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

Incredible reply! :blue_heart: :mondo:

1 Like

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

6 Likes

What’s your opinion on bees?

I love bees.

1 Like

Looks really good thank you for the reply!!

Also, sure there is some Joke around the bees, but I love bees… Im from Manchester :smiley: So even got a bee tattoo on my wrist!

1 Like

Great question! Our priority is making sure users have access to their money. An ‘incident’ can range from feed items not being created in real time, to a full blown outage where all payments decline. We have a few things we can do internally to minimise user impact, depending on the severity of the incident. What we can do also depends very much if it’s an internal incident or from another company that we interact with (like Mastercard or other banks).

Ultimately if there’s something impacting all of our user base, and they can’t access their money for whatever reason, we would consider sending a message with a push notification to all users letting them know what’s happening, so they’re not caught off guard. It might seem like an overkill to many users, but people will be sitting in a restaurant without being able to pay their bill, or at the supermarket till with a trolley full of groceries (and might not even have food at home). So first line of action is being transparent about what’s happening and keeping users looped in while the engineering teams resolve the issue.

Internally we would immediately start publishing overtime shifts that anyone can pick up and jump straight to the conversation queues, and for the following days if we expect the issue to last longer. Being a customer centric company everyone at Monzo is also trained on how to use our internal tools and answer customer queries. So if things are really bad, we’d ask other teams to jump on the customer support queue.

In less serious incidents we have other tools we’d use to minimise user impact, or COps impact (from the additional influx of queries). Something very straightforward to do is just adding new content to the help screen. ‘Emergency’ content appears at the top of the suggested articles (below the search bar), also appears on the top of the search results, and also in the screen where users first type their message as one of the ‘suggestions’. This is very effective at answering questions that do not impact user’s money, but might create confusion in app for some reason (like a duplicate feed item, or a slightly delayed bank transfer). These are the issues that there is no action from our COps team except explaining what’s happening, which the help screen is also effective at doing.

We also use StatusPage to publish incidents. If we add an incident on StatusPage users that signed up for SMS notifications on their website would be notified (albeit it’s a very small number of people). StatusPage also allows us to set a severity, and depending on what we choose it can automatically add an alert banner throughout the Monzo app, with the description of what’s happening, and enable an alert box that would appear to anyone that tries to contact us during the incident (to tell users we’re aware of the issue and they don’t need to get in touch, but they can still do it).

What’s really interesting is that from each incident we do a “post-mortem” to discuss how we could have dealt with it better. More often than not we realise we could change our systems to stop some of the issues before they affect all of our users. As we see more of these we become better at preventing large scale incidents, and at minimising user and COps impact.

4 Likes

A month or so ago we gave a bit more space to the search bar in the help homepage. Everything that used to be on the help screen homepage was still there, but when you first landed on that screen you would see search front and centre.

This was done as an experiment and had a reduction of 12% in user conversations. We didn’t prevent anyone from getting in touch, but we nudged them to try searching first, and it this was very good at helping users solve their problem faster. So this is now standard for all users on both iOS and Android.

Transaction related queries represent 10-15% of all our conversations. We’ve done a few things in the past to help users resolve their transaction queries without needing to get in touch, and I don’t think we’ve nailed this yet.

These type of queries can be very different from one another, and can be difficult for users to self service a resolution. The vast majority of transaction questions don’t actually need any action if users are okay with waiting a few days, as they almost always sort themselves out with time. But naturally this sometimes affect the available balance shown in the app (although the actual balance of the account is right), so even when users understand what’s happening, sometimes they send a message “just to be sure”. We will continue to work on this problem until we get it right.

4 Likes

I think this answers you question:

2 Likes

The most rewarding thing of being a product manager in the Scalers team is seeing the impact we can have on the COps Team (Customer Operations). It’s a team of nearly 200 people, and we have the opportunity to make their daily work more enjoyable, and stress free. It’s a constant battle between a fast growing user base (more user conversations coming through) and the Reductivity squad trying to minimise the number of questions we receive. If the speed of these two different dynamics gets out of sync the COps team is the first to feel the pain of user growth.

I also believe we should focus the time of the COps team in solving the wicked problems our customers face. If someone loses their job and suddenly can’t pay their overdraft, this can create a lot of anxiety to peoples lives, and the COps team does an amazing job in dealing with these situations. Or if someone gets robbed in a random country on the other side of the world and is left without a phone or a wallet, at this time we should dedicate as much time as necessary in solving these problems, and going above and beyond to make sure our users can carry on with their lives without needing to worry about money.

Solving the wicked problems, the problems that require high touch high empathy, makes the daily life of the COps team more challenging, and more enjoyable. It’s very rewarding as a pm to have an impact in this.

