There is an upcoming “overhaul” of retail financial services to make them clearer, safer and better for consumers:
One particular aspect of this that I expect Monzo will struggle to meet is this:
"Companies will also need to provide “helpful and responsive” customer service, to make it “as easy to use a product or service, sort out a problem, or switch or cancel, as it was to buy in the first place”.
I am not sure what, if any, the penalties for not meeting these new requirements will be (whenever they come into force), but I am glad good customer service will not be optional any more, and look forward to Monzo improving their one weak point.
Well I won’t disagree that it’s poor but I really don’t see any change in honestly. Have you ever tried Natwest’s, it makes Monzo’s look fantastic.
To be honest, with the possible exception of first direct, and maybe HSBC, no bank I’ve ever been with has had good customer service. It’s just not a thing (in my experience). And I believe I have tried mostly all of them at some point.
HSBC of late have been fantastic, even proactively logging a complaint a few months back for poor customer service, even though I wasn’t personally too put out by it. But I would really like to see Monzo fix its issue, it could be so much better and actually truly be a revolution for others to follow with.
EDIT: Added in that it’s not a thing in my experience
My most recent - multiple - experiences with Nationwide have all been brilliant. I have interacted with many departments, credit card, FlexPlus, current account, all resolved perfectly.
I had to use my local Barclays branch a few times over the last year and their customer service was impeccable. Can’t say the same for their online customer service though
I found Nationwide’s customer service to be really good (or at least it used to be). This was quite a few years ago but I had Flex Plus at the time and they had a line that went straight through to a person instead of an automated phone menu, was great.
For me, they’ve been awful. I went to close a savings account and they closed my main joint account and cancelled all the direct debits as a result. It 4 days of constant calls just to get them to acknowledge the error and reinstate the amount, by which point the damage was done. It may be a one off but it’s pretty bad.
The customer service at Monzo was one of the reasons I stopped using them as my main account. I hope they improve and I may in time consider coming back.
I found Starling pretty good, NatWest were good and nationwide.
I think there will always be people who experience good customer service and others who unfortunately experience poor customer service.
It’s a shame, while I could understand during the early years, with 8/9 million customers, you would expect CS to be vastly better than it is.
My experience on single issues that can be solved by one agent were fine, it’s the moment it starts tracking to different CS agents that it fell apart. I also had occasions where the complaints team would finish up and then another CS person would pick up the conversation and you’d have to tell them it was a previous conversation.
It made me concerned about how things could go, if I ever had something very serious happen on my account eg fraud