Few household chores are as infuriating as spending an age on the phone to complain to your bank, recover a lost password or answer some minor financial query.

Hold music, press number 4 for an option that is only half-related to your problem, more hold music.

Banks are under pressure to cut costs while improving service – which is crucial to keeping customers and improving the industry’s battered reputation.

One hope lies in new technology and, in particular, robots. Several British banks are ploughing money into artificial intelligence (AI) in the hope that it could start helping customer service behind the scenes in the coming months and soon be let loose on the public.

Barclays’ former chief executive, Antony Jenkins, believes half of all jobs in banking could be chopped in the next decade as automation takes hold, underlining the scale of potential transformation.

Enabling Britons to check their balances, transfer funds and even pay in cheques using smartphones has already allowed banks to cut hundreds of branches, saving millions of pounds while simultaneously improving service. In the near future basic complaints handling, forgotten passwords and other simple queries could also be a human-free zone, with several banks working to deploy online chat systems that run on robots.