Introducing Monzo Chat

Why you need your previous chats? Just search your email for your previous chats…

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Agreed. I could never even be bothered to contact anyone at Halifax when I was unable to move my ISA and all it was giving me was a generic error.

I would love to know what the top 10 CS queries were for Monzo. I imagine a lot of them are things that can be removed by fixes/automation and general improvements in the app, eventually. It’s just a whole bunch easier to fire off a quick message with Monzo.

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I have to say, my new chat experience has thus far been terrible. I submitted a message around 03-Nov 13:30 (I only know this as I opened the request around the same time as another event, otherwise there is no way to tell from the chat window), and I haven’t received a single response. There is also no indication it has been received, read, or that anyone is planning on doing anything with it.

My issue isn’t urgent (thankfully), so it’s not a huge issue. However, had it been urgent or for people contacting Monzo for the first time, the experience is horrific. From a customer perspective it feels akin to a message in a bottle; maybe it’ll arrive and maybe it’ll be read, or maybe it hasn’t arrived and it will never be read. Not good. :thinking:

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Monzo, please be extremely cautious when it come to support UI.
This great CS experience is by far your main asset. Don’t ruin it. This is why majority of users love you.

That said, and I’m sure you’ll quickly find a good solution, I would like to know what are the choices behind you not moving intercom convos to the new system. This is a shame one can’t see its previous interactions, and I like to showcase them when I’m convincing ppls to join you (which happenned a good dozen of times).

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When will Monzo Chat be updated with urgent available to be used all the time

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Hello everyone ! :wave:

I’m one of the product managers working on Monzo Chat. Thanks for all of your comments. Monzo Chat is still in its early stages but, aligned with our engineering principles, we’ve shipped it early exactly so we can get this kind of valuable feedback from our community. (So thank you!)

I’ll try my best to cover the points raised here.

Single thread vs. multiple threads

Why a single thread? This a fair question. Especially for people used to the older system this can come as a surprise. These are some of the reasons:

  • Only 5% of our users have had more than one conversation in the last 30 days. Less than 1% have more than five conversations. This helped us understand that supporting multithreads while useful would largely be unused by most customers.

  • We discovered looking at our internal data that most of the people using multiple chats did so by accident and not intention. This can be very confusing for customers.

  • We want to make the idea of chatting with us as simple as possible. We want to shield customers from the complexity of our systems while making theirs seamless. On our side we still organise each interaction separately as most ticketing systems do.

Taking into consideration these points we’re confident that our approach will make Monzo simpler for most customers. Most messaging apps (WhatsApp, iMessage, Facebook Messenger, etc.) use a single thread of conversation even though this may contain a significant number of messages regarding different subjects.

Timestamps etc.

Sorry about this: this is simply a missing feature that we haven’t got to yet.

We know this information is quite helpful to set the right expectations when you’re starting a chat. We’re working on making this a reality soon and are expecting to ship these in the upcoming weeks:

  • Message timestamps;
  • Grouping messages by day they were sent;
  • An indication when a conversation is resolved;
  • An indication of when a new COp took over the chat;
  • An estimation of how much time it will take to answer your chat request (this will depend whether the customer marked their query as urgent and non-urgent).

Why we’re quickly rolling this out to more people

This is a fair point.

On one hand, pushing the new chat to more customers could create a less comfortable experience and this is not ideal since our customers expect the best of what Monzo can offer.

On the other hand it has enabled us to learn quite fast and adapt much more quickly. As we shared in our engineering principles: “ No matter how perfect a design might seem, the only way to know whether it works is to get it in the hands of users and see how they use it. Resist the urge to add “one more” feature and let users show you what to focus on next.”

By pushing for bigger number of customers to use the new chat system we’re able to see the constraints we have and build better and scalable systems. It ultimately leads to a better product.

There is a point here though that we will take as a learning: we should have been a bit clearer with customers when their chat experience changed for them in order to avoid such confusion.

Access to past chat history

At any point in time if you need to access your past chats with us (from Intercom), just pop a message to our customer support team and we will send you full transcripts.

Again we want to thank again your feedback, having these insights is super useful for us to improve.

Hopefully we’ve covered most things. Let us know!

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Thanks for the post @JPLopes, it makes things a lot clearer now there is some reasoning behind it. Hopefully the further iterations come soon :slight_smile:

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I think this is fine when you’re talking about new features, but chat was an existing feature and what you’ve provided isn’t even close to what was there before. There is no possible way that this design could be seen as perfect and I find it hard to believe you needed your user base to tell you that.

