My experience with the customer service team was awful to say the least. After purchasing a new phone and trading my old one back to the company, I went ahead to connect my monzo account so that I can pay the parking and go home. Upon logging in, I was asked to verify my ID. The last step of the verification process “record a video repeating the words shown on the screen” kept erroring. Went ahead and asked for advice from the team who went ahead and logged me out of my account 3-4 times with the hope that the issue will “be fixed” and secondly asked me to change my password of my email !!! (Who knows how the password of a different application can affect a banking app!). They went ahead and passed me on to the specialist team informing me that they couldn’t do anything about it for up to 24hours. Meanwhile, I was stuck in the mall with no means to pay for my parking and go home. Luckily, I managed to figure out that all I needed to do was enable the microphone in the settings and the error message disappeared, a very simple solution that the customers team SHOULD have provided me with! I was shocked from the lack of support provided to me as well as the indifference to my situation.
It seems like a simple solution and the frustration is understandable but generally to get to this you have to narrow down your options.
It sounds like this is what the team wanted to figure out to avoid bombarding you with try this, try this, try this, try this, try this, try this, try this, try this, try this, try this, try this, try this, try this, try this, try this.
That’s very likely the issue here.
However, it may well be the case that the Monzo app, when first used, asked for the microphone permission out of context. It is logical for anyone not to grant this (why would you?). Then when the microphone became necessary (video recording), the permission wasn’t there and the OS did not allow a new prompt to be shown.
Can anyone confirm whether the Monzo app asks for microphone permission on first use, rather than only just before you record an ID video?
It sounds like the app should have an explanatory error message when permissions aren’t given.
Android (newer versions) won’t allow apps to prompt for permissions after they’ve been denied a couple of times, the app needs to show its own message and ask the user to go to settings themselves and allow it.
I wouldn’t mind that if they were actually giving me any options. All they did after logging me out 3-4 times was refer me to the specialist team (with an eta of 24h) and offered me their apologies for not being able to help.
I cannot confirm 100% as I was dealing with a fee apps at the time, but to the best of my memory, I don’t think it has. Take that with a grain if salt, my memory’s not the greatest.
I am going to play devils advocate here - this all sounds very reasonable, like good customer service and instead may be better phrased as a simple “Just so you know, this was the problem” post.
It’s because the integrity of your Monzo account is reliant on that of your email account. If someone has your email password, they could in theory hijack your magic login link and gain access to your Monzo account.
As for why the agent was under the impression that had happened or there was a such risk that they’d suggest that, I don’t know. And even then. Talk about training your customers to fall for phishing scams.
Honestly, it shouldn’t have even got to that point. The app itself should have told you this! Assuming they’re using the proper APIs, iOS handles that automatically, so I’m a bit stumped as to why the phone wasn’t prompting you for the mic access. If you initially deny access, the second attempt should have told you that you need to go to the settings app and enable access for Monzo. If it wasn’t, Monzo goofed somewhere.
Unfortunately, it’s not something I can test or try to replicate (until I buy a new phone) to see if the app is indeed not presenting a request for access after initially denying. I know it does if you deny camera, but for the mic, I can’t recall testing that ever.
I don’t know if it falls under their purview, but it might be something to flag for the @iOS_Health team to look into.
I wanted to set up my apple pay before I left the apple store in case I needed help from the staff there. Once I logged in from the new device my card got automatically blocked until I verified my ID. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to use the physical card either.
I wanted to share this for two main reasons; to save other customers the time and frustration, but also as feedback to the customers service team to improve on providing assistance to their customers, especially when it comes to very simple things like this.
If they were remotely helpful I would have mellowed out my criticism. Naturally I’ve had many experiences with plenty of customer service teams before, this experience was sadly the worst.
I do want to mention though (just to give them the benefit of the doubt) that I had to ask for their assistance on a different matter in the past, and they were indeed helpful, I might have just stumbled across one of their least helpful employees this time?
