The evolution of Monzo Chat

Right now, almost 2.5 million people are using Monzo, and around 250,000 people are joining us every month! We want to make money work for everyone. And one of the biggest challenges we’re facing as we grow is making sure we can consistently deliver amazing customer service, every time. 

First and foremost, this means being there to answer your questions and fix your problems whenever you need us. But it also means keeping our costs reasonable as we scale, so we can build Monzo into a sustainable business that’s around for years to come.

Read on for the full story, but to summarise:

We’ve already done some small tests using automated messages to help us understand what you need before you chat to someone. They’ve worked well so far and we’ve learnt a lot. So now we want to test some new ideas with 10% of customers, to see what works and what doesn’t. 

We’ll use machine learning to see what your question is about and suggest some help articles to point you in the right direction. In some cases we’ll even show you what you can do to fix your problem straight away, like getting a PIN reminder in the app.

We’re also exploring a menu-based system, where we’ll ask you a couple of questions while you're waiting to chat to someone. The more info you can give us, the better! It'll also help us understand what questions and problems we're getting most, so we can work on fixing what's causing them in the first place.

Here’s how it looks if you find what you’re looking for: 

And here’s how it looks if you still need to speak to someone:

Over the last 3 months, we’ve doubled the number of people in our COps team. And we’ll continue to hire more COps as we grow so there’s always someone to speak to, if you need to. 

But we think there are lots of questions that you should be able to quickly get answers to, without always needing to chat to someone. Recently we improved our help articles and we think they could answer most of the questions you chat to us about now. (At the moment, about 60% of people who chat with us haven’t seen our help articles beforehand.) 

We hope that this will help lots of people get their answers faster than they can now. And it gives COps more time to focus on helping customers with more complicated questions, as well as making sure our customer service is sustainable. 

We’re not replacing any COps or reducing the number of COps we have. And if you don’t find what you’re looking for straight off, we’ll put you through to someone. They’ll have the full record of what you’ve already told us so they can help you as fast as possible. 

This is our first try, and we know we can make it better over time. Our team are going to be collating your feedback and working on improvements over the next few weeks. In the meantime, we'll learn everything we can from what we're launching.

Lots of other banks use third-party systems to talk to customers. We’re building this ourselves because we want something that can be completely tailored to Monzo and the needs of our customers as we grow. 

The long term goal is not just to give you the right help article, but a specific answer to your question, like you'd get from someone on our COps team. But we know that getting the balance right here is super important and not always easy. So we'll make it clear whenever you’re not talking to a real person. And you’ll have the option to chat to someone directly whenever you need to, especially when it’s urgent.

We know this is tricky, and we might not get it right the first time. As always, we’d love to hear your thoughts and feedback over on the community forum.