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.