Monzo Staff Weekly Q&A - Bruno Vaz Moço (Product Manager, Scalers)

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.)

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What do you feel is the most effective way of providing self service to customers, without impacting the customer experience?

Are there any new technologies that you feel are changing/have changed the face of customer service?

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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?

Have you introduced something that has subsequently badly effected another area you initially felt wouldn’t be effected?

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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?

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In the last month or so, there seems to be a huge amount of wasted space on the help screen. Any chance of shoving things up a bit?Screenshot_20180722-182033_Monzo

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I was wondering why there’s so much space around that. Particularly as it pretty much hides everything else for no reason I can see?

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I think it’s designed to make you use the search in an attempt to reduce the chat usage but couldn’t be totally wrong!

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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.

Surely that defeats the object of the suggested topics, and all the other stuff on the page apart from Community Home and Chat…?

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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.

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That’s a very good point! We recently added the section with suggested articles to the search flow (on Android only). You can try tapping the search bar on Android, and you’ll see the same article suggestions there.

This means we can direct more people to search and still have the power of the article suggestions. Another change to this suggested articles section is that we’ll soon prioritise them with a machine learning model. @Neal is the data scientist behind the new model, and offline results suggest the articles picked up by the ML model are much better than the current implementation, which is based on binary rules that we manage manually in the team.

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Do you find that people interact less with items such as Spotlights? which are great at pointing out new features etc?

We should have probably saved these for you Q&A later :see_no_evil:

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Yep! Feel free to post these in the Q&A thread, I’ll be answering them today/tomorrow :+1:

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I’ve moved some posts here from this thread: Helping Every Customer: Behind the scenes of the updated Help tab! as the answers would fit in nicely to this weeks Q&A :slight_smile: Hope y’all don’t mind.

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Many of the challenges we face are definitely shared with many other companies, not just high street banks. I think the biggest difference is the constraints we add on top.

We believe customer support is one of the most important differentiators of our service. The process of scaling up the COps Team (Customer Operations Team) is not a new challenge but we’re committed to doing so without compromising the level of service we currently provide which significantly changes how we can do things. If you’ve ever chatted with our lovely COps Team in past you might have felt it was a refreshing experience, especially when compared to other high street banks. Why should this experience be any different once we have 500 million users?

There’s also challenges on the daily life of people working in the COps Team. Since we offer real-time human customer support 24/7 we need to guarantee there’s always enough people working at any hour in the day to cover the number of new conversations. It becomes more complex when you factor in the wellbeing of the squads (each Team at Monzo has multiple Squads), for instance it can be quite challenging to work night shifts. Making sure people have the flexibility to take time off whenever they want, or even the ability to tell your colleagues you’re having a bad day and need to go home. These things are easy to do in small companies, but become a challenge once we have hundreds of people working in the same team and don’t want to compromise on quality.

Regarding the challenges high street banks face that we don’t, there’s many (not just from a Scalers perspective). If you think about the tech infrastructure they’re using it is much more difficult for them to quickly iterate their products, or even know how customers are interacting with them. In the Scalers Reductivity Squad we constantly tweak the Help section of the app. On a daily basis I check how users are interacting with the new features. The amount of (passive) feedback we get is critical for us to continuously improve the app. And we have this data stream in near real time (15 min lag). High street banks often times need to operate without this feedback loop which makes things much more difficult for them. More than this, the way our product teams are structured allow us to deploy new code to production on a daily basis, this can be a new machine learning model, a new user experiment, a new app flow, or new app content. It’s a luxury high street banks might not have and has a massive impact for users.

High street banks are also structured in a very different way. Their customer support teams are not as close to their product teams as they do at Monzo. For instance all of the Scalers team sits physically in the same space as all the COps team in London. This allows us to react very fast to the issues our users are facing. Everyone in the COps team can add outage banners to the apps, or add content to the help screen that appears on every user’s app (literally just typing on their laptops and hitting publish). We also involve people from the COps team in many of the projects we do, this helps us in two ways: product teams get first hand insight of what works and doens’t work for users, and the COps team is much more aware of the changes we’re shipping and how they work.

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Incredible reply! :blue_heart: :mondo:

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Pineapple on pizza, yes. Cats, they’re ok.

We’re currently building a new help screen for new users which is better at helping users that just opened an account. This changes our approach to help significantly and it’s a hypothesis we’re testing… Up until now we’ve been building the help screen with very powerful features like machine learning search, article suggestions, etc. More recently we’ve given the search bar more space on the help homepage, this works really well for the majority of users. But an empty search bar can also be quite scary.

That’s why the new help screen for new users takes the approach of “help on rails”. Instead of giving you all the different options to find the content you want, we make it more prescribing by placing the content we think is most relevant for new users more accessible (after analysing thousands of conversations from new users). We don’t remove any of the existing functionality, but we simplify what sits on the homepage.

I’m really excited about this change for two reasons. 1) We’re ramping up user growth in the coming months, and new users are twice as likely to get in touch than the rest of our user base. If we suddenly experienced explosive growth the COps team would be under significant strain to keep response times acceptable. So this is a project that can have a real positive impact in the COps team. 2) We’re testing a hypotethis that we haven’t before, and it’s change of mindset in how we approach help, so I’m very excited about that as well.

We’re shipping this on Android as a user experiment next week. Only new users signing up will be allocated on the experiment, and some of them might have a slightly different version than the screen below.

image

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What’s your opinion on bees?

I love bees.

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