FCA Consumer Duty and Monzo customer service

Financial Chat
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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.

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Interesting clickbait thread title.

It says it comes in to force from today, I’m sure Monzo have been well aware it was coming.

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There, changed it so you wouldn’t have to click it.

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Monzo needs to get their hiring strategy right to encourage applications and be able to meet this small part of the consumer duty.

The main bulk is making things transparent, easy to understand at every level, and remove any jargon to simplify products and services.

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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

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I reached out to customer services for the first time in years, and got a timely response, with the whole query boxed off within an hour or so of first opening.

So, while there are failings of CS - and we’re all aware of them on here - there is a lot of good CS out there too. I personally don’t think Monzo will be failing against this standard, but maybe it’ll give them the kick to do something about it.

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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.

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Actually I was with them for a while and you are correct, they were pretty good.

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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

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Good luck the FCA trying to define the boundaries of this and what good looks like

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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.

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I think that’s the point, isn’t it? Lots of “hard talk” but very easy to push the boundaries around a little and carry on as you are.