Making it easier to get the help you need, faster

Jami · 11 February 2020 09:06

We started 2019 with 1.36 million customers. And now, over 3.6 million people are using Monzo, with more and more people going #FullMonzo. This means the challenge to provide fantastic and sustainable customer support is increasing. Last year, we automated the first few messages you get from us in chat, using machine learning to either: fix your problem straightaway, suggest help articles to point you in the right direction, or put you straight through to a person.

This has given us lots of useful data about what types of problems you have, the questions you ask the most, and which questions are best suited to automated responses. Using this information we’re working on some more improvements to the app, including:

Making it easier for you to find help articles, and tell us if an article needs improving
Showing you help content about specific features, at the time you need it
Helping you report common problems in one go, instead of going back and forth on chat

Almost 20% of customer chats involve giving information that’s already in the app. We want that information to be clearer and easier to find, so we can help you faster. You can still always chat to us whenever you need to. And when you do, we’ll solve some problems faster by asking for information in one go, rather than back and forth conversations.

We’re making it easier for you to find help articles, and tell us if an article needs improving

We’re improving the organisation of help articles, to make it more intuitive to find the answers you need.

We’re also adding rating buttons so you can tell us when we need to make information clearer.

Get help when you need it, without having to go to the Help tab

Sometimes you’re in the middle of something, and need a little help. We’re going to make it easier to get quick answers related to specific features, without needing to go to the Help tab or chat to our team. Just tap the “Help” button to view help snippets without losing your place.

We’re going to make it easier for you to report issues, and help our team review your cases faster.

To save time, we’ll make it easier for you to report issues with payments directly in the app, without a back and forth conversation. We think you’ll get an answer about your issue much faster, as our team will have all the information they need to review your case quickly.

We think these changes will make it even easier to get the help you need, when you need it

We’re not replacing or reducing the number of people in our Customers Operations team (COps). In fact, we’re still growing our customer operations team throughout 2020. But we hope these improvements will help lots of people get their answers faster than they can now. Plus, it gives COps more time to focus on helping customers with more complicated and sensitive questions, as well as making sure our customer service is sustainable. You can still chat to us 24/7, if you need to.

We’ll share updates as we go, and let us know what you think in the comments.

phildawson · 11 February 2020 09:12

For the 80% of chats that can’t be answered with generic help how about splitting that up into the ten most common requests.

You create ten teams, each team dedicated to resolving that specific issue. An eleventh team to handle anything else.

You list them in the same way as above as a menu to pick from.

This way it would avoid the receptionist issue customers face where the 80% goes to a first OP and they can’t do anything as they don’t have the permission and need to escalate to the right team. If the customer could send the request to the right team that would take that unnecessary step out.

gmclean · 11 February 2020 09:13

Great to see this improvement. Should also mean the forum questions can also suggest ‘have you checked the Help’ too.

gmclean · 11 February 2020 09:14

Better to have multi-skilled, full permission (to use your terminology) handlers - first call resolution being the aim - than individual teams. What if I have a multi-team query? I’d still get passed around.

Jami · 11 February 2020 09:14

Good shout. Some of our work is aiming to do this for the obvious flavours of work. An example, the self-serve Transaction Dispute reporting flow will create a review tasks directly in the inboxes of our Dispute experts, without the need for someone to triage and escalate the case via chat.

But not everything is super clean cut - with any of these changes it takes some time to wiggle towards the right set up, especially as our support team grows!

phildawson · 11 February 2020 09:16

Well the ideal situation would be to rip out the (useless) WhatsApp chat system that Monzo created and rebuild something closer to Intercom which they replaced.

One contained chat for each issue, they can then be given different urgency, dealt with by different teams, marked as resolved by the customer, rated independently, far easier to reference that scrolling up a million miles etc

gmclean · 11 February 2020 09:20

Hopefully moving forward the changes being made will improve things across the board and we won’t have to have discussions about the technical implementation (which isn’t really the problem, but is definitely a hindrance).

Thanks for the post @Jami - good to see these things are being tackled.

Jackster126 · 11 February 2020 10:55

What happened to pot sorting and hiding on iOS? Thought you said in November “the ball is rolling”

Hatticus · 11 February 2020 11:03

Any word on improving the phone answering? So many threads/comments about people just getting disconnected.

Jami · 11 February 2020 11:27

Hey - I’ve switched teams to focus on Help, so am not sure the answer I’m afraid.

I think Bruno has replied about the status of Pot hiding on iOS in the thread about that. The dedicated thread is the best place to ask about Pot hiding etc.

Jami · 11 February 2020 11:30

Regarding calls - We’re making changes to who we train on calls to increase our capacity to answer quickly (this takes time though). Hopefully there will also be fewer situations that require calls if we do our job right with in-app help.

One problem we’ve seen in recent tests is that people aren’t sure when their first card is going to arrive, so they all us up to ask about their card. The estimated delivery date is already in the app, but isn’t obvious (especially if you’re new to Monzo). We think we can make that information clearer to new customers, and remove their need to call in about their card - resulting in less demand on calls and higher chances of our team quickly answering people with more complex cases.

Jackster126 · 11 February 2020 11:31

Fair enough bud

Hatticus · 11 February 2020 11:34

That’s good to hear. Just always a little concerning when you hear of people with serious sounding issues, often time-sensitive, unable to get through to anyone.

In all honesty, that’s the thing that’s putting me off leaving legacy, and would imagine that’s the case for others, too.

Jami · 11 February 2020 11:37

Totally agreed. It’s one of the main reasons we want to make some changes here, in order for serious, time-sensitive issues to get direct, human help quickly. One way we could do that would be to hire into infinity (which really won’t scale), another way would be to better prioritise the complex cases, ideally by fixing easy problems directly in-app.

Hopefully we can do a little bit of everything (hire more, train better, improve self-serve help, improve internal tools) - and reach a great outcome for all.

Hatticus · 11 February 2020 11:42

Has there been any thought in to re-working the chat system (I realise it was only recently built, but it’s still inferior to the old Intercom system). I really miss the option to have multiple tickets, rather than the one long chat thread. Or the option to send a message, rather than a chat, for non urgent/trivial stuff.

Jami · 11 February 2020 11:50

No immediate plans, but it comes up in discussion, there are pros and cons to separate threads (especially as many problems are actually tangled together in reality). I imagine what we’ll likely do is test a small version of a dedicated thread/case for one clear type of issue, then see if that could work for others.

One thing we’re exploring is doing this for Transaction Disputes reported with the self serve form (highlighted in the original post) - so we can send updates about that specific report and ask for more information if needed, without piling everything into a single chat.

But for now it’s just ideas, we’ve got enough super obvious things to improve without needing to rethink/rebuild foundational things like chat (projects like that often balloon and take longer than expected).

Hatticus · 11 February 2020 11:53

Good to know it’s at least in discussion.

Still not sure why the decision was made to switch from Intercom in the first place, TBH, especially given your comment about more obvious things to improve upon. But oh well.

Jami · 11 February 2020 11:57

Before my time in Help-land, I’m afraid!

I do think a big part of the desire to switch services was in order for our internal tools and processes to be more integrated - I think we might have hit some limits of what’s possible.

Also, that was a while ago, the obvious things to improve then are very different to now, I imagine (we’re so many more customers and Cops than 2 years ago!).

Hatticus · 11 February 2020 11:58

I know, just more thinking aloud

Jami · 11 February 2020 11:58

All good!