As you’ll all know, since you all watched Episode 11 of The Bulletin yesterday (you did, right? ) it’s SCALERS WEEK here at Monzo! Was anyone at our Open Ofice last night? If so, you’ll also know all about it!
But what is a Scaler and why do they have a week?
Well, here’s an excerpt from a lovely blog post that we just published.
At a typical bank, there’s one person working in customer support for every 3,000 customers. Right now at Monzo, we’re doing a lot better, and need one working COp for every 19,000 customers. But if we want to bring Monzo to a billion people – while building a sustainable business – we can’t keep growing our Customer Operations team at the same rate.
The Scalers team is a cross-functional team we created to tackle this challenge. We’re data scientists, designers, engineers, product managers and analysts that work alongside our Customer Operations team to make sure we can keep providing amazing customer support, at massive scale.
The reason why we’ve decided to tell you about all of the details of our Scalers team is simple : all in the name of transparency, heck yeah!
Seriously though - the point of Scalers is to address the problems that growth might cause before they happen. So it’s all about being proactive - what might happen when we hit a million users, what might happen when we hit 2 million? etc!
That’s the theme of this week’s Q&A! But before I introduce our special guest… it’s catch up time! Check out all previous Q&As below
Bruno has been here since January 2017 and he’s currently working on:
Working in the Reductivity squad in the Scalers team. We make sure that users don’t need to get in touch with customer support so that we can scale our user base effectively.
Interesting Fact about Bruno!
“I spent 30 days hiking in Iceland on my own, carrying all my food with me and sleeping in a tent.”
His fave thing about working at Monzo?
“How passionate and diverse everyone at Monzo is. You can have a conversation about any topic and will always find an alternative way of seeing things. At the same time everyone is very driven to have a positive impact in how people manage their money around the world.”
You know the score!
Get your questions in and Bruno will be here later in the week to answer them
What sort of contingency planning has been put in place to deal with some sudden influx of queries? If, for example, cards have stopped working for whatever reason or lots of people had direct debits declined?
How would Monzo ensure that there is no chaos and customers can get in touch and Monzo team can reassure them or deal with them in these sort of situations?
Slightly out of left field, what is the derivation of the term ‘Scalers’? Is it a common banking term or something Monzo have invented?
More centrally, what is the proportion of proactive and reactive changes in what you deal with?
(e.g. my assumptions here are that if something big happens now, there’s clearly a need for a reactive response to try and manage/divert a proportions of the sudden COps calls that would otherwise result so the Scalers will have a reactive (or damage limitation!) roll. In parallel I assume that there’s the background task of the data scientists and others presumably looking at the ebbs and flows of support work in the past and developing strategies from there.)
What is the cut-off point where you decide that there are too many customers per COp (how long it takes to resolve, etc.) and what steps have you taken so far with the Reductivity squad/ ways of improving efficiency while not compromising on customer satisfaction and quality of service?
How do Cops take on board the changes you introduce? How do you stop them getting into the mindset/feeling like you’re taking their work away from them?
This has to be by design. Looks like a nudge to make you type in your query rather than scroll through options looking for the one more relevant to what you’re trying to find out.
We ran this design change as an a/b test and managed to reduce 12% of all conversations just by doing this.
The only difference here is that the search bar takes more space in the Help homepage, but all other elements in the help screen are still there below the fold (suggested articles, transactions, categories, spotlights, community and chat).
Our motivation was exactly what @HoldenCarver suggested: nudging users to use search. We know that users that enter the search flow are much more likely to resolve their problems without needing to get in touch. I think this is a much better experience for users since they can find the right answer in a matter of seconds, without needing to wait for customer support to review their problem, and without needing to explain what their issue is etc.
We have a running assumption that this is good for more advanced users, that know exactly what their problem is, but less useful for new users that can be intimidated by an empty search box. So we’re trying something new very soon just for new users.