Absolutely agreed. I was on the early bird offer excited by the future offerings of Plus. But now it’s going to take something brilliant and more importantly complete to convince me to come back.
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I interpreted an update coming to clear up confusion around refunds in the below comment from yesterday:
Ah okay. Don’t really see a revised response being posted today on how cancellations have been handled but happy to be proven wrong 
Jeez I despise Monzo Plus.
Just refund everyone already, wipe the slate clean and start fresh.
They keep digging themselves deeper and deeper.
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From what I can gather from all of the posts so far, it seems the ‘magic key words’ to complain of, both in intial messaging, and in the escalation to the formal complaints team, would cover:
I feel I have not recieved a large number of the features promised in Monzo’s advertising material at the time of subscription, inlcuding:
- Monzo Merchandise - offered at the time of sign up, and will now not recieve.
- Events - No further events will be planned, and only 2 events ever took place (with one to launch the now cancelled Plus v2)
- Ability to Add Components - This was promised in the feature set, and never materialised.
- New Features planned for 2019 - again a set of new features were advertised as “coming in 2019” but did not appear.
The ideal resolution to this complaint, would be cancellation of my membership plus a refund of the “core” fees paid, at £x/m, totalling £X.
For most users who’ve posted anything about a successful refund, it seems to be things along those lines.
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You’re forgetting that there’s another 3M customers out there that won’t have even looked at this forum or been affected any of these Plus issues. So I highly doubt they’d drop the whole concept based on just what the community says.
I agree this has been handled horrendously and everyone who’s touched Plus so far should just be refunded but let’s not forget that there’s millions of people out there who probably have no idea what’s been going on thus far (a lot of my friends/family for example)!
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Let’s just say I’m less optimistic than you. Nothing in follow up posts from @tomdavies or @cookywook to date have suggested they’re going to change their minds when they somewhat arrogantly claimed they delivered everything to Early Birds.
I honestly believe it’s now in customers hands to force the issue elsewhere (ombudsman, press, whatever). People wouldn’t think twice if it were another bank and folks have cut Monzo more than enough slack here.
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I wasn’t going to mention anything, but considering I’ve been happy to criticise where necessary, it’s always good to look on the “other side” as well.
Although I’ll start off by saying that Monzo have 100% made this a bigger issue than it needed to be.
If you refund 1 V1 Plus member, you need to do them all - They clearly should have been proactive and refunded everyone, but you know that already……
My question is aimed at those early bird Plus members who are seeking refunds…….
The £3 covered a monzo.me url (which you could get, and keep even if you cancelled), a coloured card (same applies), and the infamous “swag”, which has been well documented so I’ll not go over it again.
From the get go, it was clearly a “super fan” package - Sure, the promise of bolt ons (travel insurance etc), never materialised, but you weren’t paying for it anyway?
I may be missing something, as I haven’t been reading the forum, but is the issue more that some people have been refunded, and others haven’t in exactly the same scenario (because, that would royally pee me off in that situation), or do you genuinely feel you weren’t provided the service that you signed up for (which was just a URL, card and swag)?
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This is certainty the issue for me. I got a refund but I think I got lucky because I complained early doors. If there is literally no difference between me and say @Paulw except I complained before he did. I got a refund, he didn’t. How on earth is this fair 
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My take on that, is that the product that was offered for sale was not delivered, as per the marketing promises of that product.
So this, but the service was “bigger” than “just a URL, card, and swag”.
It was the promise of a flexible bolt on package,
The promise that ‘more features will be coming in 2019’
Merchandise that I will now never get.
A poor quality card which will never be sorted.
And the fact that if I did want to keep the part of the package that was adding value (travel insurance) - I would have to keep paying for the part of a service they have said they will not deliver on.
The sense of urgency Monzo created about signing up for the early bird deal…
All of that contributes to me feeling like I’ve been sold a lemon… And at the end of the day, a £12 fee isn’t a huge deal, but I still signed up on the back of product promises that weren’t delivered on.
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Yeah, I’d 100% agree with that, and it’s arguably more damaging to a company than not providing the service in the first place (because it feels like they favour certain customers over others) - No one want’s to be on the wrong end of that particular stick.
