Are the fingers strong enough to chimpanzee-swing my way around town? Because that sounds way better than stinky toe-hands.
Also, I don’t want to wear socks on my hands, so I choose option A.
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I’m very lucky with how flexible I can be with my working hours - I usually start at around 10am, as that’s the first fixed meeting of the day. I tend to work until around 6pm, or if I’m in a really good flow, around 7pm.
In my team we’re pretty good about not disrupting the day with meetings - we even have an entire meeting free day booked into everyone’s calendar.
Lots of days I’m not in a good flow. Yesterday I stopped at about 4pm as I just wasn’t getting anything done - why bother stressing if nothing good is happening? 
I’m really thankful to be in a team and a company that is supportive of that.
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Great questions!
- would you have still been enthused by developing an in-house chat system?
I would absolutely build it again, and I would do it pretty much exactly the same way. It’s not perfect, but we have infinitely better controls over what happens on Monzo Chat compared to Intercom. We get much better data, we can target our efforts much more precisely, we can build highly specific interactions directly into the flow, etc etc. Most of all, we can build the COps-side experience to be exactly what it needs for any given task - as different types of work pop up for a COp, their interface changes to reflect what information is most important and hides information that isn’t relevant. I think Monzo Chat is one of our superpowers as a company that we’re only just starting to explore.
- How do you test that chat system from a customer point of view? Invite customers in (pre-pandemic obvs)? Hire third parties to try it out?
I believe at the start of the rollout we did some user testing, but nowadays we mostly do it by monitoring data. We can see how our changes cause fluctuations in things like contact rate, customer satisfaction, time to resolve, and so on. The data scientists on our team spend a fair amount of time exploring this data and making connections.
- How advanced are the features of the systems that try to avoid customers “falling between the cracks”?
This is one of the big benefits of having our own custom system - we are moving away from the Intercom model of having “queues” that chats are assigned to and worked from independently. We’re moving to a much smarter model of (massively simplifying) pre-defined saved searches across all open conversations. For example, a given group of COps might be working on payments conversations that relate to the UK, another group on US payments, another group on UK savings - there’s lots of overlap in these definitions. We’ve got a safety net that enforces that if none of these definitions match a task, we immediately force it to frontline to help it on it’s way, and we emit some data points that we can use to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
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I was already 3 days a week remote before waves hands at everything, so it was an easy transition for me which I’m grateful for. 
One thing I do at home that I can’t in the office is have blaring drum and bass on all day, I’m not sure my colleagues would thank me for that… More seriously though, taking a 30 minute walk along the river outside my flat does wonders for my mental health, which is a bit tougher to do in the office. It’s rather easier to collaborate in the office though, so there’s pros and cons to each.
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We have a process internally for COps to report issues with Bizops when they happen - no system is perfect. We have a queryable event log in Bigquery for every event (backend and frontend) that has ever happened, so we can put together some SQL and “read” the history fairly easily.
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This is an important question so I asked a few of my colleagues to help with this answer.
We let callers hold for 20 minutes, before we ask them to try again later or suggest other routes of contact. Ideally, no-one would need to wait 20 minutes for us to answer, and so this system would be of no note. But, when we are really busy, it can be an inconvenience and we know that. We do keep a close eye on how many people are waiting the full 20 minutes too, and we are looking at alternatives right now.
When someone phones up, we have an interactive voice tree that does the classic “press 1 for this, press 2 for that” thing - this lets us route customers to the right place, for the narrower range of things people call about.
For chat though, we have a much wider range of customer issues coming in that we need to deal with. This is why we put the Chat button on specific help articles, rather than having a huge options menu when you open chat. It’s important for us to get as much information as we can about your query from the context of where you opened it from. For the chat buttons elsewhere in the app, like on the transactions screen, we have enough context that we can route you straight to the right people. If we had a totally open Chat button there’d be a lot of back and forth before we had enough information to route you to the right place.
I agree that it’s a trade-off - and not always the right one. We have a lot of customer requests coming in, and a fixed amount of people at any given time that can help. By not having the Chat button on things that can be entirely self-served, we’re making a decision to focus our COp time on the requests that can’t be self-served at all, or otherwise need rapid or sensitive handling from our more specialist teams. We do categorise every single request that comes in, and review the Chat buttons on help articles as we see the patterns in the data to balance these factors.
