Definitely and whoever did the modelling didn’t seem to take the TV ads into account very well!
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I wish they’d just opensource the data, There’s enough data scientists out there that could produce good data and models(Even if they just made it a competition)
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In the meantime, let’s launch in the US 
Good point and well made both. The Monzo recruitment team do need to do better forecasting, I can’t deny that.
For what it’s worth, I read that we’ve received literally thousands of COps applications over the last few weeks. We’ve opened up a whole new section in our London office to act as a full on training centre over the summer whilst we push hard on onboarding, and we’ve brought a bunch of experienced COps onto the training team so we can both train faster and more thoroughly. There will also be onboarding happening in Cardiff and Vegas, where next month or so we will be moving to a much bigger place where we can fit another 100 people or so.
We know this isn’t an ideal situation right now, and we very much appreciate your patience.
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Thanks for the insight. Always appreciated
Hey Simon! Thanks for your post. Very enlightening. That’s quite a lot of applications! Makes me happy to have gotten through to an assessment centre, will be in the London office in two weeks to say hi. 
Quick question based on what you said… The Job Descriptions on the website all say “training will be in Cardiff”. If you’ve opened up a new training centre in London, does that mean you’ll be able to facilitate training in London as opposed to me commuting to Cardiff, if I do end up being successful?
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Best thing to do right now is ask that at your assessment day. The reality of the situation right now is that we have significantly more space in Cardiff because we just moved into a new office there!
So, we are figuring out how we split the groups effectively.
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Hi everyone! 
Just thought I’d pop in and say hello! As @simonb has said there’s a ton of new COps on the way including myself! I’ve only just joined the company and will hopefully have the pleasure speaking to you all soon! 
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Welcome and good luck!
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I’ve never had a problem with the customer service. Always top notch.
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Hopefully I’ll be chatting to you on the internal Slack soon. Have fun! 
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Hope so too! Let me know if you’ve got any questions!
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Hope Monzo fixes it week end customer support service weekdays are topnotch, weekends not so much
Welcome @CallumJ
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I might have something pithy and earthy to say about Monzo’s customer service, if I needed them. But never really have 
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I know they’re working really hard behind the scenes to change this! 
I’ll be doing some weekends too!
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I very strongly agree with this, as I believe I have firsthand experience of it… While I applied for a COps position a year ago, I didn’t get it, and (in so many words), it was my empathic ability that was the deciding factor. I’m a very straight to the point person, and I would’ve had to pass any content through a sort of ‘filter’ to ensure it met Monzo’s COps ‘voice’ (and there is a real possibility that this filter could develop holes during times of stress).
While only hiring those with a high empathic ability is good in theory, those people tend to focus more on the emotional wellbeing of customers, rather than efficiency in resolving their query. Now, I have little experience in ‘professional’ customer support, but I do believe that efficiency and ‘straight talking’ is better than hand-holding in general.
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I also applied for a position(about a year or so ago). I did kind of point of that I supported an entire large scale project at Oxford where I learnt that empathy can happen in many different ways.(I probably should have lent harder on that).
Its a simple idea that how many customers care how “nice” the person is compared to how they get the job done.
EE for awhile was the worse customer service ever now I speak really highly of them as they’re nice but also really efficient
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Scaling customer support is exceptionally difficult for a myriad of reasons, not least because domain knowledge drives efficiency and imparting that domain knowledge onto new agents requires pulling the most efficient agents out at the time when their efficiency is most needed. The most visible part of the business is struggling and the only solution is to choose to struggle more now so you can struggle less in future. That doesn’t look good from the outside.
The only way to scale support while maintaining quality is to scale before there’s a visible need but that introduces a lot of very difficult financial problems to resolve: support is, ultimately, a cost centre. How do you justify shoveling money into an area of the business that is ostensibly doing great by hitting all their KPIs?
A business has to find the perfect balance between minimising costs while maintaining the standard of support required to meet customer expectations… and if that was easy, or a solved problem, customer support wouldn’t be the differentiator we all believe it to be. The moment a business starts to experience stress in their customer support, they’ve passed the point of no return and a lot of pain is unavoidable – because the economics haven’t changed but now there’s the added urgency and increased stakes.
Monzo is in a difficult position because banking is high touch. Monzo has differentiated itself on the quality of that close relationship between Monzo and their customers, but the conflicting priorities – quality vs. growth – betray the ability to deliver on that close relationship.
Fortunately, all hope is not lost, Monzo is a forward facing business that understands the value of customer support and the value technology can deliver to enable more efficient support, however everybody should temper their expectations of immediate improvements because regardless of how many people are hired, support is not going to be fixed overnight. Monzo have a long, hard road ahead of them. Every business experiencing rapid growth goes through the same process, I’d be very surprised if there are any examples of businesses that have handled these challenges better than Monzo – not because Monzo is the best but because of how difficult this problem is.
I’ve managed ticket systems with hundreds of thousands of tickets and personally answered tens of thousands, it’s very difficult to understand the dynamics of customer support without having been deep in the weeds. I am very glad that part of my career is behind me. If anybody can solve this problem, you’ll be very wealthy. Everybody has hindsight, I’m sure you could pick out anybody in the Monzo office who could tell you in hindsight how this could have been avoided: but could they have given that same answer 24 months ago? That’s the big question. Answer that and retire before Monzo turns 10.
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