I think if you had:

  • Message Timestamps
  • An indication of who you’re talking to or when someone took over
  • A time estimation
  • The ability to mark a chat as urgent if you’ve not heard after a long period of time

Then people wouldn’t be so annoyed.

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I had just mentioned in another thread and think someone else mentioned it here earlier.

Things like this we have been saying are unmonzo like… i have to agree.

Monzo used to ask for feedback before implementing changes/features/fees but they just dont do this anymore and have a do first ask later approach and its left a sour taste for me anyway.

Summary… Chat… Cash Deposits

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One of two things happened here:

  1. Someone spoke up and said “we can’t release this yet, it’s nowhere near good enough” and they were shouted down or ignored; or
  2. No one said anything and it was waved through to release with no internal criticism

I don’t know which is worse.

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Why? Was there no room for debate, sensible arguments and such?

Why must they have been shouted down or ignored?

Do you not think maybe they had some reasonable arguments and they came to an agreement as a team and maybe you don’t have all the facts?

It’s genuinely staggering how people with so little actual facts peddle their opinion as gospel.

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I guess by “shouted down” I meant there was a debate and they were told that the release would go ahead with the product in this state.

Shouting someone down is very different from debate, though. Shouting someone down is preventing someone from having an opinion.

I wouldn’t have commented otherwise.

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Glad to see this is being addressed. I probably would have had these features ready before shipping as they are so fundamental to CS. Also, what about making the colour of the chat bubble one of the 4 colours of the Monzo logo rather than that very strange dark blue?

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In regards to multiple chats, I don’t report something every month but I have had months before when I’ve needed this, especially when there’s been a lot of new features that have separate problems. Moreover, 5% of your users is still a lot of people… well over by now 50,000 if we go off of the 1,000,000 milestone a while back. And that’s only for the current past 30 days which for me was the time I’ve never had to report anything if I’m being honest

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I also feel that it is very useful to have all the previous chats visible, at least for a set time before they are archived. I do not really see the logic that reducing complexity can only be achieved by reducing the amount of information displayed to almost nothing. Multiple chat conversations are intuitive, as are multiple conversations on WhatsApp, i message or facebook. And the big difference is that in this case those previous conversations might prove relevant for the current concern you are raising with the COps. I was trying to find a conversation which happened about a year ago to provide feedback on my current experience, but could not find it and did not provide feedback. This new system and the lack of adequate response times as has been mentioned by many others just makes monzo feel further and further away, and this is not the direction I was hoping customer support would be going.

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I think you’ve made a fundamental mistake here.

You’ve only looked at the last 30 days when you should have been considering a user’s ‘lifetime’ experience of Monzo. There are many reasons why one would want to see past chats going back over a period of time greater than 30 days. At-a-glance ability to spot past reports of recurring issues; needing to pinpoint when a specific issue happened; wanting to refer back to an earlier answer when you need the same information again and don’t want to waste everyone’s time by starting a new chat request to ask again.

It’s also a mistake to prioritise the number of customers using separate conversations over the usability and accesibility gains that are accrued by the customers who do use them. The advantages gained by having a properly featured system are significantly higher over a lifetime.
Which returns me to the point above. That may be less than 1% over 30 days - but I can’t imagine that number does anything other than climb higher if you look over six months, a year, five years.

I can only join in the chorus of customers strongly requesting that we can see a properly ticketed multiple-thread system too, especially if this is already provisioned staff-side!

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Nothing has indicated that we won’t be able to see chats older than 30 days. It’s just that they will be in the same single thread as more recent chat interactions.

You might think it is a mistake, and when you are building your product, that is a decision you can make. But your suggested approach prioritises more technically-minded users (who are over-represented on this forum compared to the overall Monzo user base) over everyone else. Julio stated that Monzo’s data show that most people are using multiple chats by accident. So providing multiple chats might be a “usability and accessibility” gain for some small percentage of users, but it’s not without cost – it’s causing confusion for a larger percentage of users.

As someone who was happy and more familiar with the multiple chat system, I would definitely chose single chat for my product if the data show multiple chat is causing confusion.

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This is my exact experience! Ive sent multiple follow up messages to try and get someone’s attention and i have no idea if its being received or not.

It really doesn’t instill confidance if I do ever have a urgent query and being the only form of communication its worring that this wasn’t tested first like so many small aspects of the app are first

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Slight difference/issue I’ve just encountered with the new system. I am currently waiting for a reply about my overdraft, but I have another question I need to ask about an app logo not updating properly. On the old system, I would’ve just opened a new chat for the second unrelated question. On this new continual thread system, I don’t want my first query to get missed/confused, so I guess I have to wait for that to be answered first.

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