Monzo Staff Weekly Q&A - Emily Parrett (COps, Call & The Gang!)


Note : All Monzo Q&As to date can be found here :grinning:


Hello forum family! How are you all doing on this fine Wednesday? It’s my first day in our new office, I’ve travelled down to London to check it out and I’m blown away! It’s huge, we have like a bunch of different floors and it’s all very shiny and new!

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We just had our first weekly company All-Hands in the new office and everyone is buzzing about it. Things are feeling very good right about now here at New Monzo HQ :grinning:

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This week we’ve got Emily Parrett from COps (Call & The Gang) in our Hot Coral Hot Seat™️!

Call & The Gang is our squad that primarily deals with support that comes in through phonecalls (as the name suggests) and social media! :grinning:

But before we get into it…

Catch up on all the previous Q&A’s here!


Click here to see all previous Q&As

Week 1 : Chris MacLean, Customer Operations & Vulnerable Customers :santa:t2:

Week 2 : James Nicholson, iOS Engineer :green_apple:

Week 3 : Tara Mansfield, People Operations Manager :woman_technologist:t5::man_technologist:t3:

Week 4 : James Routley, Backend Engineer :hammer_and_wrench:

Week 5 : Hugh Wells, Customer Operations :man_police_officer:t3:

Week 6 : Naz Malik, Technical Specialist :computer:

Week 7 : Fred Morgan, COps Squad Captain (Calls & Social Media) :telephone_receiver:

Week 8 : Emma Northcott, COps Scaling Team :balance_scale:

Week 9 : Jarno Wolf, COps Financial Crime Specialist & Squad Captain :wolf:

Week 10 : Maria Campbell, Head of People :woman_office_worker:t2::man_office_worker:t4:

Week 11 : Jim Amey, Night COps Captain :bat: :crescent_moon:

Week 12 : Richard Cook, Online Community Manager :man_cook:

Week 13 : Beatrice Borbon, Content & Press Manager :newspaper:

Week 14 : Tom Blomfield, CEO :crown:

Week 15 : Ella Johanny, COps/Hiring :handshake:

Week 16 : Harry Ashbridge, Writer :writing_hand:t3:

Week 17 : Beth Scott, Overnight COps :cat2:

Week 18 : Georgie Parmenter, Executive Assistant to the Founders :blonde_woman:

Week 19 : Vulnerable Customers Team :sunflower:

Week 20 : Leah Templeman, Interim VP People :sun_with_face:

Week 21 : Daniel Chatfield, Backend Engineer, Fincrime & Security :closed_lock_with_key:

Week 22 : Valerio Magliulo, Product Manager - Revenue Team :money_with_wings:

Week 23 : Sam Watkin, Operations Analyst :thinking:

Week 24 : Kieran McHugh, Backend Engineer :desktop_computer:

Week 25 : Jonas Huckestein, Co-Founder and Chief Technical Officer :computer_mouse:

Week 26 : Annual Report Edition with Tristan Thomas and Julie Oey :calendar:

Week 27 : Zander Brade, Lead Product Designer :pencil2:

Week 28 : Richard Dingwall, Payments Engineer :moneybag: :wrench:

Week 29 : Oliver Beattie, Head of Engineering (Reliability Report Special) :watch:

Week 30 : Bruno Vaz Moço, Product Manager (Scalers) :balance_scale:

Week 31 : Dillon Van Auken, Remote COps Team Lead and Vegas Project Team Lead :first_quarter_moon_with_face: 🂡

Week 32 : Rhys Davies, COps Cardiff Office :dragon:


Emily has been here since January 2018 and is currently working on :

“Just getting excited to train the new COps on social media customer services & will be helping with more training for the Vegas team.”

Interesting Fact about Emily

“V long but most interesting fact about me, bare with me on this one: My background is in theatre and I somehow got a Distinction in my Masters in Applied Theatre from The Central School of Speech and Drama last September (the practice of theatre and drama in non-traditional settings and/or with marginalized communities). Last year I lived in a home for girls in India for 2 months teaching daily theatre sessions. They performed their show for 250 kids from other homes, the Delhi police & local authorities. Every July I co-lead a theatre project commissioned by my local council to engage the local community in arts “Humans of Ashford”. Last year the commission was to make a show about a huge local carp fish that died a long time ago - seriously, that’s one of our biggest local celebs.”

Her fave thing about working at Monzo?

Definitely the people!

You know the score!

Get your questions in and Emily will be here later in the week to answer them :grinning:

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Yesss Emily!!! :hot_coral_heart:

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It’s lovely to see that most people in Monzo have various and completely unrelated backgrounds. You don’t expect that from any other bank. :hot_coral_heart:

Oh and let’s get the standard questions out of the way: cats? Pizza? Pineapple on pizza? :joy:

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First impressions of the new office? :blush:

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What percentage roughly are calls not urgent at all? (When I’ve called it says only urgent calls, but I dunno if that was because it was out of hours)

And a funny call story pls.

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Would you say the older generation tend to call up more than the younger generation?

How many calls on average are there a day? In app chat seems the most popular way of getting in touch.

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Have you had any calls to ask you to help them find nearest a branch ?

When someone calls, would you actively make the recommendation to use the App chat next time, if it’s an issue you feel could of been dealt with there?

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How does Monzo handle calls within its operations system? Do you use off the shelf software or has an awesome custom built solution to calls been built? :sunglasses:

What’s your favourite coffee shop? :coffee:

Do you think there’s a reason legacy banks haven’t yet adopted in-app chat? :thinking:

What is the most common reason for someone calling Monzo? :monzo:

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What is your favourite type of writing instrument?

Gel

Biro

Fountain

Quill

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What’s been your best (and equally worst) phone experience?

Also when’re you going to start hosting Transparency Tuesday on insta? :wink:

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Have you met any of the community?
How was the experience?

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Btw NatWest have chat in their app, but it’s absolutely awful, they send you a text to open the app when an agent replies no notification, and the whole chat has terrible UI you have to use their built in keyboard which is tiny imo.

Hello! :wave:

For those of us who haven’t used the phone to call Monzo, can you talk us through the experience? How many rings to answer? Is there a message before a human? Would I have to press 3 to discuss Pots?

Also, what’s the security like? How do you authenticate that I’m me on the phone?

Finally, imagine you’re being sent abroad to bring Monzo to the country of your choice. Where do you go and why?!

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The phone experience was what made me realise how fantastic monzo are at customer support.

I accidentally dialled the number and I hung up before anyone answered.
The next day I had a call back asking if I had any queries since they could see I phoned :slight_smile:

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What do you do to cool off after a difficult phone call? Do “Call and the Gang” have any rituals?

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Is there some sort of ‘approved’ corporate tone for social media interactions or do you have some freedom to play each one as you see fit?

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How difficult is it to remember who is staff and who isn’t on Twitter when responding to stuff? (Especially as the company grows :chart_with_upwards_trend:)

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Same they called me straight back to an international number when I was abroad that must have costed them.

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Not knocking Monzo, as that is fantastic service, but international call costs are surprisingly low these days - especially at wholesale levels. The markup on retail customers is insane.

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Ahhh, I struggle so much with cats questions. I love my cat, but there are just so many extremely sweet dogs in Monzo HQ. I’m going to say dogs for that reason, but I love my cat a LOT. Pizza with pineapple is a winner. Always. But sometimes it can be a lil soggy… (sorry all!)

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