First up in our run of AMAs with the Monzonauts is @danhughes
Dan has been on the rocket ship Monzo for 2.5 years and has worked in Ops Product since joining.
That means he builds the systems at the other end of chat and calls.
Dan will be joining us to answer questions and give a bit more on what he does on Friday 18th June between 2:00pm - 3:00pm but wanted to open the Topic now to see if there’s any questions for him in advance.
I’ll post on the day as well to make sure everyone knows about Dan’s visit.
A bit more about me and the work I do - I’m in the Support Experience Squad, which means we try to optimise both the customer experience and the COp experience. When you get in touch, that spins out into any one of over 200 types of bespoke tasks, lots of which would all be bundled into “back-office” spreadsheet work at a legacy bank. I make sure the right COp gets the right work at the right time.
We have over 1,000 COps now, and we run our own scheduling system that the data scientists on our team developed. It’s a pretty hard computational problem.
We operate our own entire in-house chat system called Bizops, having moved off Intercom a couple of years ago; we own about 200 microservices.
Fire away with your questions, and see you on the 18th!
What are the pre-requisites for a chat to “go to a specialist”?
Im not sure if its just because when i contact cops its because something really is wrong out of the ordinary or if its just a case of most chats going the specialist route?
Also massive massive thank you for taking the time to do an AMA its something ive cried for monzo to do for a while but needs cool people like yourself and @AlanDoe to make it happen and its appreciated
Why is a single threaded chat deemed better than multiple chats per customer by Monzo? A lot of the time you get passed to a specialist and have to wait for them to reply, during this time you can’t raise another issue if you have one. Seems needlessly restricting and possibly stressful for some people who may need you the most
If the internal customer (COps and others) run into problems with the system is there a means obvious and to hand in BizOps to report it while the context is intact and obvious? Is there a mechanism/method to “replay” their sequence of actions to reach the impasse/glitch?
If he’s in charge of building the systems at the other end of the phone, then it seems he would’ve had some input into the (in my opinion) ridiculous choice to disconnect waiting callers after a few minutes of the call not being answered.
Given that incoming call queues likely have zero/minimal cost, monetary or otherwise, to Monzo, what is the purpose of doing this?
Also, given that calling Monzo is somewhat of a difficult task because of this, I found it also very surprising that Monzo actively ‘hide’ the chat support function within the app. I understand users should be pushed towards self-help where possible, but how do you know customers are actually resolving their issues via self-help rather than just giving up out of frustration after not being able to access human support?
and has worked in Ops Product since joining.
? 
Thanks Alan!
