Klarna wows its 80M customers with instant responses and rapid resolutions with Freshchat

Customer Spotlight

 

About the company

Online shopping has given us the luxury to browse and purchase from our homes, at any time. Swedish Fintech company Klarna has added another layer of comfort to this process by serving as a trusted, simple, and smooth payments provider with a variety of payment options to suit every kind of shopper.

Users can simply log into any of the vendor sites powered by Klarna with their registered email, make an instant purchase, and pay for it in the timeline and mode they prefer.  With over 190,000 merchant associations, shoppers have no shortage of options and are sure to find their favorite brands among this extensive list. It is no wonder that Klarna’s unique payment system has become popular across the world. Klarna now boasts of over 80M customers across 17 countries as it sets its eyes on new markets and merchants

Klarna’s vision for customer service

As with the case of any payment related brand, customer service is vital to Klarna. Customers facing issues with payments or transactions are understandably anxious for quick answers and resolutions - something Klarna never compromises on. Klarna consciously enabled the shift to chat as a preferred support channel to give customers instant interactions and solutions they need and expect. 

But customer service means more than just rapid resolutions to Klarna. As Tien,  Product Manager in the Customer Service domain puts it, “every service interaction is a representation of our brand. Every interaction is an opportunity to showcase our commitment to customers and deliver the WOW factor.” 

With its massive customer base making over 1M transactions a day, Klarna has a lot of ground to cover, and its legacy chat solution just couldn’t keep up. With the solution, Klarna had to deal with 

• Manual assignment of chat conversations 

• Authenticating a customer during every service interaction

which impacted both handling times as well as the overall customer experience.

Instant responses and moments of wow with Freshchat

Unwilling to settle for less than excellence, Klarna decided to look for an alternative - a flexible solution that can help them support millions of interactions with no dip in quality while helping them balance the load between agents, especially during peak seasons. 

Tien said, “At Klarna we are constantly learning and improving every single thing we do. We iterate fast and move fast. This speed, combined with quality is what we were chasing after when we were looking for the right partner.”

They found the perfect partner in Freshworks.

Klarna deployed Freshchat, Freshworks’ modern messaging platform and implemented it across 7 countries in just a few months.

Freshchat has transformed operations behind-the-scenes, helping Klarna keep those wow moments alive for every single customer. Vadim, a Customer Service Engineer at Klarna, told us about how teams can meet the aggressive First Response SLAs of 60 seconds with Freshchat.

• Take conversations to the right agent, immediately - Customers no longer have to wait till their ticket is manually handed over to the right agent. With IntelliAssign, chats are immediately auto-routed to the right team member based on pre-set assignment rules that take agent load and skill-set into account. This is particularly handy while managing volume spikes during peak seasons.  

• Focus on customers that need immediate attention - Agents are able to shift focus from unresponsive customers to those who need more immediate attention by auto-resolving conversations with customers who have stopped interacting after a pre-set time period. Like Vadim says, “this has made our agents more efficient, and this has led to better first contact resolutions for our customers.” 

• Greet customers with context -  Customers are now spared the annoyance authentication during every interaction. They are instead greeted with an agent who knows their history and can cut right to the chase. Freshchat’s SmartPlugs (now replaced by Freshchat’s Marketplace) fetch data from all of Klarna’s third-party apps and CRM to give agents complete context to have an informed chat conversation.

Before Freshchat, chat as a channel accounted for only 20% of service volumes with Phone support accounting for 63%. Now, 66% of Klarna’s customers turn to chat for support, bringing down phone support’s tally to 32%.  

Every revolutionary brand needs the right technology to revolutionize customer experience. In Freshchat, Klarna has found just that.