On Slack, we have collectively discussed an idea that may help alleviate some of the pains with chat.
Without knowing the data and based on presumption, there may be the possibly that a lot of chat questions could be answered via existing articles.
It is too easy to skip the help articles and make your way over to chat, and as humans, we can be pretty slothful when we feel like it!
Therefore, it may be worth having chat display a “while you wait” message that triggers a selection of articles based on keyword relevancy.
These articles in most cases could answer some frequently asked questions and therefore free up COps.
For example, if one were to ask “How do I bank a cheque?”, a while you wait response could be as follows;
"While you wait for us to connect you to a member of our team, have you tried the following:
Add Money via Account (links to the relevant area with steps on how to reach that screen)"
If this helps, the user could then state “This solves my question” which is relayed into chat.
This process should be optional, as to not detract from the personal element, or making it feel “robotic”. The chat should still be forwarded to staff unless they choose “This solves my question”, or similar wording.
Please add your thoughts and opinions.
And many thanks to @Sherlock@Peter_G@nexusmaniac & Kurt McLester (couldn’t find a matching username on forum!) for their input on this particular idea.
It’s a weird one, I’ve seen first hard a couple of research sessions on live chats, bots and how you can try and give users the answer they need automatically and weirdly it comes with some mixed responses at least in my testing!
One of the main things Monzo would definitely need to nail with this is things like “I’ve forgotten my PIN” where there’s an extra validation step which sometimes requires you to contact support. This would be quite annoying if I had messaged support, an automated system told me to review this article and then the article told me to contact support.
I also think some of the questions it would make more sense to have embedded functionality, so rather than it taking me to an article which very often says go somewhere else - it cuts out the middleman and just says what I need to do or gives me the answer there and then!
Another thing as you mentioned is making sure you get the wording correct as to make it known that your request has still been sent to support staff, this is purely optional and is to try and get you your answer as quickly as possible.
I should add though that Monzo does already have “related articles” when you go to create a new conversation at least on iOS. This takes advantage of the searching capabilities of “help” and picks out keywords much like you mention. It’s not as embedded into the experience as maybe it could be, but it does help to raise articles of similar relevance to your query!
Is there any way we can find out about these stats?
Appreciate I may be in the minority, but I’m only contacting my bank if there is something very specific to my situation (the kind of questions a generic FAQ probably wouldn’t solve).
I’ve still never had a bad experience with the in app chat (even when the wait times were advertised as days… my non urgent question was answered really quickly).
I can’t help but feel that anything that detracts from simply speeding up the times across the board, is probably not a good idea.
Again, possibly in the minority on this opinion, but I’d rather Monzo had 1,000 CS agents who were severely underworked, but could cope with big peaks.
Fully appreciate that’s not a sustainable business model, and there needs to be a balancing point. So hopefully all of these conversations will be long forgotten soon.
I think this is good idea. I know a lot of people don’t like the idea of a “bot”, but if was done tactfully as described here I think it could be very beneficial. With the migration to Monzo Chat this could most definitely be a possibility too. Some form of response human or otherwise surely is better than silence for 24 hours+?
Also, having an option to mark your issue as resolved would be also be a big win, regardless whether you used the automated responses or not. Sometimes issues resolve themselves and it would be good to have a process that indicated this.
A lot of the time it feels like answers are already on the forum, but users do not always check/know about the forum.
What could be cool is a way of showing generic requests to the community (with a way of ensuring data/information is protected) and then providing a small incentive to the community to effectively resolve the issue; hence reducing volumes in the queue.
Might be a bit far fetched, but essentially a cool way of ensuring Monzo can leverage it’s community on here in quite a useful way
The copy in the chat isn’t final at all. We don’t want to give any kind of impression that you’re talking to a person (eg. “I’ve found this article…”) so we want to still tighten it up a bit.
But glad you like the prototype of how it could look
Personally I don’t understand the need for this. The help button is there and its quite intuitive to use.
Have you found through user research that most users use chat first instead of using the help search function?
