That’s not irony, that’s just Monzo being rubbish. I don’t understand the selling point of Monzo being an account you can open and begin to use anywhere in minutes, but then being worse than most other banks for customer service requests. Is anyone at Monzo sitting back and thinking “our customer service times and procedures are the shiz”?
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I suspect not, because polls and surveys paint a starkly different picture that their approach is still better than pretty much everywhere else.
I’m not sure how they’re managing it, but the fact they’re careful who they select to push towards taking part in such surveys may have something to do with it. The quality over quantity thing.
They’ve never asked me, and nor should they if they want glowing praise in this aspect.
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Hang on, why hasn’t a bank with millions of customers and billions worth of money employing someone at weekends?
It’s not a startup anymore 
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I think because their app and features are still just about ahead of legacy banks (plus the fact that Monzo built up a lot of goodwill in the early days). It’s why I haven’t gone back to First Direct yet. But as soon as FD add instant notifications and budgeting (if they do), then I’ll have to seriously consider going Full First Direct.
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It’s almost like they haven’t heard of working different shift patterns or at least ensuring other people are trained up to be able to step up to do that work.
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I’m fine with people having a weekend, let them rest. Not everything needs to be available 24/7. But just let customers know that’s the case.
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Yeah but as mentioned just above you have shift workers.
So someone might work just:
Tues, Weds, Thurs, Fri
And another might take:
Sat, Sun, Mon
A bank has no excuses not to employ weekend shift workers.
I’m not suggesting making someone work all 7 days, and all 24hrs.
People accessing banking services at weekends is completely reasonable.
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True. I get that. What I meant was that I wouldn’t demand that a service like this HAS to be available 24/7. Sure, other services yes.
But for me the bigger problems are: poor communication, lack of consistency, flip floppy policies that appear without warning, lack of expectation management etc
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Yeah but it’s not down to personal circumstances.
Because I don’t make large purchases at weekends doesn’t mean that everyone should wait until Monday. Life doesn’t need to be put on hold.
Sure it’s not like hospitals or breakdown services where it’s critical to have continuous staff revolving to provide support at any time.
If it was 2016 then yeah it’s an unreasonable cost for such low numbers of customers that might need weekend support. We are pushing 6 million now. A few of those are going to be wanting to make large purchases at the weekend, and sometimes it’ll be critical to them.
Are Monzo really that cash strapped @Dan5 ?
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This is a really key point.
If you, hypothetically, had a big purchase coming up that was going to go above the standard payment limit (like buying a house) you would look up this article well in advance to see what you needed to do.
The article strongly implies that it’s a 24 hours or less thing, so you would think “looks like I need to contact Monzo on Friday to make sure my sale completion can go through on Saturday” (a perfectly reasonable thing to think, and exactly like what the OP did). It would then create serious issues for you if it couldn’t be done until Monday, and it would be directly contrary to what Monzo’s published guidance advised.
Obviously, raising limits and processing large payments has an element of manual review about it, and it’s understandable that only people trained in this area could do such work, but if they only work Monday to Friday it really needs to be made clear to customers so they can plan accordingly.
If you had something important coming up on Sunday, but sorted it out with Monzo early in the week, then as long as the transaction could be pre-approved it wouldn’t matter if the right Monzo employees actually worked on Sundays or not. We need clearer customer advice around the process (and, without publishing the exact limits etc, would not fall foul of any tipping off rules).
I’ve read loads of these sorts of posts here, and I’m still not 100% clear on what exactly I would have to do or should expect, in the circumstance where I need/want to make a large payment from my Monzo account. That’s a problem. I can only imagine how stressful it would be looking at the community for the first time, trying to find an answer in the middle of a time-sensitive purchase process, when you can’t get hold of support in the chat.
At the very least, non-specialist agents should be giving the right information and be able to take some basic details to feed back to the specialist team (in order to speed up processing when they are available).
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I won’t replay @SebH’s post - it’s all said there. No need to review shift patterns. Just the ability to plan a transaction, safe in the knowledge it’ll take place when required.
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You really need to fix this manual review system for large transactions and automate it. It’s a serious pain point for your customers who want to use you as their main bank, and significantly undermines your credibility.
If you must do it this way do the auditing in advance, trying to do it in real time and requiring customers to wait for you is absurd and frustrating. We should be allowed to request limits be upped for a period of 7 days say, well before it is needed. If you need reasons for each transfer, give us a text box to enter that, no need to do that in chat. I’m currently waiting on a response for this myself and do hope you’re tracking the complaints about it.
There must be ways to automate this rather than relying on a chat system to do it.
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I don’t work for Monzo, so can’t say anything with any authority, but the system will always require some element of human oversight to meet regulatory requirements, I would have thought.
Whether that may allow for some risk-based AI and automatic approval for some people/circumstances or not, I couldn’t say. But I imagine it could.
I agree that a form to at least state your situation as a starting point would be very useful.
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Yeah I think it’ll still need manual intervention but being able to message Monzo prior to say I’m buying a house/car/large purchase and I’m going to need a higher limit within the next X days seems the obvious solution. It can then be pre-approved without stressing on that particular day. I think* that’s acceptable from a risk management perspective.
If it technically can’t, then it goes back to actually doing what banks do and employ people to cover weekends.
Or if it can then do both, have people at weekends ready and pre-approved to take the load off.
A bit like when you used to have to call your bank back in the ol days to say you were going abroad so expect some foreign payments going through.
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Another problem is that Monzo put restrictions on us:
1 - you can only request the limit increase on the same day you want it
2 - the full amount must be in your account before you make the request.
So if I was buying a car on a Saturday, or making a transfer to another account and the money want due to arrive until Saturday, or any other scenario, then I just literally can not do it with Monzo.
Again, fine for Monzo to say that - but Monzo MUST say that. It’s not acceptable to have help pages + my personal experience + support telling me it’ll get done on Saturday and then for Monzo to fail to get it done on Saturday.
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This is probably because of a requirement to check that the money is not the proceeds of crime or money laundering. If it were, they would be required to freeze the funds.
But it could be a separate process, to provisionally raise the limit first and then check the source of the funds when they come in?
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Completely agree. I’ve said it before- Monzo’s current system for large transfers is not fit for purpose.
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It properly frustrates me how every time the topic of large transfers come up, somehow it seems to have gotten worse since the last time.
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The most important external survey (the ipsos mori one) doesn’t ask specifically about customer service. It asks whether you would recommend the provider overall. Owing to the quality of other aspects of Monzo, I think many respondents would give an overall recommendation even if they’ve had a poor customer support experience.
I’m in this category, but if I’m having a conversation with someone who is considering Monzo I can caveat the recommendation in a way I wouldn’t be able to do in that coarse survey. And that’s indeed what I now find myself doing; I still recommend Monzo overall but I also mention a couple of significant limitations - unreliable customer support and lack of post office counter services. I’m sure this puts some people off.
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The thing is that this shouldn’t be hard to fix. Monzo have got most of it right. But it feels like customer service wasn’t scaled up with the rapid growth in customer base.
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