We know it’s not perfect, and we’re still working on getting the right balance! We certainly don’t want anyone to give up out of frustration 
If there’s a help article that you think should have a Chat button, or a missing help article, please do let us know and we’ll look into it! 
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I don’t have one to reference, but quite often I’ve noticed if when asked “Did this solve your query?” and you select “No” then that’s the end of it.
Is there any thought to building on what could help the customer if that didn’t? “It’s usually this, but it could be this” type thing?
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- what’s your favourite Monzo Slack channel?
#goats - it has lots of pictures of goats in it.
#yelling - caps-lock only or you get kicked.
#incidents - a more serious one, but I learn sooo much from watching how everyone handles fires. I’ve caused a few of my own in my time. 
- favourite Slack emoji?
We have a bunch of painfully cute cartoon panda emojis that I use a lot - otherwise, the o.g. !
- the thing that you wish more people knew about Monzo
I’m not sure 
Maybe I wish more people knew about the forum, as I didn’t really interact with it before for no good reason, but y’all are lovely!
- hiding the chat button - why?!
Answered above
- best bit of Monzo-tech that customers never get to see?
Our deployment pipeline, from the good folks in the platform team(s). Being able to get a pull request approved, and use a single terminal command to yeet it into a massive computing cluster within a few minutes, is immensly satisfying every time.
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I’m not sure what I can say on the topic of Fincrime - it’s a tough one as the fincrime team does so much incredible work that must stay non-public 
I will ask around if any fincrime peeps are able to do an AMA, as I don’t think I’d be the right person to make a comment on it.
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That’s right - we want to make sure that our email reputations are separate. If @monzo.com (for our more marketing style emails) gets marked as spam by a customer, it’s important that @monzoemail.com (for our login emails) aren’t.
If you visit monzoemail.com there’s an explanation, too
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That’s right, it’s going to more specialised teams to get your issue resolved.
We’re looking at how we communicate that at the moment, actually - we may experiment soon with only showing the “you’re talking to X” when X actually sends a message. We’d need to run the experiment and see the data on how it actually affects all the numbers that we care about, though.
There’s some middleground somewhere between every transfer sending you a message, and radio silence until you get an actual authoritative answer. We’re still trying to find it
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We didn’t see a noticeable increase in contact rates over the normal daily and weekly fluctuations.
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Scheduled interactions for low-urgency (not necessarily low importance) problems that involve a lot of back and forth. “Select a time from these options in the next 3 days when we can chat to you” - it’d make the customer’s life easier as they can block the time out, and my life easier as we have some proportion of scheduling that’s no longer based on predictions 
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If I were to leave Monzo I’d probably go to some sort of green energy startup - there’s obviously a ton of opportunity in the space and a lot of very clever people to learn from.
I’d want to bring over our engineering approach. We (famously or infamously) have thousands of microservices, which in a lot of places would be chaos. Our platform teams have invested so much into the abstractions that honestly I don’t need to think about it, or open up the hood. I run a few commands and I don’t need to think about the utterly bonkers scale of the thing.
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How do you find the flexible shift? that put me off a bit about becoming a COp (though it became a non-issue)
Do COps using the Monzo community and are they tagged as staff?
- What has working for Monzo been like during the Pandemic; what have they done that will stay around afterwards?
The People team have done a great job of making sure we can operate as a distributed company just as effectively and empathetically as we operated before - it can be easy to slide into a “profile picture” mindset, instead of really talking to someone. Monzo’s done a great job of shifting the collaborative nature of a shared workspace into a virtual space, and it’s something I think we’ll need to keep doing for some time before the world is back to how it was before.
- Is there anything you’re working on at the moment you’re particularly proud of that we might not otherwise hear about
Hah, nice question! We have Monzo Time each month to work on totally out-there ideas that don’t make sense to prioritise, and I used mine last year to build this - I’m still really proud of it whenever I see it in the wild.
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I must confess I’ve never watched football 
But I am from England so… I guess England?!
Ducks for cover
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Calls makes up roughly 18% of our inbound, with chat being our main channel.
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