Interesting. 
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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.
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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
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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.
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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” 
(Avoiding the chat messages to check they’ve understood correctly?)
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From a Reductivity perspective, COps don’t see much impact from what we do, but they would see an impact from the things we don’t do. So if we’re doing our job right, the COps team wouldn’t be surprised by unmanageable queues and things run smoothly, without that much interaction (queries just don’t appear).
From a broader Scalers perspective we’ve made mistakes in the past in how we communicate some changes to the broader COps Team. Now we apply more the principle of empowering the people closest to the problem to solve it. There are some things that Scalers can help fix, and introducing some changes to the way the COps Team works is beneficial for everyone, or required.
Other problems it’s not up to Scalers to solve, we can identify the problem, if a squad in the COps team asks for help to solve it we can bring in whatever skills they need (like engineering), but the actual work towards implementing a solution and “owning the problem” sits within the COps Team, which is much better for both teams as well. It always helps if the people that have a direct impact on the outcome, feel that they are responsible for the problem being fixed.
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This exists! But only for staff 
It’s there to serve a different purpose though.
I agree this would be really cool. Maybe if you shake the app all numbers in the app become random?
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I agree with you. Chat will always be there for anyone that wants human reassurance 
However that doesn’t mean we can’t do a better job at making it easier to understand how the app/your-money is flowing between different transactions.
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Love it !!
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8 pint mode?
Great question! The number of customers per COp is not something we check on a regular basis for planning, it’s more a consequence of everything else. It might sound the same, but we plan towards “customers helped per hour” instead of Users/COp.
To make sure we have enough people scheduled to work at any time of the day, throughout the week, we forecast the number of new conversations we’ll get each hour, using a data model trained on historical data. It’s fairly accurate.
Based on the projected conversations throughout each day we use the latest number of “customers helped per hour, per COp” for each hour of the day (this is a productivity metric). It allows us to know roughly how many COps we need to be scheduled to work at each hour of the day.
There are many other factors that impact scheduling (who knew it could be that exciting!). There are always peaks of new conversations through the day (early morning / lunch / after work), but of course we can’t schedule someone to start working at 13:00 and finish at 14:00, and then to come back online at 18:00 for another hour. COp shifts need to be compatible with a healthy lifestyle.
We smooth inbound peaks with staggered shifts, each hour x number of people come online, instead of having everyone that covers the day starting at 9:00. And there’s lots of other really cool stuff I’d love to see us do with more flexible working to address inbound peaks.
This is all assuming we have enough people in the COps Team to cover the total number of hours we need to schedule for frontline customer support. Once the projections start to not add up, we start publishing overtime shifts that anyone can take. And also dial up on hiring for the COps team.
I think it would be amazing to also hear the comments from @ijsemerene on this - he’s the scheduling guru at Monzo 
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Yes, naturally the things that we move below the fold will get less engagement. However the search is very good at picking up the right content for users.
In the future we want to bring more types of content into the search results. So if you searched about travel you could get a few help pages with just a few short answers (like ‘what are the fees’, ‘is my card accepted everywhere’, etc), and it would also appear a spotlight about Travel, with more long form content covering all the main questions about travelling with Monzo 
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Yes that’s what I meant - the number signing up per day. I wondered if you had a target for that above the current ~2000 for after you’ve worked out the drivers.
Oh I don’t know, some of us over 60 semi retired people would quite like to help out with that.
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I think this is a super idea. There are many many older folk who have more in common with the culture of tech start ups than many would think. And a diverse workforce (including different perspectives from age) is really important. And, as you say, there is a greater willingness from this group to do “little and often”…
@bruno interested in thinking about if this can be piloted?
(Disclaimer: I’m not in this age group so it doesn’t apply to me. But I still think it’s a great idea. Along with attracting neuro-diverse folk for, say, engineering roles. But that’s another conversation!).
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I agree it’s something to consider. We actually have a few people working in similar situations, like recent moms that can work a couple of hours for a bit of extra income while staying at home. One day we’d love to have people anywhere around the world just picking up their laptop and logging at peak times. We’re still not there yet.
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In this vein, do you have plans to further automate the merchant data system, or somehow engage the community in approving items? I have frequently contacted COps to fix merchant data (after repeatedly submitting through the app), and I don’t want to waste their time on something trivial. But I also don’t know how else to resolve the issue.
Maybe the number of requests for merchant data is so low it doesn’t warrant work at this point, but this seems like the kind of low-priority request that would be good to remove from COps as much as possible.
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