Unacceptable customer service deteriorations

UK General Chat
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Dear Monzo,

As a long-standing customer since your prepaid card days, with a customer number below 35,000, and an investor who has supported Monzo’s growth, I am deeply disappointed by the recent deterioration in your customer service. I have always valued UK-based customer support as a critical factor in my banking decisions, a standard I believe Monzo once upheld. However, I have observed a shift to automated, impersonal responses and long delays in communication, which suggest that staff are handling multiple queries simultaneously. This decline in service quality is disheartening.

Upon contacting your support team, I was further dismayed to learn that customer service operations have been relocated to South Africa. The grammatical errors and reliance on scripted responses have significantly diminished my experience. This change was not communicated to customers, which feels like a lack of transparency and respect for those who have supported Monzo’s journey.

As a result, I am considering two options: closing my account or leaving it dormant as a form of protest. I have chosen the latter for now, as my other banking relationships with institutions like Nationwide, American Express, NatWest, and Barclays—all of which maintain UK-based customer service—continue to meet my expectations. I am also disappointed by the lack of opportunity to sell my shares, as I would have considered this given the circumstances.

Monzo’s decision to outsource customer support, particularly at a time when the bank is becoming profitable, feels driven by cost-cutting rather than customer care. In my experience, UK, US, Swiss, and French customer service teams consistently deliver high standards, while my interactions with support teams in other regions, including South Africa, India, and the Philippines, have been frustrating and inadequate.

I urge Monzo to reconsider its approach and reinvest in UK-based customer service to restore the trust of loyal customers like myself. Without clear communication or improvements, I will continue to rely on competitors who prioritize local, high-quality support.

On another note. As a shareholder this article has really peeved me off as well.

https://www.crowe.com/uk/insights/fca-fines-monzo

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Hi @Olderandwiser, have you sent this to Monzo themselves in any way? Although a staff member will pop by the forum occasionally, they’re not here regularly and don’t read every thread. This is mostly a customer forum with some staff moderation and occasional interaction.

While I sympathise with your experience, and have experienced problems with Monzo support myself, I’ve accepted that it comes with the territory for Monzo.

Support was never “live chat”, agents will certainly be dealing with multiple conversations, and response times can be slow.

Your customer number makes no difference to your experience, and leaving your account open and dormant as a protest will also have zero effect on the service you receive. It’ll cost Monzo a little to service the account, but they’re honestly not going to notice.

I’m not defending Monzo’s customer service, and not having a go at you. But if you have a regular need to speak to customer service, then an alternative provider is probably your best bet, as you say.

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Hi, regardless of whether you need Support once in a blue moon or regularly, that is not the response you’d expect. It should be of impeccable high standards for everyone, regardless of usage. A consistently high standard is what is expected.

A lot of customer service departments are no more than answering services informing you that they will be passing on your message and that you will be getting a call back. But then you try and inform them that you are not customer-facing and you are a busy executive who is more likely to be in a meeting. You also try to inform them that they are customer-facing and it’s down to them to be available for when the customer has a free moment? That’s the whole point of a customer phoning in a moment of convenience. More and more it seems that we are forced to operate at the convenience of the bank and not the customer, and that is just a sign of the times. It was not like this in the 90s and in the 00s; the decline is awful and painful to be a part of. But I appreciate your opinion. I am from a time when you could phone up and if the person on the phone couldn’t handle your query and he would transfer you to someone that could. A good telephone transaction can take five minutes the same transaction could take a week via email. You have to wait for responses and now it seems you have to wait for a callbacks. It’s unacceptable and none of us should accept it. I hope you have a nice day and I appreciate your response.

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Well, there is an element of getting what you pay for. I’m just in the process of switching back to a German car brand because the service I received from a cheaper Japanese brand didn’t satisfy me.

I bank with Monzo for free for my basic banking needs and put up with occasionally poor customer service because I don’t have complex customer service needs for my basic banking, and the Monzo app beats all others hands down for my own needs for day to day use. I pay other organisations money, in some cases a lot of money, where I have more complex needs and tend to get better service if I need to contact them, and can speak to them on the phone between meetings or whatever, which is a service Monzo doesn’t really offer.

