Roughly 2% of Starling users had a Starling Community account. Around 3.5% of Monzo users have a Monzo Community account.
Starling considered their Community to be a distraction and felt that the small proportion of account holders who used the facility weren’t representative of their customer base.
Monzo considers their Community to be an important part of the overall product and regularly ask for opinions on the direction they should take, e.g. the introduction of foreign ATM withdrawal fees.
At this point I’ll state that I do all my banking with Starling and am not looking to switch at this time. I think the app is more professional looking than all of the competitors and, overall, the product is a better fit for me currently. That said, to claim that their Community was a distraction and to largely ignore feedback and constructive criticism from the most engaged customers was fairly disrespectful. The reasons given for closing the Community were disingenuous IMHO.
As part of their Community, I felt an increased sense of loyalty and think I would have found it very difficult to switch to any other bank. Now it’s gone, I don’t have that attachment any more and would be happier switching to a competitor in the future.
When they commission a company to do Market research they may pay for 2000 views or something like 0.000001% etc much less for the banks with millions of customers, so 2% or 3.5% is always going to give them a wider view of opinions than when they commission companies to get opinions.
Starling just released an update (0.61.0) can anyone spot any visual difference…like at all? Everything mentioned on the feature updates are exactly the same. The only thing i noticed is when opening a new goal you have a teal background instead of a white one.
Would be really interesting to see what it is you’ve built. We have some features on Monzo which try and track/predict DDs, SOs and card payments. Maybe with a few tweaks you can do the same within Monzo without needing to use the API!
A lot of the Starling reviews are about the same thing which I found interesting, I also experienced problems with their rubbish log on process when you get a new phone and don’t have the old one!
My point is more that Starling have claimed that only a very small proportion of customers were active on the forum, as if that in some way justifies the closure. I think it’s actually quite a large proportion of their customer base.
I may be wrong, though surely the customers within the forum, be it Starling or Monzo, are the customers best worth listening to. To actively seek out the community, dedicate time to reading through the different topics and contributing ideas and opinions, it’s like having a whole bunch of interns. Those not engaging in the community are either unaware of it’s existence or are happy leaving the work to the company and allowing them to steer the ship in the right direction…in other words they’re not too bothered. To discard the platform which invites “voluntary interns” is really strange. These platforms are priceless when managed correctly and so it’s a shame they were pretty inept.
Depends on your definition of “active” - In terms of posting… There were literally a handful of people. The 2% you quoted would be over 4,000 users.
It was closer to 40!
I kinda agree with you here Dan - But it comes down to what the company wants.
In Starlings case, they have a very defined plan, and I don’t think opinion from a small section of users will ever sway them. They want what they want, and they won’t be persuaded down a different path.
This is why the forum didn’t work in part, because the expectation wasn’t set out at the start (if anything, there was a false expectation that people putting their heart and soul into the forum would actually have an impact) - I’m not sure this was ever the case (purely my opinion).
I can see pros and cons to what Starling are doing (removing the community aspect and focussing on things in house) - I just hope they broaden their research on certain things (no way the Loans marketing/feature should have been released as it was).
It’s a shame they couldn’t leave it open for future reference, but things move so quickly it would have been out of date and misinformation would have been ripe!
From memory, the usage figures of most threads were very low.
What plan is that? ‘Follow Monzo, and throw everything at releasing half-assed features first so it looks like it was our idea… Oh and while we’re at it let’s see how much customers are willing to take in preparation for a legacy take over’.
I’ve wondered if there is some kind of “tick list” of things that a bank needs to do when starting up (perhaps you are better placed than me to answer).
But from what I’ve seen, it’s about 50/50 on “who got there first” with different features.
I’ve never subscribed to the whole “they copied them” - Which I’ve seen used as an argument against Monzo and Starling.
