To me Mondo reminds me a lot of giffgaff in the way that the community here helps out people and points them to where to get help etc and you can only contact a giffgaff employee for non-generic help.
I was wondering if Monzo were considering a similar approach whereby FAQs etc were dealt with by the community, freeing up Monzo employees to deal with queries that involved confidential information etc?
This would probably save Monzo money too, even if they do financially reward folk for helping on the boards in a similar way to giffgaff
In a way, we already do a little of this here on the community.
The problem giffgaff had when I was with them was that they relied solely on the community with agents practically refusing to provide any support that wasn’t a small set of account specific queries. When people were heavily incentivised to reply to questions and have their answers accepted, I found I was left with low quality, irrelevant replies to technical and service questions.
I think a good balance is to have multiple tiers of support, starting with self-serve resolutions and information on simple or common issues. This includes showing declines with reasons in the app, status information at the top for outages or degraded performance of the service as well as card freezing and replacements due to loss or damage. Then the community forums for specific issues that affect a wide range of people or general discussion of upcoming/new features. Finally, the layers of “real” support for fraud or account issues ranging from email, private messages on social media and in-app chat to the emergency phone number.
I think the current approach works well. In-app chat which gets a quick reply and there’s the option to ask the community if you have a general question or want to discuss ideas.
I notice there’s a customer service number on the back of my card. I’ve never had to call, but I suspect (someone correct me if I’m wrong) that when they become a proper bank they’d need to also provide telephone based support. Personally I’d be happy if all support was done online. Some banks you can’t even contact online if you want to and that is frustrating.
They will almost certainly have to provide a phone number for support, I believe it’s a requirement for certain things they plan to offer. It doesn’t have to be the primary or preferred method of support though.
The idea of using customers to answer queries has a big drawback with the quality of reply highly variable from one individual to the next. A more consistent standard of response is achieved by retaining customer service to staff only
