Hello everyone ! 
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:
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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.
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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.
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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!