Hey everyone, and sorry for the delay! I’m an engineer in our internal product team. A big part of what we do is building features to make sure we can resolve customer issues quickly, even as we grow. This sometimes involves building features for our internal web tools that help our support team respond more quickly to support enquiries.
Another way to quickly resolve issues is to provide more support in the app, so that there’s no need to get in touch. This has a fantastic dual effect:
- Many people get a resolution to their issues right away instead of waiting for a response from our support team (although they’re very quick, and definitely worth having a chat with!)
- Load on the support team is decreased, so we can respond quicker to more complex queries that can’t be resolved in the app.
Because the inner workings of payment systems are very complex, many of the enquiries we receive are around transactions. For instance, the first time you use Transport for London services, you might be a bit bewildered by a charge appearing in your Monzo account a few days after travel. Or you might be surprised to see two transactions in your account for a single trip to a US restaurant — one authorisation for the cost of the meal, and one for a larger amount including the tip.
Based on transaction data, we can often identify someone’s transaction issue programmatically. What we’ve been working on this week is a new feature to show context-sensitive help content when you click “Something wrong? Tell us!” from the transaction screen.
(Note: These screenshots are based on a design rather than the implementation.)
A few thoughts on this feature:
- Crucially, we’ll suggest options that we think most likely apply to this particular transaction. In the screenshot, the transaction is in Euros, so it’s probably a foreign transaction. Information about fees and charges abroad might be a helpful option.
- If someone taps “ No, I still need help”, we’ll get them straight through to customer support. It’s important that our improved in-app support doesn’t get in the way of customers getting help from a human.
- We’ll use metrics for the and indicators to develop our content: both in terms of the the content itself and the options that we show for a particular class of transactions.
- In the future, we want to use machine learning to come up with better rules to suggest help content. Our hypothesis is that sophisticated algorithms can probably come up with better recommendations in less time, compared to the time-consuming work of identifying classes of transaction issues and writing rules by hand.
Currently, the help content that we show is based on specific hard-coded rules. For instance, if we detect that a transaction is from Transport for London, we can show a help option that explains how TfL charge fares based on travel patterns over a full day.
Of course, not all transaction enquiries can be resolved in the app. People will need to get in touch with us as we develop our help content, and some transactions simply can’t be resolved by help content — such as when a merchant has made a charge in error.
In the future, we’re hoping to support menu options that go beyond help content. If a transaction is declined at the point of sale but goes through as an authorisation, we could offer “This transaction was declined” as an option. This might reveal a screen where you could upload a decline receipt that our customer team can verify and subsequently reverse the authorisation.
We’ll be trialling this feature in the coming weeks for a small number of customers. If we consider the change successful based on our analytics, we look forward to rolling it out to all customers.
I’d like to nominate @nigel for the next update!