I know we are in the midst of a pandemic but am I the only one who thinks Monzo’s customer service has gone right down the pan in recent months? It used to be that you could get in touch with a real human in the event something went wrong or you needed help but now all I get is redirects to FAQs. This was one of the main reasons I enjoyed joining Monzo years ago. The customer service was so great it made you forget there were no high street branches in case you needed help, now If something arises that’s not an issue with payment there’s no way to speak to someone. Seems since management has changed Monzo is resembling a high street bank more and more and it’s really putting me off. Apologies for my mini-rant but it’s been really putting me off recently especially as some bigger banks are finally catching up. Personally, I feel Monzo really needs to sort these issues out or they are going to lose customers.
No need for apologies, we know exactly where you’re coming from.
There is a way to talk to someone, search “contact” in the help section and you’ll get there.
They haven’t got the balance of articles vs chat, but most people don’t read.
thanks for your reply. i thought I had tried that today but i might have missed something.
Except without the branches to walk into and get the problem solved.
Note: this agreement comes from seeing the increasing frequency of posts here, reddit etc., personally it’s been over a year since I’ve dealt with chat.
I wouldn’t put this on new management. It’s been at least a couple of years since Monzo started exhibiting problems with customer support. It basically hasn’t been able to grow customer support at the same rate as customers.
Just to put an alternate angle on this, I needed help with something earlier this week. I messaged via chat and had a response 20 minutes later.
They asked for more information and once I supplied it I had a reply from the same person 5 minutes later.
I know that’s only one experience, but I feel like we’re in a bit of an echo chamber here where we only hear of the support interactions that don’t go well.
I must admit I feel the the opposite. The vast majority of threads I’ve read on here about bad CS, someone does a post near identical to yours giving an example of good CS generally starting just like that too, there is often then shortly after a thread created by someone aggrieved at the general tone of the last thread which starts “To balance out the threads about bad CS…” which then goes on to detail some example of good CS. I think sometimes we see only what we want to see, which is just human nature, and not a negative, but I think there is far more positivity and praise than people realise, it’s just that because the negativity is predisposed to hurt feelings a little more, that is what is noticed
We always tend to remember the negative experiences too, and we’re more inclined to share them.
I think that’s right too, at least as far as we’re concerned. Good customer service should be the gold standard, and when we don’t get it right then we want to know about it.
Of course, customer service is a hard thing to manage. We predict what our inbound will be on various channels and in various domains, for example towards the end of the month and pay day we put extra hours into different departments because we see more people getting in touch (such as customers in financial difficulties).
However some things happen outside of our control, which you can’t predict. To illustrate this, over the last few days we’ve had an issue with duplicate payments because an acquirer has submitted duplicate presentment for a specific merchant (not naming names, because it’s not what we do). This has resulted in extra inbound for disputes because people have - rightly - gotten in touch about this.
You can’t predict that, and in order to staff disputes up to bring the queues down then you have to take hours from elsewhere.
Often that’s at the detriment of the people answering chats, calls and emails. Monzo is generally pretty generous with what we call none-interactive-time (NIT). Our standard is:
- an hour feedback & development with your manager
- an hour development time
- an hour’s COpstorm (your whole squad meeting, getting the latest updates, sharing your best practice etc)
- an hour to watch the company all hands.
When the queues start growing we reduce that time on a scale of booster levels and put people on tasks around the business to put customers first.
Sometimes that’s not enough, and so people get moved from one task to another and we put out overtime.
We are also increasing our internal hiring and we’ve got a lot more COps coming into the business. Again though, that’s a trade off. You don’t want to pay people to sit around and do nothing in case something unexpected happens. That’s not good for customers in the long run, because it’s not efficient and drives costs up.
So the hiring, activity and scheduling teams are constantly trying to balance it all out and make it work. It’s not a job I envy, but I think 99% of the time we get it right. We just need to work on the 1%, and get as close to 100% as is humanly possible.
(Dunno if this background helps at all…!)
Thanks for the insight.
Good to hear, thanks Dan.
This topic was automatically closed 180 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.