Monzo Staff Weekly Q&A - Jacq Bridge (Ops Support Analyst) - COps Hiring Special! 🤝

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

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What is up, forum folk?

I’ll tell you what’s up. We’re hiring. That’s what’s up!

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More specifically, we’re aggressively hiring in COps. But in a nice way. It just means that we’re doing a lot of it. Not that we’re beating people with sticks. That would not be the Monzo way. Actually our hiring is very pleasant. You answer some questions, you come in and meet us, you talk to us, and if you’re a good fit with experience then we give you a nice shiny MacBook and all sort of other cool stuff. Oh, and the best part? Every month, you’ll get a specified amount of money appearing in your (hopefully Monzo) bank account. I kid you not. It’s true. Money for you to spend on whatever you want. The sky is the limit! :cloud:

You see, we’re a stones throw away from 1.2 MILLION customers. And so our team will grow to support them.

So… if you want a job, or your friend wants a job, or your next door neighbour wants a job, or your cousin’s friend’s dad’s brother’s girlfriend’s sister wants a job, tell 'em Monzo are hiring. Shout it from the rooftops. You have my permission!

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Before we get into this week’s Q&A, it’s catch up time!

*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:

Week 33 : Emily Parrett, COps Call & The Gang :phone:

Week 34 : Liam Houghton, Ops Fixer :hammer_and_wrench:

Week 35 : Frances Coyle, Legal Team :scroll:

Week 36 : Shak Welch, COps Fincrime Specialist :police_car:

Week 37 : Sarah Allen, People Operations :woman: :man:

Week 38 : Simon B, COps Community Specialist :globe_with_meridians:

Week 39 : Natalie Price, Visual Designer :paintbrush:

Week 40 : George Webster, Night Cop :crescent_moon:

Week 41 : Brenda Wong, COps, Call & The Gang :telephone_receiver:

Week 42 : Niamh Power, Mobile Engineer (Android and iOS) :calling:

Week 43 : Vuokko Aro, Lead Product Designer :paintbrush:

Week 44 : Meri Williams, CTO :computer:

Week 45 : James Clyburn, COps Activity Lead :chart_with_upwards_trend:

Here in the Hot Coral Hot Seat™️ this week we’ve got Jacq Bridge! :grinning:

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Jacq is an Operations Support Analyst and she joined us in July 2017 :grinning:

She’s currently working on:

“Taking time out of my analyst work to help hire lots of world class customer operations people. This includes all parts of running our assessment days, interviewing lovely people, and thinking of new places to source fantastic candidates!”

Fun Fact About Jacq:

“I have hyperextendable elbows which would make me great as an extra in a zombie movie (if anyone’s looking for one)”

Her favorite thing about working here?

“Everyone working here is really invested in our mission - it’s so nice to work with people who actually enjoy what they do!”

Alright folks, you know what to do! Get your questions in, Jacq will be here later in the week to answer them :grinning:

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How many pigeons can you hold in one hand?

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In the year last year (and a bit) since joining, what is one of the biggest things you’ve realised that maybe you took for granted previously?

How do you tackle the challenge of onboarding as many new support members as possible while still ensuring they’re trained and have the independent guidance they need?

What’s one piece of advice you might give to people considering applying? (besides, in a Shia accent, “just do it!”)

In recent times Monzo has shown itself to push out a lot of functionality quickly, on top of onboarding new members of team how do you ensure that your existing team understand the new features in order to offer the best possible support?

I’m done for now! :heart:

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What percentage of queries received don’t actually require chat support ie the information is already in the help section?
What is being worked on to reduce the number of support queries?

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Hi @JacqB

You feed the pigeons.

Do you sometimes feed the sparrows too…

Giving you a sense of enooooooormous wellbeing?

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As hiring specialist what do you look for in potential COps and why do you think Monzo seems to be struggling with Customer Service for past couple of months?

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Hi Jacq,

How did you go from analysing Ops Support to being at the heart of recruitment? It seems like a huge stretch of the job description.

