I just restarted the app and now the selection shows up - so possible bug somewhere.
Oh yeah, itâs been there a while, Iâve seen it before. But having zero options after that is not helpful.
Iâm all for directing customers to âself helpâ, I wish we made our customers do it more in my own job, but to have zero options when youâve exhausted all of the self help options just isnât right.
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Oh I agree. I was just clarifying that it isnât related to the topic of the thread 
Ah ha anyone want to try this link?
Help 
Edit: This was meant for the other thread where they have dicked about with options for people but Iâll leave it here in case itâs useful.
Edit2: guess could go through each cat and link and find all the answer that have a link to activate the chat
Emergencies > How do I make a complaint > scroll down and this âget in touchâ starts a normal chat as an example.
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So the magic to trigger it is
monzo://support_chat
Fairly simple to make your own direct link
Edit: needs a from
<a href="monzo://support_chat?from=button-help-article">Get in touch</a>
or hereâs a fiddle to try
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we should be a bit careful in trying to bypass the normal support flow, the focus should be on improving things not bypassing changes
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I think anyone who finds the above link, itâll be because theyâre active searching for it - in which case they almost definitely need it.
Oh I donât want this to detract from the fact that for the 4.1 million or so customers that arenât on this thread that they will still be affected by it.
Contacting your bank should be easy peasy that anyone who needs to get in contact can do so. A/B such a critical function with a bank is madness.
What Monzo needs to do is improve the help section to focus on self-serve but always have the chat button visible, even if when you click it asks a second, have to tried searching first? with a ok Iâll try that option.
My post above that maybe still hidden from flagging has a screenshot of how they do it. Itâs all handled nicely on one screen and very straightforward which it should be.
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Defeats the point of what theyâre trying to achieve though.
This is yet another thing that stops people from becoming full Monzo and trusting them with their money - if you call up phone support and they tell you that they canât do it over the phone and to open up a live chat request and itâs urgent what do you do? All people want to be able to do is talk to someone and get help, not look at FAQs. Basically Metro Bank instore customer service but online 24/7.
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Exactly?
Weâre saying that with the point Monzo are trying to achieve, in reducing chat interactions, that they have gone about it in the wrong way, and should be defeated by finding a better solution. ie Put the button back so that everyone can see it not just some customers they think need it, make the Help section layout better, put some friction on after you tap to suggest searching (if you havenât searched for anything first and gone straight to the button)
Removing the button will obviously reduce chat interactions, and wonât impact on anyone until they really need to make contact.
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I donât know how it works on Android but on iOS itâs pretty easy to make the link an icon/webclip on the home screen
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I was curious to see what UK customers got when they tap the Help tab, so I gave it a look. Wow, you actually get a decent set of help articles. (with a US account, normally when you tap the Help tab, it jumps straight to support chat).
And more generally, I wonder if this means weâre going to see something like that soon instead of having to contact support for basically every question.
Yeah the UK never had all those, thatâs grown.
The icon was originally a message bubble, before they swapped it for the awkward looking â?â that doesnât fit with the other icons.
For some reason we again now need to be told what the icons mean. As if we couldnât work out the home means home, or question mark means help. Even if they went with random icons that arenât globally known what they meant, thereâs only three FFS and you start on the first. Theyâve done this in other places too recently where itâs totally unnecessary (change category comes to mind)
I assume you see the same WhatsApp style chat where itâs an endless scroll and thereâs no separation to each chat?
Monzo used to use Intercom before they ditched it. (Although still unpicking it internally as itâs still tied into customer emails sent directly). Unfortunately Intercom was vastly superior imo.
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Forgive me, but thatâs plain daft. Playing hide and seek with the contact button really is less than optimal.
Itâs a balance.
Providing support for [whatever thing] will result in lots of similar questions from a number of people.
Why are they asking that question? Is it bad design? Can the [thing] be made easier to eliminate that particular question? Is it something out of their control?
It makes sense to design out those things that are generating frequently asked questions, where possible. That should reduce the number of inbound queries to customer support.
Where itâs not possible, some sort of help articles or knowledge base would be a good step to answer those particular FAQs. That is designed to reduce the number of inbound queries to customer support.
For those (fewer) questions that fall outside of the knowledge base then thatâs when to show the chat button and funnel people through to someone who can help.
These steps are taken to reduce the number of questions, asked of customer support, that are easily answered in help articles.
Of course, where this all falls down is that many people go straight for the chat button rather than do a little research for the answer. Similar behaviour is evidenced all over the Internet (here as well) where people ask the question rather than looking for the answer (which would often be a lot quicker for them).
In the case of Monzoâs support, it has been suggested theyâre experimenting with A/B testing as to how to best make this work. Itâs a balance and whether theyâve got that right or not remains to be seen. What does seem to be evident, however, is some people with questions not answered elsewhere are having trouble getting support.
Which was a long way of saying not having a chat button is not necessarily less than optimal if the support is available and the customers are able to find it.
The ways to contact support vary bank to bank. Many have the option of telephone support. They are longer established and have more employees to service customer queries.
Monzo is a smaller, younger business thatâs been experiencing rapid growth. This presents a challenge to the servicing of customer queries.
I agree. This tends to be the case.
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Yes. I can see that and that may be the case, although I have no evidence either way.
What we do know is that Monzo set out to disrupt legacy banking and they came up with some interesting things such as instantaneous balance, spending notifications and rich merchant data.
Legacy banks, however, are catching up. Monzoâs features / benefits do not have the wow / uniqueness they once had, perhaps?
Going for packaged accounts to raise revenue strikes me as very legacy and not at all disruptive. And theyâve had two or three goes and still not mastered it.
Theyâve taken huge investment, grown really quickly and have now been impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic at a time investors are looking to see more income.
I can understand why theyâll be wanting to reduce the human cost of the support function and look for automated ways to do it. That makes total sense to me.
Whether it makes for good customer experience all depends on how they do it.
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Ah, I hadnât seen that with RBS. Thanks 
Iâve avoided weighing in before now because I wasnât sure where I sat on this. But having had some time to think this is my view:
Excellent, human support should (in my view) be the bedrock of Monzo support. Anyone should be able to speak (loosely interpreted) to a human at any time with a minimum of friction.
But! Iâm fully supportive of more automation to help customers where they need it. For example, on transactions to report fraud or to ask for a chargeback. Or better ways to raise limits (preferably in advance) and so on. None of these necessarily need human support and could be better done, I think, through the app.
So, for me, it seems sensible to try to create better flows for specialist activities. Weâve seen people frustrated that theyâre being passed around specialists so any way of going straight into the right queue seems like progress.
Where the problem is with this experiment, I think is two fold:
Firstly, thereâs no evidence that there are new or better customer support flows in the app. Making things more context sensitive (such as the chargeback example) would be a good start. And an overhauled help tab thatâs less about articles and more about automation would be steller. This seems to be the essential.
Secondly, even if this isnât done (but it really should be) thereâs no customer training that theyâll need to do things differently. So rather than seeing something like the splash screen we got when the new navigation was rolled out, customers just see a missing - critical - feature. It also, regrettably, plays into the narrative that Monzo isnât a âseriousâ bank.
So my view is, unfortunately, that this test has been misjudged. Sure, itâs interesting information to know what happens: is the demand suppressed? Do folk take to here or Twitter? Do they struggle through? Whatâs the difference in account closure rates etc? âŚ
⌠But, again in my view, I donât think itâs worth it. Indeed, Iâve just noticed that the chat button has gone for me, which makes me uncomfortable. I hope itâs back soon, or a better, context sensitive way of doing support - together with clear communication on how to access support and talk to a human - comes along very quickly.
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