It is true that some traditional banks provide better customer service with free current accounts but I’d argue that they have other business areas to fund that which Monzo and the other challenger banks / fintechs don’t. “Free” banking is I believe a rarity elsewhere in the world, and I’ve paid for accounts when I’ve lived abroad - and received good customer service.

But my original point remains - you need to tell Monzo this if you feel strongly about it - it’s unlikely to gain traction on a customer forum. If you have a specific case where you didn’t receive good customer service and can demonstrate this, then raising a complaint, which you can do though the in-app chat also gets things noticed.

Edit - I’m 60 by the way!

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I always expect poor customer service and I’m usually, but not always, right. It’s pretty dreadful across the board these days, with staff generally poorly paid and under trained. The myth that UK-based customer service is automatically better is nonsense - I’ve had amazing service from call centres around the world, and some of the most ignorant arrogance imaginable from within the UK. And, of course, vice versa. The location is less important that the person.

We are money-making opportunities and little more, and so long as a service isn’t fully AI I put up with whatever the customer service throws at me if the feature set and price are right.

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I have also hard good things about them recently. I had stellar service from them, from when they opened, until I moved to a bank with Internet banking in the 2000s. But while the phone service is still, I’m told, brilliant, the app isn’t.

And that’s what it comes down to for me. Everyone will want something different but I’ll take ®ubbish customer service chat which I rarely use, if I can have instant notifications, holistic view of budgeting, pots, etc.

Unfortunately, at the moment I don’t think there’s a bank which offers a 21st century technology stack and mid 20th century customer service.

Amex service is generally superb but they don’t offer a current account. The app is reasonable. I don’t know how customer service for a fee-free Amex compares to customer service with the Platinum card at £650 a year.

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That’s incredibly debatable. The app is serviceable not going to win any awards, but isn’t bad enough to lose any awards either.

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Hi, you have assumed that I use Monzo fee free? I absolutely pay to Bank with Monzo. I disagree with what you’ve said. I respect your right to say it.

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Respectfully disagree, the language barrier is a very important thing for me. I want to speak to someone who has clear concise English which is very rare for a foreign call centre. In my experience the customer service I receive as I previously stated from the UK and the US are generally brilliant. And a lot of countries in Europe are great even with English as a second language .We tend to get the Cheap CS from the Cheap wages hubs, it’s all about saving money. Customer services is dying. I resent giving him my credit card details to someone saying at home with no oversight. A new opportunity for fraudsters and dishonesty. Everyone in their 50s and 60s nose customer services was a lot better, and even people younger know how pre-pandemic CS used to be.

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Brand loyalty gets you nowhere.

Not necessarily, could just be an error.

Neither of those things matter to any bank, some will close your account being dormant for so long.

Barclays outsources far more staff than you think.

Monzo still has UK based staff, it’s cheaper to recruit abroad, usually on a contractual basis opposed to perm employee so they can dispose whenever they deem necessary.

Quite frankly, not anyone’s business but Monzo’s.

The value of competition gives you these options.

Choose a bank who you can rely on customer support, first direct for example all UK based for front line over the telephone. Can’t say the same for their chat service, they rely on HSBC who also hires offshore.

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As a 50-something, I suggest the ‘customer service was much better in the olden days’ is true to an extent, but it’s hardly as if there was a golden time where companies fawned over us.

And as for ‘clear concise English’ - never spoken to a call centre based in Newcastle, Glasgow or Belfast then? There is absolutely nothing wrong with their English, but it’s notalways as clear as some support I’ve had from India etc.

I work from home, does that make automatically make me a ‘fraudster’ prone to ‘dishonesty’?

Broad sweeping statements that the old days were better, working from home breeds poor standards, and anyone from beyond the UK, US and Europe is not as good as ‘us’.

I’m getting the picture.To play your game, I ‘respectfully disagree’ whilst ‘respecting your right to’ tar huge sections of the world population as beneath you.

