Here’s a good reason for never signing up for premium service.
I have ordered a first card 6 weeks ago. Never arrived. I have ordered a second card. Never arrived. I have ordered a third card. This one arrived (late) but guess what? With someone else’s name on it!!! So, i tried to order a new card and guess what again? The app says I have ordered too many cards!!
Can you believe someone might be getting YOUR card? I won’t say the name of the person whose card I have, but if your initials are KH, get worried because I could have your card! Until they don’t sort out their service stay out of premium at all costs!
Posting this here but also on the Monzo forum: I got the card for free in no time with them.
So… I have been waiting on the PREMIUM chat service for 15 minutes. Chat service: We are aware of this issue and the relevant team is working to resolve it as soon as possible. This means it’s not just this one card! They are sending cards randomly across the country! Please BE VERY VERY CAREFUL IN ORDERING CARDS! Other people might be using your card to do some shopping!
Meanwhile, the chat comedy continue. The Revolut advisor in the chat suggested: Please destroy that card and order a new one.
What??? Didn’t this guy read what I wrote at the start of the chat? That the app won’t allow me to order a new card? And I have wasted premium money for a month - will they refund me at all? Apparently not. The chat ended with him saying: I had made the request. I have asked whether the card will arrive and whether they will refund me. Total silence - no answer. Not even Rita to offer solace with her comical parody of a bot.
Would you be happy if I were using your card to buy my stuff online right now? Also: I have waited for more than a month and am under premium service. If you go to McDonald, you buy a macmenu, they throw it on the ground after you’ve waited for an hour, you don’t ask for a refund of your money? Note that the card mishaps is a known mistakes. That means they are sending the wrong cards (plural) around the country.
Monzo NON PREMIUM service replies after a few minutes, never had a problem with their cards (neither myself or other people), arrived in time (for free at the time), refund mistakes no questions asked.
Really sorry to hear that. Definitely not the kind of service we strive to provide. We will investigate what’s happened. In the meantime, we will refund you the cost of one month premium membership.
You’re comparing chalk and cheese…
Monzo does direct debits and standing orders, proper debit cards - more ‘legacy bank’ stuff, which is still essential for their customers (in the UK).
Not really meaningful to compare with Revolut.
By which time starling will have launched multi currency accounts and monzo will have expanded to the US and N26 will make it to the UK…
It’s hard to know who will be the winners and losers in ten years. But surely CS is going to be high on the list for the winners.
I think it’s almost part of the culture of the new wave of apps to be amongst aggressively confident. Not sure that always plays well with customers.
Back to the OP though, I think Monzo at least is honest about what they are offering and what they can deliver.
24/7 support and Premium cards are great, but only if you have the capacity for them!
-Starling’s partnership with TransferWise is odd, given how there’s a conflict of interest. TW Borderless is/can be a competing product to Starling’s current account offering.
-:R: iterates faster on the currency account function, and adds currencies at a faster rate than TW.
-:R:'s US expansion is faster than N26 and Monzo.
-:R: is going for the North American market and the East Asian market in 2018, having established a foothold in Europe. Meanwhile, N26 is notably absent in the large UK market (and no public plans for expanding to East Asia) and both Monzo and Starling have still not entered Europe.
-Users tend to care more about price and functionality, rather than whether the CS of a bank makes them ‘feel great’ about banking with them.
Situation with the fee-free ATM withdrawal/quota was quite a debacle, with a significant number of users moving from Monzo to Starling.
If you look at why Uber’s been tremendously successful as compared to its competitors like Lyft, it’s because it’s insanely competitive on product functionality + pricing, and incredibly effective on the execution front.
If you think ‘friendly and good CS’ is a good differentiator (especially in retail banking), you’re mistaken. First Direct isn’t part of the Big 4 UK banks by revenue or customer count due to it’s ‘friendly customer service’.
CS is a core banking function, not a feel great factor.
Too many holes in the ironbran article, but not sure I want to start listing them
The Monzo ATM thing was well advertised and discussed in advance. You can criticise the business decision, which was slightly nuts, but not the communication.
Uber is not a real comparator - such different products.
Customer support is a support ting function, and not a core function.
The average person is not likely going to accept a more expensive product just because the people running the business or the customer support are friendly or good.
Customer base attrition stemming from the ATM debacle still an issue. I noticed how the CEO was for ‘option 1’, whereas ‘option 2’ was chosen in the end.
In terms of feature development, whilst it was true that Starling launched significantly later (2017 as opposed to 2016), Starling was able to roll out a functioning current account to the public with most CA functionality intact, and launched their marketplace offering faster than Monzo.
I brought up the example of Uber–Lyft because it shows that concerns over public perception (an area of improvement for Uber) won’t trump product functionality and execution (Lyft still incredibly behind Uber, despite it trying to re-brand and saying how righteous they are.).
If you only read the sensationalist news articles and blog posts about Uber in the last year, you’d assume that the company would be on the brink of insolvency.
Meanwhile, its core business is sound, it has few competitors and one of its business lines (UberEATS), which was only founded 3 years ago, has managed to perform incredibly well.
A lot of people (on the community side) heavily invested into ‘their’ side winning, in terms of emotions. A lot of lashing out at the company’s competitors. The fact that a company’s product roadmap is significantly behind (when compared to their closest competitor) is an objective one.
Never understood this myself. My view is simply: may the best product win.
If you’re locked out of your account because CS is incompetent, you’re going to be slightly less bothered about the feature set. See OP.
It would be fun to create a table comparing costs across available products right now. There’s already so much more in the space than the Uber v Lyft scenario.
Put another way, if you had to choose, as Joe Bloggs consumer, between HSBC, First Direct and Natwest, how would you choose?
It has historically had a very strong balance sheet, a well-diversified global business and is one of the few universal banks that didn’t need bailout money.
Growing pains. Every tech startup growing on an exponential (as opposed to a linear fashion) level will not have 1:1 capacity. :R: 's been adding to its CS team significantly since the raise in Q2 2017.
Just because a product has a friendly face doesn’t mitigate the significant shortcomings in terms of its features or functionality.
I’m sure it wouldn’t be welcome on your forum (which has had users blame Moneysupermarket for ‘ruining them’ and bringing on a class of ‘undesired, freeloading users’.), and some members of the community would decry the comparison (based off of real numbers and percentages) and say things like ‘you can’t reduce friendly customer support to a number’.
The OP seems more to want functional CS, not ‘friendly’ (not sure who you’re quoting). Functional also suits me just fine. A company is never your friend…
All problems are teething problems until they hit the bottom line.
Out of all the banks I’ve ever used, HSBC has to be by far the worst from opening an account to the dreadful app to the crap products… Maybe we’re living in parallel universes, or you’re ribbing me
How many consumers care how diversified a bank is or whether it was bailed out?