I think the issue there is that companies have said many things over the years, and the goalposts move consistently (although maybe none quite as spectacularly as Monzo Plus 
). You didn’t pay for a promise, you only paid for what you received (minus the swag), and a terrible quality card.
Like I said, I’m in no way defending Monzo over this - They messed up from day one in my eyes, didn’t address the card quality issues or swag, and seemingly intentionally led their most ardent supporters up the garden path with everything.
At the same time, if they offered no refunds to those early bird customers, I’d also see why.
The fact they’ve done it for some, means they really should do it for all - I still hope they do, but I can’t see it happening.
All this drama could be easily be avoided if Monzo compensated everybody and held their hands up and went “we screwed up”.Then write off the compensation as a loss and learning experience and move on.
It would seem that they would prefer to have to deal with a large amount of complaints and put their COps under even more pressure and then increase the number of FCA reports and ombudsman reports then deal with a PR backlash of all of which cost way more time and effort than a blanket refund. 
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To boil it down to the true root cause then - the ultimate issue is that they advertised a feature set that wasn’t ever possible for them to deliver. The Promises on the product page are effecitvely a product feature set advertisement.
And I, General Consumer, made a purchasing decision based on advertising that was not accurate.
That’s why I’m bothered ulltimately - I feel missled into buying the Plus Service, on the back of advertising that was not true, or would never become true, at the time of it’s launch.
I don’t mind that the product offering changes, or that the product has been cancelled - that happens all the time. The bits that bother me are that the advertising used all the news of a new innovative feature sets as the “pull” for new consumers, but without consideration for risks etc.
If the product had been cancelled, and all the bits they offered met, then fine, 100% happy with paying for parts of that.
If you look at some of the marketing materials when Plus was launched:
(you couldn’t add features after sign up)
(never was customisable, more features never came)
The last sentence, both points were not true.
And then the creation of scarcity/limited time deal - Encouraging sign ups to a product set that didn’t yet exist / have the functionality to deliver.
So to me, my feeling here is, yes I have been missold something. There is no context of “there is a risk this product may get cancelled in 4 months time”.
Sure it’s new launch, they take risks, things change all the time, etc - but what I don’t like is when Corportations take bold risks (advertising features they didn’t know if they could deliver) but then don’t deal with the consequences appropriately when those risks materialise (unhappy consumers asking for a refund). Feels a bit “have cake and eat it”.
Bit lengthy there I know, and I certainly edit: don’t think there was any intended malice in Monzo’s advertising from Day 1 - maybe naivety that they need to learn from. If you’re asking consumers to spend money on a product they need to be much much surer on their ability to deliver it than a feature on an app…
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This for me sums up my ongoing experience with Monzo. I’m still “fullMonzo” simply due to the fact I don’t use my current account and have limited banking requirements (those that i do have, Monzo copes with well enough).
But having read this forum for a number of years, it’s disappointing to see that time and time again, Monzo don’t learn, and still give off the impression that they are just starting out with a handful of customers.
The ongoing CS debacle is a prime example, and there really is no excuse anymore.
I think I lost interest when I realised that the promises of disrupting the industry was just marketing spiel, and in actual fact, they have a long way to go before becoming a serious player in the space.
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Maybe I’m wrong but I don’t see how you we’re miss sold something.
You paid £3 a month knowing the add on features weren’t available and were happy to pay £3 a month for the current offerings at that time.
It was just poor advertising.
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I paid £3 a month, knowing that those features would soon be on offer, and I would soon be able to add a multitude of new products to my package.
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I don’t think anyone ‘knew’ those features would be available. At most we ‘knew’ they were planned but beyond that, anything was possible.
(Those on the forum were explicitly warned against buying based on future plans but that clearly doesn’t help the majority of customers who either don’t have forum access or didn’t read that particular post.)
What would do in this scenario…
They released the product / offering they advertised and you wanted. But it wasn’t suitable for your needs? (To much excess, not enough coverage, to expensive etc etc). Would you feel as though you have been miss sold then?
Go back a couple of years. I can’t say I was miss sold an iPhone 8 based on the fact I had an Apple Watch and AirPods and really wanted to use AirPower that they advertised to charge all 3 together. Obviously they didn’t deliver on AirPower, that doesn’t mean I was miss sold the iPhone…