Monzo Staff Weekly Q&A - Sam Watkin (Operations Analyst)


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


Denizens of this Digital District!

Come one, come all to the Monzo ball. Ain’t no curfew to hurt you!

Did you know it’s World Meat Free Week? I’m vegan, so for me that’s every week :muscle:

What else happens every week?

That’s right… Monzo Staff Weekly Q&A!

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accurate depiction of all Monzo forum users when they see a new Q&A thread :wink:

Before we can get this party started, y’all know the drill! It’s catchup time.


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 :policeman: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:


This week’s guest in the Hot Coral Hot Seat™️ is none other than…

Sam Watkin, Operations Analyst!

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Step up and take a bow!

Sam has been at Monzo since January 2017.

He’s currently working on helping our COps team delight our customers quickly and efficiently :tada:

Fun Fact About Sam! He once ran a marathon without training for it.

Would he recommend doing that?

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So get your questions in, folks! Sam will be here later this week to answer them!!!

2 Likes

Cats?

Pineapple on pizza?

2 Likes

How many operations do you analyze on a daily basis?

4 Likes

What do you do and how are you helping COps team work quickly and efficiently? :grinning:

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What has been the biggest change for you since you started? :grinning:

What drew you to Monzo? :slight_smile:

What feature is Monzo missing that you are waiting for?

How did this happen? Was it fun?

What’s your favourite type of operation?

I’m a sucker for the quadruple heart bypass myself.

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Which processes have you seen that need improvement and how do you plan on achieving this?

1 Like

Apple or Android?

What’s your favourite movie of 2018 so far?

What was your first car?

What motivates you?

Windows or BlackBerry?

Your favourite song of 2018?

What demotivates you?

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Good questions all, keep em coming!

How many customer enquiries are there in a typical night and what’s the average time spent with each customer? How much do these figures fluctuate?

(Blame Simon, he says you see all the data)

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How is performance measured? i.e. what are the KPIs/performance measures for Customer Ops?

Do customer ops build up specialties or are most customer ops generalists?

What scaling issues do you foresee for the team as Monzo expands internationally?

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What do you do in the event of a sudden spike in customer support queries due to something breaking or if Mastercard went down like Visa did recently? Are there any contingency plans? These types of spikes aren’t predictable based on past trends

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If there is an emergency/ unusually high volume of support requests, are there any contingency plans or extra staff roped in to deal with this? eg during the last day available to switch to current accounts last year, I’d imagine there would be a lot of queries.

Edit: @Jackcrwhitney beat me to it!

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Do you monitor what type of queries repeatedly take up cops time and try to find ways to reduce this which enables them to focus on more pressing tasks?

Edit: Found this blog post, It mentions you do with automation, but do you have any recent examples?

After reading the blog above, do you feel the goal of 1 cop per 100,000 customers is still achievable in the future based off the data you see?

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Our long-term goal is to support 100,000 customers per COps agent. That’s a lot! By comparison, the average UK retail bank supports roughly 2,500 customers per agent - we aim to be 40 times more operationally efficient. We are still a long way from reaching our goal, currently supporting 5,000 customers per agent.

Just to second what @Jackcrwhitney said, what’s the lastest wrt the above in terms of progress?

Have you ever been in a cockpit before?

On average, how often does each customer contact Monzo through the in-app chat?

Since introducing the new support centre with those suggestions, has Monzo seen a reduction in the number of people contacting support?

Are there any manual process right now that you feel would benefit from being automated?

1 Like