Right now we still get many questions that don’t necessarily need to be resolved by the COps team. And we can prioritise work in the Reductivity squad in the Scalers Team to make sure users don’t need to get in touch in these situations. Part of our team’s mission is to make sure users don’t need to get in touch, but can still do so at any time! So if someone prefers to chat with us because their moving house and need to update some of their account details the COps team is here to resolve this through chat, but many people that write in about these things would prefer to do it themselves in the app.

Ultimately as a company we want help over 1 billion users to not having to worry about their money. Making sure we can reach that goal while still providing amazing human interaction to our users is what makes me come to work every day.

Prioritisation is always the most difficult thing. We can do many different things, but prioritising work to make sure we get the maximum impact on the shortest period of time is a challenge. Most all of our work will have interdependencies between multiple domains (design, backend engineering, iOS/Android engineering, user research, content, operations, data, etc) so making all of this make sense for the entire team on a day-to-day basis requires a lot of planning.

4 Likes

There’s no single trick to make this work, reducing number of conversations is a consequence of many different efforts, thousands small changes that collectively help us move towards that goal.

We’re a very data driven team and have a very good picture of what users write to us about, what’s the response we give to users, and what actions were taken on a user’s account (if any). We can see this at an aggregate level over time with some real magic from the Data team. We use this information as a guiding star to our roadmap.

Simply put we pick the most common problem users have, and make whatever change we need to in the app to help that group of users. We do this every week, and keeping a laser focus on that list has worked very well for us in the past - it’s our Hit List.

Some problems are easy to solve, like updating your phone number, we just need to allow users to do this themselves in the app and that will solve 80% of the conversations about this (we’re shipping this on Android next week!). The other 20% of users is more difficult to solve, the flows are never perfect or 100% discoverable, and it requires a lot of work to fix these problems for the long tail.

3 Likes

How do you plan to do that? New golden tickets? New “network-based” features? Can you give any examples?

1 Like

As far as I know it’s not a term we picked up from an industry standard. It simply means fixing all of the problems that can block our ability to grow our user base, from a customer support perspective. So it’s the “COps Scaling” team if you’d like. Also, I think it sounds cool :slight_smile:

It’s a balance between the two, and it depends on where we are at any time. For example when we started rolling out the current account last year, there were a few issues that created a big strain in the COps team. At one point mostly everyone that opened an account was getting in touch, that was a time that we needed to be reactive.

In the past 6 months we’ve halved the number of conversations that come through, which buys us some time to be proactive in solving issues that would otherwise not be possible to prioritise.

2 Likes

We need to make sure the basic flows for self-service are available. In the past months we’ve done a lot of work in this and mostly everything can be self-served. Then the question is making sure users can find those flows when they need them.

There’s a lot of work in this area, and we’ve covered some of this in previous blog posts. Things like machine learning to predict what you’re going to ask, dynamic article suggestions, better discoverability, etc.

Have a read at the blog post @Neal posted this week explaining the role the Data Team plays in this process. https://monzo.com/blog/2018/08/01/data-help/

2 Likes

Spot on! Bringing more network based dynamics into the Monzo app is one of the ways we’re going to dial up on growth. These can be golden tickets (referral leaderboards, rewards for inviting more friends, etc) or can also be features that makes you want to have your friends on Monzo, like being able to split your flat bills with your flatmates in an elegant way).

The core Product team is focusing on growth and there are 2 different squads focusing just on this (not in Scalers).

1 Like

Cool. Are there any other examples, and do you have a daily new account target in mind?

:eyes: Interesting. :slight_smile:

1 Like

It’s not so much about how many users we’ll have by the end of the quarter, but the rate of users signing up.

If it takes us 3 months to figure out the key thing that drives growth, and until then we grow very little, that’s a much better outcome than growing linearly throughout the quarter, but not nailing down the drivers of explosive growth.

1 Like

I think this goes back to how money is emotional. Even if it can be answered by a help screen section, most people (me included) would want the human reassurance just make sure. This is why it’s definitely important for Monzo not to slip on the great customer service standards which we are currently used to :slight_smile:

1 Like

From the work that I do in Scalers the biggest potential risk of making something go wrong is probably stuff that has an impact on the Security team. A lot of the things we do bring functionality to the app that they would otherwise have to be reviewed by the COps team. So we need to consider all the security implications of giving users more control over changing their details, sending cards to addresses other than their own, etc.

We haven’t yet been surprised by an increase of fraudulent attacks using these feature, but it’s something we keen a close eye on.

There’s other type of work we do in Scalers that has a much higher impact in the daily life of the COps Team. Things like making a change to our internal tools, or the way we do shift scheduling, the guidelines for queue management or even new changes to the COps team structure. This is the type of activity that happens everyday, and we work together with the COps team to solving these.

1 Like

If Monzo had a sandbox/demo mode, to not only mash up your own data so you can demo to friends you are trying to show how good the app is, it would also give a great way to check you’ve understood an article or the help given before accidentally doing it for “real” :slight_smile: (Avoiding the chat messages to check they’ve understood correctly?)

3 Likes