How do you feel about the current state of affairs with Customer Support? Do you look forward to the end of the recruitment drive so you can make support great again (if that’s what you do)? :slightly_smiling_face:

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How has the new ‘Monzo Chat’ changed your workflow/procedures etc?

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Is there a particularly memorable or funny answer in an interview that you remember out of all the people you have hired?

How long would you say it takes for a new hire to need no additional support for non-specialist queries and are there any particular areas that are especially difficult?

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The COps must be under a lot of pressure at the moment with the queues and potentially annoyed customers. What measures are in place to support them?

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What’s your favourite bromeliad?

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Hi there :blush:

What are the most important qualities, skills and experience that you look for in people for COps?

I am arriving in the UK in a few weeks and very excited for my assessment and interview day :grin::tada: Waiting for confirmation of the date. Hoping it will be before Christmas, nudge nudge, wink wink :wink: But I am willing to wait for Jan if need be, as Monzo have been willing to wait for me :grin: Can’t wait to meet everyone there, and REALLY praying that I will soon be part of the Monzo team :rocket:

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If you could have any superheroes powers, whose would you have?

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Nandos or Shake Shack? :thinking:

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I think my record is 4 - I have held pigeons on multiple occasions because they are adorable

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This is a really interesting question! I am quite privileged to have come to Monzo straight from university so I had no real ideas of what working life was like before I joined :grimacing: The first thing I took for granted was that working is horrible and should be avoided. This was something I realised was wrong in my second week at Monzo and was when I decided to work full time and quit the MA I had planned on doing :tada:

I think I also took for granted before my work on hiring was that everyone loves/has heard on Monzo! This is very much not the case and brand awareness is something we’ve had to do work on which has been refreshing.

This is toughie as well :see_no_evil:This is all down to our wonderful training team who have been tweaking and improving our training and onboarding schedule to make it work for large groups of people. We’ve definitely found the sweet spot for how many people we can take on in one week and we give each new joiner a buddy who can help to guide them further once their training period has finished.

Don’t try to guess what you think we want to hear. We have a take home task that we send to applicants and a common mistake is to get caught up in what our processes might be/how Monzo as a company would deal with the question. We ask these questions to get an idea of your problem solving and empathy skills and don’t expect anyone to have the ‘right’ answer. Also - don’t be afraid if you don’t have lots of customer support experience - sometimes that’s a good thing.

We have custom made training for each new feature that we bring out, this is given to our current COps as well as our newer COps as soon as it is made. We also have a really strong feedback culture at Monzo. This helps us to make sure that knowledge is spread through COps because if someone isn’t sure on how to deal with a query they can ask the people around them. These two things combined mean that we’re generally pretty good at getting support for the new functions in the app!

Thanks for the awesome Qs! :heart:

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I’m probably not the best person to answer this one :see_no_evil:It has been a little while since I did customer support but we do have a wonderful reductivity team who are working on this at the moment :blush:

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Hope I’m not too late here! Your name is super cool! What’s its origin?

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With regards to what we look for in potential COps, our bar is pretty high! We look for empathetic people who are really comfortable problem solving and share the same passion that we do for helping people manage their money.

Again, I might not be the most qualified to answer this, however, I do think there are a few factors at play here! We had a lot of growth in terms of customer numbers which we didn’t prepare for as well as we could have. This is something we’re definitely combatting at the moment by hiring as much as many wonderful people as possible.

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Great question! When we had a big push for recruiting new COps towards the end of the last year and beginning of this year I played a part in this and so was someone with experience of our hiring processes and had ideas of what we could do to improve this time around. So while I don’t specialise in hiring necessarily I did have previous experience hiring at Monzo!

I think our current customer support is definitely disappointing in terms of wait times and that can be really hard to think about. The main reason being we all really care about our customers and so knowing that we have failed them in a way by not always being available is really hard. Again though, this is definitely going to get better with hiring which keeps me motivated!

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