Same here. The “Halifax is just as good” thing is totally and utterly bogus. They’ve re-skinned old, broken technology, and it very apparent.
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Agreed, and that’s also reflected in various surveys. I wasn’t praising the service (which was mediocre comparing to other banks), but how easy it was to get through to a human being who was willing to at least understand my query. I didn’t have to ‘hack’ the knowledgebase system to see the live chat which isn’t really a live chat, but more like a re-skinned email system.
100% - ignoring how good or bad Monzo is, both Monzo and MasterCard experienced outages in the past and they will certainly experience more in the future. It should be a good practice to have a second bank account and a second card just in case if things go wrong.
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I feel like a lot of the issues that people bring up about Monzo have been mentioned numerous times at this point and just not actioned(or actioned wrongly or even poorly)
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I still don’t understand this view. Could someone explain why you feel chat is harder to access please? I keep seeing it mentioned…
… Yet I can access chat pretty easily.
In short - they currently have different methods of chat access available. The “worst” version is no “chat now” or other button accessible at the end of the Help Screen, or in articles.
If you have that version of the app, and you need to chat to someone, there’s no obvious way to do so.
That is to say the way you accessed Chat isn’t possible for all users
(It can be accessed by typing “contact support”)
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Maybe the people who voted “poor” on the MSE survey all have the version of the app where it looks like there’s no way to contact customer service.
I’m one of the people who has the “no chat” version of the app. If it wasn’t for the forum, I’d have no idea I could even chat to someone. I’d probably vote poor as well in that case.
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Liked to thank for the explanation, not because I agree with differing access.
Has it ever been confirmed (more likely, denied) as to whether this is just one big A/B test?
Not a test, but staged rollout:
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This is the forum’s discussion of the last MSE poll, way back when Coronavirus was just getting started.
Interestingly, with nearly double the number of voters for Monzo, only seven voted Poor.
Something has definitely gone very wrong at Monzo.
Apparently I’m the only member of my social circle to still have an easy to access chat function. I’ve heard rumblings elsewhere within this community (I could be wrong) that this rollout had been paused and was being reviewed due to all the negative feedback.
I certainly hope they reverse course on this. Better automated support is no justification to obfuscate human support. The two should work in harmonious synchronicity. I’ve laid out examples in other threads where this is done to an excellent standard. Monzo don’t currently have the good level of automation required, nor the quality human support to back it up to support such a system yet. And until they do, chat must remain the most visible and accessible method for receiving help.
A nuanced chat bot, capable of automating simple things like payment disputes and chargebacks, with the ability to intelligently parse sentences to provide FAQs, with a simple human to human live chat fallback for redundancy would serve the purpose quite well and reduce load on support agents. Just retain the ability to skip all of that if the user prefers.
I’m satisfied with using Monzo for my day to day banking, largely thanks to some of the advanced budgeting features in Monzo Plus. But if they continue down this road in regards to support, I’ll be reevaluating that choice sooner rather than later. I’m half tempted just to give up hope on fintech ability to improve the banking landscape and just go back to using my credit card for spending and my traditional bank account for direct debits and standing orders.
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I think the poll is consistent with the trend in customer service over the last number of months. Interactions with CS has been variable for me ranging from pretty quick response times to waiting nearly 24 hours.
Regardless of the number of people who voted, you can see from posts on the community that support standards vary significantly.
There is a real issue here with consistency in service. Customers blindingly defending Monzo and hiding behind the fact that there was only 152 survey responses isn’t going to put pressure on them to improve that service.
Let’s not forget that MSE and Martin Lewis are generally well respected and trusted (anecdotal) and potential customers will take note of what they poll.
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It hasn’t been many times. One occasion was because I needed stamped statements and that was handled brilliantly quick. One time was to raise my daily limit and that wasn’t answered until the day after by which point it was too late and I had to split a transaction over 2 days.
I am not a Monzo basher by the way. If you look through my previous posts you will see quite clearly I am a big supporter and defend them when appropriate. But I personally think the poll being discussed here seems to me to be fairly accurate of customer service engagement which is either great or poor.
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Just on this point, this was due to regulatory changes. All banks were required to ensure their overdraft charges were presented as an annual interest rate.
And yet Resolver has Monzo at the top for best customer service of a bank…
It’s the so-called ‘challenger’ banks that top our excellent customer service charts for their current account services. Monzo’s Resolver score is an impressive 87%, followed closely by Revolut at 84%.
While both received a hefty five stars out of five for satisfaction and likelihood to recommend, Monzo stood out for their resolution and response times – meaning their customers felt they received a speedy communication process throughout their interaction.
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Resolver seem to rate how quickly a firm responds to a complaint via its service while the MSE one is about Customer Service generally.
From reading posts here, even if you don’t like the MSE result, it’s clear that CS at Monzo had got worse over time - and sadly it’s by design.
I clearly recall one of their staff saying Monzo was going to be introducing changes which would prove unpopular with customers
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Their methodology is even worse:
“Resolver requires a minimum of 30 customer feedbacks”
When did they say that? And why would they say it like that?
I’m probably going to get targetted for picking this out, and arguing back, but there’s a key thing here.
it’s not by design
The difference with the changes to Cops is that it’s trying to promote self-serve solutions to customers sooner so that they’re able to get a response to their question quicker, and clearer than waiting for a cop to reply. Inherently the problem is with live chat support things is that people jump straight to that to get help, instead of reading help articles.
The decision to remove easy access to the chat feature isn’t helped by the increase in number of queries that people have etc currently in the current climate.
Personally, I think it’s right to make people turn to self-serve options first, instead of simply contacting customer support for simple queries.
It was never intended to make customer service work, it was intended to reduce the strain on customer service, instead what has happened is it’s just lead to people getting angry, and probably not using the help feature (or scrolling down to the “something is wrong with this transaction” option on a fraudulent transaction etc).
Customer service has, unfortunately been brought to light a lot recently with the number of posts from people saying they can’t find how to contact them (instead of actually probably being able to read a suitable help article if they bothered to).
Finally, I’d like to point out that I don’t agree with the full removal of the instant chat availability, I think it’s a poorly planned decision that came into effect at a very very tough time for everyone, and it’s been skewed to Monzo trying to become unavailable at a time of crisis.
Hopefully they’ll rethink it, and make it easier to contact after trying to first read an article that (hopefully) attempts to solve their problem first.
(As an aside, I think back to when locked pots were actually locked, and how many queries Cops got about wanting them unlocked because people didn’t realise that locked meant actually locked)
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It’s not as easy for me.
The help page has no contact option. Instead, it encourages me to search the help pages.
If I find an article that looks like it might have the answer, I click it, read it, and at the end of the article says, “did this article solve your problem?” When I click no, it simply says, “thanks for letting us know! Your feedback helps us getting better at helping you.” At which point, I’ve reached a dead end.
If, however, my search results don’t show anything promising… well, I’m at another dead end. There’s still no contact us option.
It’s crap.
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