In a recent post I noticed the following:
I wasn’t aware Monzo’s official support channel is suggesting, or sending, users to a community forum for help.
I guess it makes sense with a lot of recent posts. I wonder if it’s a new thing they’re doing?
Not going to lie, it does feel a bit wrong. They’re basically using us as free customer service advisors at this point 
(slightly tongue-in-cheek, slightly serious)
I’m pretty sure they’ve always done that, within certain circumstances. Largely bug reports and feature suggestions.
Oh I totally get it for feature suggestions. That seems like the perfect thing to direct to a community for.
And the post you’ve quoted is a bug report, so that’s both elements I’ve mentioned covered. 
Is a bug considered a feature request?
I think it looks more of an influx because all the threads get approved at the same time. Lots of them should just be deleted or direct the users to chat.
The new interface has brought more users too.
I suspect part of the problem is that the community is featured prominently on the help tab, and can look like where you’re supposed to go, especially as there’s nowhere visible on that page for actually contacting Monzo.
It’s not really a new problem though, it’s been happening for years. It slowed down after the community was closed for a week because it reopened making it harder to both sign up and post, as both needed to manually reviewed by an admin first.
Answering indirectly, I’d say that the reason bug reports are directed to the community is because it helps speed up the gathering of information - from replies and upvotes, they can see how widespread a bug’s impact is and this helps fast-forward the troubleshooting.
Does the chat exist in the app at all? I’ve had a look around and I can’t seem to find any way to start a chat.
The only thing I can do is browse the FAQs or link to here.
Thanks
It does if you have the secret code. Go to Help, search Contact Us and one of the help articles will have a hyperlink to chat. It’s very sneakily disguised to discourage people going there because Monzo still don’t think support is important for a bank.
Again one for the Consumer Duty peeps at the FCA, me thinks.
Although still not ideal, I think the discoverability of support has gotten a bit better recently. A while ago it really was the case that you needed quite a specific search term to get to chat or phone support.
Now I can search “contact”, “support”, “customer support”, or “chat” and the appropriate article for getting to chat support or phone support is at or near the top of the search results.
It does, it’s just hidden behind random FAQ articles.
There’s a specific phrase you can type in the search bar which will take you to an FAQ article with a link to chat, which the posts above reference.
But for a quick shortcut, this link directly opens in app chat in the Monzo app too:
Unless your new to Monzo and you have a direct link to customer service for a whole month whilst people are getting used to the app (which is nice and they are quick at responding). But after my month of my new account being opened I’m sure I will have trouble finding the contact us link lol
Just bookmark that link above should you ever need it.
Or save this in a note:
monzo://support_chat (it’ll turn into a link on your phone that will launch the Monzo app directly to the support chat screen.
Or since you’re on iOS, download this shortcut I’ve made and contacting Monzo will be as simple as Hey Siri, contact Monzo Support.
https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/abcd5a0785f34a729b0e18aba169b92a
You should create a new thread on here with these links, then we could bump it every day so new users see it.
If newbies could read, we wouldn’t have the threads in the first place
It actually does make a bit of sense…. The community seems to provide better support for the basic things
Have an admin pin it globally
Then you’ve the issue of people coming here as mentioned by the app, to then just go and open a chat with the app, causing further unnecessary inbound.
Instesd of just approving all new posts, it could encourage people to search topics in a “did you mean any of these?” Type auto responses, as majority could just be resolved with some self help and patience.
But as all of this shows, self help does not work. People will always prefer speaking to a human and that’s why we’re where we are.
Instead of hiding chat Monzo should revamp their self-help and contact options and bring in a context aware bot who will highlight a few possibly relevant articles and then let you speak to someone after one attempt.
