Introducing Monzo Chat

If Monzo keep going the way they are now, Starling will become more and more attractive.

Monzo’s main perk so far has been chat; granted it’s a bit slow, but it works and has (well, had) great UI. If they screw it up we might as well switch to Starling; at least their app is faster.

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I also think this is a flaw rather than a feature. All of my old chats are separated by topic. If I want to add something to a topic discussed I will go back and find that old chat.

I also couldn’t care less who I am speaking to, and didn’t mind at all that that person changed over the course of a chat.

I would much rather have separate chats for separate topics, and a way to label them to make them easy to find.

Also, surely after I have been 30 years at Monzo,.loading one massively long chat thread spanning 30years will be a tad unwieldy?

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So summarising thoughts in here so far:

  • Threading by Topic is preferred at (some) users end, rather than a continuous feed. User’s don’t need the full continuity but Monzo do,
  • The solution doesn’t yet have (close enough) feature parity - impacting on the overall UX.
  • The design doesn’t yet look very Monzo Brand (Hot Coral chat bubbles anyone?)
  • Delivered/Read indicators would be very useful.
  • Some advanced warning of the change over would have been handy.
  • It seems historical chats are gone - but would be good to have a way to export them.
  • We need GIFs

It’s truly great that you’re working on services that give you a fully Monzo solution - and Minimum Viable Product and all that… But hopefully the roadmap to improvements will be a speedy one.

Out of interest - does emailing help@ integrate with Chat? I seem to remember the old version sending replies by email too?

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I hate this feature. Absolutely hate it. Support requests should be grouped by request, not lumped together. Whoever decided this was a good idea needs to try again, and this needs to be scrapped. Immediately.

In fact, please revert me to the old chat system. I don’t know why I didn’t ask before. I am unable to use this new system, and as such you are not providing me with a sufficient system to get in touch.

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A sizeable proportion of my work is work in and around case management systems and I can imagine nothing worse for customers (in terms of service delivered/UX) and operations (in terms of minimising confusion) than a single thread with everything mixed in together. There are good reasons (not least of which, SLA measuring) that separate cases make sense, and it’s hard to see how potentially having a user scroll back through months worth of individual messages rather than ‘by case’ to see what was said previously in an earlier conversation about a particular or similar issue is good UX.

The real problem with the old threading IME was that the discoverability of previous conversations in the app for users used to be poor (ISTR having to go as if to open a new chat, then closing that, in order to see the ‘old chats’) as was, iirc, the lack of a “subject” or heading field that could be used to easily distinguish the chats. Getting rid of threads doesn’t appear to be an obvious improvement here, and that design decision has presumably resulted in the outcome that bringing old threads over is too hard (because they’d potentially end up overlapped if they were mixed together based on the original timestamps of each message).

Sorry, no likey :expressionless:

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Forcing this onto users so early wasn’t the right thing to do. As others said it’s not even half baked, it feels like we haven’t made it to the oven yet. As an MVP for internal or beta testing sure, fine. I’m not a beta tester though so why force it on us when it’s not ready? If I forced MVP on my end users there would be the kind of backlash you’re seeing now.

You’re a bank with over a million users I don’t think you can assume people will put up with it.

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Can I just ask if the chats will be saved? :thinking:

I just can’t fathom why it was shipped in such an unfinished, barebones state. I know that is the usual Monzo MO for new features, but this is taking it too far.

It should have been at the very least feature-comparable to Intercom before switching.

This chat switchover hasn’t been un-Monzo as some have said. It has been troublingly too-Monzo.

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I think it’s really important that the messaging has read reciepts and when outgoing messages were sent.

Transparency on how long replies are taking starts from there.

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I don’t care how it looks
If there is a timestamp
If I can see previous chats
If I can send GIFS

I care that someone friendly and helpful responds and sorts out my issue.

I’m reading replies on here and wondering how often are people contacting support to be this upset :confused: I think I’ve only used it a handful of times :man_shrugging:

I’d understand all the complaints about it being “unfinished” and “rushed” if it was a frequently used feature in your day to day banking, but at the end of the day it still beats having to call in a branch or being stuck in a call centre queue with your legacy bank :slight_smile:

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I think in future what would make sense would be to institute a roll over of systems. People get freaked out by abrupt change, a rolling over would prevent that i.e 6 months for example

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It’s a bit bare bones at the minute but I don’t get some of the complaints.

I’m pleased to be rid of all those old conversations. Once an issue is sorted I have no nostalgic interest in looking back over it.

Single threaded is fine - if I’ve got more than one issue on the go something’s gone seriously wrong somewhere. The prospect of having two issue in six months is remote. Two at a time? No chance.

I’m interested in others’ experiences since the way this thread reads implies that COps have an ongoing dialogue with most customers most of the time. Is this really true? That may account for the slowish response times!

I’m not a fan of this at all and agree with what many others have said. It feels like a massive step back in functionality, especially when starting a chat; there’s no sign it’s been sent/received/read or that anyone is even around to do so. I also completely disagree with the single giant conversation concept - it will turn into a nightmare when trying to find old information.

Dissapointed that it was pushed out so widely in its current state and I hope it’s not a sign of the software quality we can expect going forward.

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Just out of curiosity, really…

Do you prefer individual threads per issue, or a single chat thread?

  • Individual threads
  • Single thread
  • Not fussed either way

0 voters

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I can’t speak on behalf of others, but there are a few things that stand out when Monzo customers talk about customer service.

I’ve always found it a little strange just how frequently people need to talk to Monzo CS in the first place - I would love to know the stats, but I reckon the calls/chats per person are significantly higher than other banks (it felt the same on the Starling forum as well, so perhaps it’s just the “ease of contact” that encourages more CS messages).

However, given that the chat service is Monzo’s primary method of CS, it should really be one of the most polished aspects of the product - I wouldn’t even call it a “feature” as it’s a necessity.

My CS experience has generally been due to “bugs” in the app - Something I have never experienced with high street banks, because their app was typically boring and stale - But functional and stable at the same time - Which has led me to contact their CS (high street banks), about 4 times in 5 years… If that!

If others are also getting in touch with Monzo due to bugs in the app, you can understand why the chat volumes are high, and the wait times are very long (which, whilst off topic, is still a massive issue for Monzo).

So in a nutshell, I think this whole “new chat” thing has compounded a few “issues” that Monzo currently has, and under different circumstances, might not have been criticised as much as it has been.

For example, if the CS responses were instant (as they were once upon a time) - I don’t think people would complain as much as they are, and the need for “read receipts” or “eta’s” wouldn’t be as important.

The same can probably be said for the “single vs multiple” thread argument - Whilst not ideal, if issues were being sorted out straight away, it would appease a lot of people, and would give Monzo a bit more rope to develop the system some more.

Or, if they had eta’s on the chat, it would give people some idea of when their issue would be looked at.

Basically… Monzo just needed to change 1 thing about the whole experience, for the frustration to subside quite a bit (certainly based on the forum responses).

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If there’s a single thread, it would be good to mark my question bubble as completed. Maybe with a different colour or a :white_check_mark: icon so when scrolling back you can easily see the beginning of that question history. Other than that I’m not bothered, as I rarely need to contact CS. Maybe once or twice per year. Oh and iMessage chat would be cool too.

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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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