Yahoo Finance Fury as Hargreaves Lansdown introduces ‘robot’ customer service
Customers of Hargreaves Lansdown say quality of service has plummeted after the broker started using bots instead of humans in a bid to cut costs.
Savers have taken to social media to complain about long waiting times on the phone and “robot” interactions, after the firm rolled out a new AI-powered platform last year.
The firm’s 1.8 million customers pay a premium for access to Hargreaves Lansdown’s easy-to-use app, extensive market research and – in theory – high levels of customer service.
The platform charges an annual fee of 0.45pc on the first £250,000 of customers' savings, making it the most expensive platform on the market for investors with portfolios worth over £25,000, according to data provided by the consultancy the lang cat.
But its reputation for premium service has now been called into question, due to a cost-cutting drive which has left investors waiting for more than an hour on the phone.
Holly Mackay of the investment research firm Boring Money said: “It used to be the case that if you rang Hargreaves Lansdown, you’d be answered by a bright graduate in their trainee scheme within ten seconds. Yesterday was the first time I’d phoned them and had a robot answer the phone.”
She said Hargreaves Lansdown's customer service has never recovered since the pandemic.
Oh dear @HLInvest you used to have nice polite grads who would pick up the phone within 10 secs and help. Now there’s a robot, a menu, the robot trying to persuade you to go online/ go away, awful hold music…and after 30 minutes I gave up. Service was always your strength? 🥲
— Holly Mackay (@HollyAMackay) May 11, 2023
The company cut back its call centre hours in 2020.
The opening hours are now from 8am until 5pm on weekdays and from 9.30 to 12.30 on Saturdays and have never returned to pre-pandemic levels.
The firm's lines were previously open until 7pm on weekdays and on Saturdays from 8am to 1pm.
The firm is under pressure to slash costs following a slowdown in new business. It brought in 23,000 new customers in the first quarter, down from 31,000 a year ago.
Last year Hargreaves Lansdown rolled out a Cloud Contact Centre platform which uses AI to steer callers to the right expert at the firm.
The company said in its interim results for the second half of 2022 that this has led to “efficiency improvements in live teams” and that it would “continue to enhance this service over 2023”.
Once routed, clients speak to Hargreaves Lansdown’s expert team. But it can take a long time to get through to a real human being.
The platform’s helpdesk is currently taking “much longer than usual to answer your calls and respond to emails”, according to its website.
One Twitter user complained: “30 minutes on hold – market is now closed – is the best service you can offer? I need a reliable broker.”
Co-founder Peter Hargreaves recently called on the firm to drastically cut costs, saying it has 1,000 staff members it did not need, but criticised the use of AI in place of using human staff.
In an interview with the Financial Times, the billionaire lambasted the company’s recent strategy to implement automated advice to meet the advice needs of the baby boomer generation.
While some see robo-advice as the key to solving the UK’s “advice gap”, others argue that supplementing human experts with automated advice could cause problems, including pushing clients into riskier investments.
It is expected investment platforms and banks will increasingly automate their customer service in order to slash costs. Call centre workers are among those whose jobs are expected to be at risk due to the rapid rise of artificial intelligence.
A spokesman for Hargreaves Lansdown said: “We’re building our capabilities and improving the client experience by using AI technology to route people to the teams best able to help them. Over 95pc of client transactions are completed digitally and where clients need more help, in those moments that matter, our expert helpdesk is there to support them.”
