Merchant Data Corrections

A customer who changed his words to a different meaning, before you clutch those pearls to dust

10 Likes

No.

Monzo staff interaction on here is a privilege not a right.

By all means, complain about the general policies of the company - but do not take them out on individual staff members.

15 Likes

It was more of a face palm at the whole merchant data situation than a response to anything else. It’s really frustrating for me that it’s such a frustration point for customers.

Unfortunately we’ve got a big backlog of merchant data corrections which has mostly been caused by the fact we’ve had to move the major of our customer service team to areas like disputes because of COVID-19. That was absolutely the right thing to do.

However it also hasn’t been a priority for some time and that frustrates me no end. The internal tooling hasn’t changed since we first started the process and what worked a few years ago doesn’t work as well. For example some of merchant groups have over 180,000 merchants in - its not very easy to handle at scale.

It’s also not an easy problem to solve - crowdfunding would be an ideal solution however if you saw the number of changes which are deliberately changed for nefarious reasons I don’t know how well they would.

It’s one of those little things that makes a big difference to using the Monzo app and I wish we could improve the experience.

We’ve been lucky enough this week that I’ve been able to find time to power through some merchant data - about 2,000 at the last count. I’ll keep doing that whenever I can and I’ll keep bringing it up internally too!

Hopefully we’ll get to a point where I’ll not need to facepalm at merchant data :crossed_fingers:t2:

21 Likes

Cos that’s probably exactly how you feel after someone misquotes you and chooses to wallow in self pity rather than accept your offer of help.

2 Likes

I kinda think this is why you do need to crowdsource. If you had trusted, local editors, we’d be able to sift these out much more easily than someone miles away in monzo HQ.

4 Likes

I don’t know the answer to that to be honest.

However what we see how is some merchants putting through transactions under a different merchant name nearly every time they process a transaction. Lots of eBay transactions now come through with (and there might be a logic on it that I don’t understand) just a reference number - often with no obvious link to eBay.

This causes several problems - lots of corrections submitted for a merchant which might not be used again, huge merchant groups and sometimes as a COp it isn’t easy to tell whether the merchant suggestion is correct or not!

4 Likes

Or, you could end up with two diametrically opposed local editors getting into insanely petty edit wars. :grimacing:

Perhaps it’s a cynical view, but it’s a view that has been strongly informed by my experiences with Wikipedia (over decades) and Genius song lyrics (more recently).

In the context of Monzo, for example, I can see the potential for an edit way between one who sees Apple payments as whatever Apple have them as now because that’s new and current, and one who thinks they should be as iTunes because that’s what they were historically.

And merchants don’t help at all when Uber Eats uses Uber to process payments and vice versa, given there are plenty of customers for who it’s very important to distinguish their Uber (travel) payments from their Uber Eats (eating ‘out’) payments.

Ultimately, this would need someone at Monzo tasked with resolving disputes rather than letting them flipflip back and forth. Which brings us back to the original problem anyway.

tl;dr, crowdsourcing could be an additional resource to aid a solution, but it can’t be a solution in and of itself.

2 Likes

With some many in the log, does it help or hinder when someone reports the same thing multiple times?

Does it move it up a list because it’s got xx,xxx requests to change? Or are they just individual and the next one can be the same as the one you’ve just done?

2 Likes

Those people need to have a reality check and ask themselves what the real reason is that they’re angry at receiving an emoji :see_no_evil:

For the record, feel free to facepalm me whenever you want @Dan5 - I’m not one of those people who complain at everything and anything :laughing:

4 Likes

My local Premier store has changed terminals so all the many months of submitting merchant correction eventually succeeded with the name, logo and map all lovely and correct is now gone. I know it’s not Monzo’s fault but I know there’s zero point in me sending in the submission. Now all my budgeting is wrong :confused:

1 Like

I’ve written a little guide tonight for COps on some of the quirks of the merchant review system and there’s a few of us working our way through it when we’ve got a spare moment.

Hopefully this mean some of the changes start flowing through and the accuracy of them improves :slight_smile:

21 Likes

Would you be kind enough to help me with the one I mention above. I use my local shop a lot and as mentioned the data’s all changed and messed up my budgeting. :pray:

Drop me a DM :pray:t3:

1 Like

Hey @Dan5 how much additional information are you able to see when we submit these? Occasionally I have a merchant that comes through with a completely different name to the actual merchant’s name and these sometimes don’t get corrected.

If we were to attach receipts to the transaction to help you see the correct name for the merchant are you able to see these on your end when you’re going through data corrections?

Thank you for all the work you put in.

Is it possible for a blog post to be written about how best to submit information. I don’t think many realise the logo link doesn’t have to be twitter for example

1 Like

We can’t see anything other than the fields which are being submitted through the app - so if there’s extra detail you want to add then use one of the fields that you haven’t filled out :blush:

1 Like

Thank you so much. What information do you need from me to do this? If I tagged all transactions with something would that be useful? I’d then give you the logo, name and address it should be.

I’m afraid you’ll have to submit the corrections as normal and then I’ll pick them up on our side :pray:t3:

Ok thanks I’ll send you a DM with the details once done. Cheers

3 Likes

Don’t know about anyone else, but I’ve had a bunch of name updates completed - including a few that are several years old. I think that’s the names more or less sorted.

Logos, though, still seem to be outstanding. But my correction list is much much shorter! :tada:

4 Likes