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Having managed customer service in both UK and abroad including outsourcing to India, I can only support, what others have already said.

Believing you can manage a customer service efficiently with 1-to-1 interactions for a free/low fee bank is wishful. Agents should be able to handle 3-4 basic chat enquiries simultaneously and while you think there might be a delayed response, you would be surprised to know how certain customers treat “live chats”, so if an agent was only managing one chat at a time, the wait times would only go through the roof and there would be more pressure to rush a customer through their enquiry.

I’ve been with Monzo since the early start too and I think I’ve only had to contact CS one or two times for something that wasn’t possible, at that time, to sort via the app. Today the app is far superior than any others I have tried and I can’t remember when I last contacted Monzo CS. If you really need to contact their customer service frequently, maybe finding another bank is probably best for you.

Regardless of how annoying one might find automated responses and AI chatbots, they do serve a purpose and help deflect many basic enquiries having to be handled by a human. Again, if they were not in place, you would likely see longer waiting times due to the sheer volumes of enquires coming through.

I’m not a native English speaking guy, but I would likely understand a good English speaking agent in India better than I would understand a English speaking agent in UK with a thick Scottish or Irish accent :smiley: And I would say the person is more important than the location. Having a UK customer service is not by default better and definitely isn’t cheaper.

Everything comes at a cost. Sure in the “olden days” you would just call up and get it sorted quickly, other than a letter or fax it was the only option available and back then costs of running a call centre was also significantly less - and while you might prefer to call, many (like myself) prefer to contact online through chat, social media or email - it’s a trend for the majority (for a decade now), why most organisations put their focus on these channels of communication. Also, for me personally, having everything in writing is preferred in case of disagreement later on.
If you expect the level of service you describe, you should also be willing to pay a lot more monthly than the current £17 (for Max) to have your account.

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Couldn’t agree more. When I went to live chat to report fraudulent activity i didn’t get a response for over 24 hours. I phoned to submit a complaint afterwards and the woman I spoke to was so uninterested. I’m not even sure if the complaint has been submitted I haven’t had an email or notification.

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Opened a new monzo account recently having closed mine.

Needed to engage with monzo to drag my mobile number from my old account to the new, AI bot was a little slow late last night; and finally handed off to a human through the night and my number issue resolved this morning early hours :folded_hands:

Then realised I couldn’t update my email as again; it was linked to my previous account. Responses were reasonable and everything understood clearly, and resolved within good time.

No issues from the human aspect; but I’d expect the AI bot to response far quicker than it does (maybe I’m just used to the Revolut bot being fairly quick).

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As I recently lost my wife to Cancer, I have had to engage with Monzo CS regarding my wife’s Cash ISA, which needs to be transferred under an arrangement called ‘Additional Permitted Subscriptions’

I was not (in general) looking forward to the process of dealing with my wife’s accounts etc.,

Whilst not the very very best CS I have received from across the various institutions I’ve been dealing with, Monzo’s CS support in this has (so far) been very near the best.

Once I had made initial contact and the outline of my situation clarified, paperwork has been dealt with in an exemplary fashion and messages and emails have been responded to very quickly - in most instances within a couple of hours, occasionally quicker. Also important, emails and messages have been a genuine 2-way conversation. An error on my part in not forwarding a required document was dealt with very swiftly.

I cannot (so far) fault the support I have had from the CS team. Monzo is one of the institutions where the process of getting things sorted doesn’t cause me any anxiety. From the way things have been dealt with so far, I have confidence in the process.

The only thing that puts one other institution (Phoenix) slightly ahead of Monzo is that I was able to call and speak to someone in their bereavement team, who was extremely empathetic, which again gave me confidence in their processes. Other than that, there’s been nothing to separate them.

A couple of other companies have, by contrast, been (and remain) hard work.

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Good to hear although even better would be a bereavement team

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I think I am dealing with dedicated Bereavement Specialists within the CS Team

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Sorry for your loss @thehamshackman. Good to know Monzo aren’t adding to the stress at this time.

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Excellent!

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