Customer experience is changing because of IT developments: some years ago companies were heavily investing in large call centers in cheaper countries.

Nowadays that trend has totally changed, as western countries consumers express their preference for native call centre agents and a better customer experience.

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UK Businesses Use AI to Improve Customer Experience

Nowadays, many clients relocate their call centre in the UK. At the same time, they invest seriously in improving the productivity of their call centre employees.

Chat bots take the most frequently asked questions today, the UX in the stores and on the websites is studied, so that clients can easily find the information, product or services they want, without needing an agent to assist at each step. Many companies try to develop their customer experience towards this.

Financial Industry Does Not Escape AI Revolution

All over Europe banks close their physical branches, and move their main activities online. The same trend can be observed in the brokerage and investing companies.

As competition grows on digital channels and fees get reduced by price pressure on the customer side, all the main brokers have chats on their sites.

We inquired with several brokers, including Admiral Markets, in regards to their experience with AI bots. At the current state of technology, the voice recognition capabilities are not yet sufficiently developed and the companies that provide AI bots still rely on human resources to complement the services of AI bots.

The bots can reply to the most simple tasks from the clients.

What Kind of AI bots Do Brokers Use?

Most used chats in the industry are:

• Zendesk Chat
• Live Chat
• Intercom Chat
• and many others

Most of them have a system of triggers or databases of knowledge articles, where clients can autonomously find answers to their questions.

Will AI Replace Humans in the Brokerage Industry in the Next 5 years?

Probably not. At the current state of technology, the clients using 100% AI bot experience report that their clients are not happy with the fully 100% automatic experience.

Several reasons for that: Bots cannot understand complex queries yet, humans like human contact for certain issues and the AI bot is seen as too impersonal and as a less qualitative customer experience.

What Future for Call Centres in the UK?

The best call centres in the UK have, in our opinion, a growing marking share in the next 5 years. As automation will take over the tasks for which clients do not need human contact, there will be a growing need from the financial sector to provide a premium customer experience, with native speakers, based in the UK.

In recent years, clients expressed a trend of preferring companies that employ people in the markets where they drive revenue. Several companies built on the local customer support teams as a sales argument to attract clients.