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

Do you find people abusing the use of the “Urgent” button?

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Afternoon gang! I’ve got myself a cup of tea, some hobnobs, and a comfy chair. Looks like there are some great questions here - lets do this!

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People bring dogs to our office, so far there have been no cats, so I guess that makes me a dog person :tipping_hand_woman:

No, what kind of savage does that? Go get yourself a margarita and reflect on your life choices :wink:

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2ca9hu

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That’s a great question; you always feel like what do you do? should be the easiest question to answer, but I guess not…

I sit in our operations scaling team, so our team goal is to support the Customer Operations (COps) team as our customer base grows. On a daily basis this means providing information, guidance and advice to teams within operations, and across Monzo.

So for example, we spent several weeks working super closely with our COps team to shadow people as they went about their day, and understand the things that they did which were frustrating or time consuming.

A great example of this is that the chat system we use has a concept of queues. COps were finding themselves spending lots of time moving between queues to pick up a conversation, so we worked with our engineers to build a simple button that finds the right conversation, and assigns it to them.

It doesn’t sound like much, but this saves a few seconds each query, and makes COps happier.

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Scale. When I joined Monzo we had 10 people in COps, and we could all sit around a single bank of desks. We’re now up at almost 200, spread across multiple offices.

And we’re only just getting started :rocket:

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I was so excited to get Apple Pay - even now it feels pretty magical.

Looking forward I can’t wait for pots with interest, so I can maybe buy a house without giving up on avocado toast :avocado:

We were in the early stages of closing down the Monzo prepaid card, and everyone was pretty busy. I signed up for a marathon in Bruges and then just kinda fogot about it… I finished, but it put me off running for months after.

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:open_mouth: :open_mouth: :open_mouth:

OMG!!

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Huge fan of divide. Indisputably the best operation.

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Sounds like you are full Monzo :slightly_smiling_face:

Hear this often feels like as millennials we should push for real affordable housing. Even if that’s in the form of rent reforms.

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Fired in 5, 4, 3…

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I am gonna flag and report his comment, it has me shaking with rage!

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Apple, obviously
To my eternal shame, I haven’t been to the cinema yet this year :see_no_evil:
I haven’t driven since I passed my driving license. For the sake of all of us, we should be glad that I don’t have a car.
I love doing hard things that make a difference - we’re on a path to make money work for everyone, and that’s a really long journey, but it’ll make a world of difference to the millions of people who struggle financially.

I used to have a BlackBerry - it was great. Get me an iPhone with one of those clacky keyboards, I’m in.
The Hamilton Soundtrack, not technically from 2018, but I got into it this year, so I’m claiming it.
When we run out of chocolate hobnobs in the office. I don’t know if I can bounce back when that happens.

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We receive a couple of thousand queries every day, which aren’t quite as uniformly distributed as we might hope :see_no_evil:. We encourage COps to spend as long as it takes to solve a customer’s problem, sometimes this can be a matter of seconds, and sometimes several days! This is from last week :nerd_face:

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What a soundtrack! Although not as good as westworld season 2 music!

I went straight to the status page to figure out what caused the spikes :nerd_face:

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Our team mission is to deliver swift, personal, helpful and delightful service to our customers, so the goals we focus on are exactly that. Our primary goal is the number of customers helped per hour, and how quickly we reply to 90% of customers, but we also track internal quality assurance, net promoter score, and customer satisfaction.

Each COp has a personalised board, which looks like this, so they know at any given time how they’re doing.

But fundamentally, while we are a data led team, we’re reliant on our Squad Captains (a manager for a team of around 10 COps) to provide human context to this kind of thing, so no one is judged on metrics alone.

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Absolutely! There are two different things like here, the predictable incidents, and unpredictable incidents. We approach both of these differently.

For predictable ones (closing the prepaid card for example) we start with a plan as far in advance as possible. The most important part of this is to know how much demand we might see. This then lets us decide whether we can handle it within COps, or have to bring in extra support from across the company. We’re really lucky at Monzo that everyone in the company is trained on customer support, which gives us a pool of people who are super willing to help out our customers.

For unplanned outages we have a playbook, which we try and follow as closely as possible. A key part of this is staying in contact with our engineers continually, so that we can best help our customers. We tend to triage issues in cases like this, so that we can get back to customers once the issues are resolved. If the reply you get in times like this sounds a bit robotic, it’s probably because we’ve had to respond to several hundred people messaging in within a few minutes :grimacing:

But we’re constantly refining our process for these, and we know we can handle situations like this much better.

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provide human context to this kind of thing, so no one is judged on metrics alone

:hot_coral_heart:

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Definitely, we have a team led by @bruno focused on getting more information in front of customers, so they don’t need to wait on customer support to get back to them. This has been hugely successful, as the number of conversations per customer has roughly halved since January!

Because of this we’re doing much better on our goal of 100,000 customers per COp, but we’re still only around 10,000 at the moment. We also tackle this through productivity, a great example of this is our system called Nigelbot which understands a customer query, and suggests up template responses that COps can use.

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