Cobrowse enables
Klarna to tackle
complex cases and drives higher resolution rates.

About Klarna

Klarna Bank AB (Klarna) is a Swedish fintech company with over 5,000 employees. Established in 2005, the company is committed to “making it easier for people to shop online”. A global payment service provider, Klarna provides a better online purchasing experience to over 150 million consumers, across 500,000 merchants in 45 countries.

Pain Points

Klarna retains a strong commitment to innovation and prioritizes customer service excellence. With an app that features a high degree of personalization, customer service representatives face many complex enquiries. The individual app experience varies by user and market, so the ability to share the customer view is a potential game changer for support agents.

Regulatory compliance is a major factor within the fintech industry. With strict data privacy regulations in place, customer support agents cannot have access to personal information, such as PIN codes and payment card details, nor data that sits outside the Klarna app.

“We are always looking to explore innovative ways to resolve customer issues better, especially for more complex enquiries”, says Quynh Nguyen, Product Manager, Agent Tooling, Customer Service for Klarna. “One of the challenges our support teams face is the evolving nature of our app, it is personalized to the individual and has new updates released every month. This makes training via traditional methods very difficult”.

A shared experience

The complex nature of escalated customer support engagements led Klarna to explore co-browsing as a solution. “We wanted to explore new options”, explains Nguyen. “We wanted to help solve complex enquiries quicker, but we also wanted to see how we could increase agent’s app knowledge at the same time. Screen-sharing solutions seemed the perfect fit. Co-browsing was seen as the best way to enhance the current support experience and demonstrate to our customers that we care about them by offering creative solutions”.

Evaluation criteria

With its sights set on co-browsing as a means to elevate the customer experience, Klarna established a clear set of evaluation criteria. The two most important factors were native support for mobile apps and compliance with data privacy requirements.

Athanasios Chatzoglou, Director of Customer Service at Klarna, explains further. “Our app is available on both iOS and Android platforms, so we were looking for a vendor with a solution that was stable in Native, iOS and Android, not just web”. 

“Second, but no less important, was data privacy. Our app contains personal information that mustn’t be accessible to our support agents. Any information that is held outside Klarna, like personal apps or data on customers’ phones is also prohibited”.

Why Cobrowse?

“We chose Cobrowse because it met both our platform and privacy requirements”, says Nguyen. “Support for web and mobile apps was essential, and this wasn’t something other vendors were able to deliver. The Cobrowse team also provides us with a solution where everything in-app can be redacted by default, leaving us to un-redact non-sensitive information. This option is important for us to prevent leaking sensitive data accidentally. Also, Cobrowse only allows agents to access the Klarna app, so if a customer has a pop-up notification, or accesses another app, it won’t be visible to our agents”.

The Cobrowse terraform provides a turnkey solution that enables Klarna to self-host all data and systems related to the Cobrowse software. Leveraging Klarna’s existing regional cloud infrastructure across the USA, EMEA, and APAC, guarantees compliance with existing security and privacy mechanisms, and enables streamlined DevOps processes. 

The development expertise that goes into Cobrowse makes it the most comprehensive and configurable co-browsing solution available. For Klarna, the out-of-the-box integration with Freshdesk was an advantage. However, Cobrowse was also configured to work with the company’s custom-built in-house systems. This flexibility is a key differentiator and contributes to both ease of use and deployment. 

Tangible results

Klarna provides support to customers across the world, with Cobrowse used to enhance telephone engagements. “Screen Sharing has transformed the way our Customer Service agents interact with our valued customers” says Chatzoglou. “With this innovative tool, our agents can now co-navigate the Klarna app alongside customers in real-time, empowering us to resolve issues swiftly and effectively”.

Telephone support cases with screen sharing have an average 15% higher resolution rate than others and Klarna has found Cobrowse to be invaluable when it comes to resolving complex support engagements. “It [Cobrowse] is very beneficial when it comes to supporting more complex cases”, says Nguyen. “Agents and customers can literally be on the same page, instantly. Cobrowse also provides better support for customers who are new to the app, or less tech-savvy”.

“In the fintech market, trust is important”, says Nguyen. “Our customers trust us, and they also trust the tools we use. We ask for consent to use co-browsing and we’ve updated our terms and conditions, but we’ve had an excellent response from customers”.

Partnering for success

“Cobrowse has proven successful in our main market, in the US, and we will be increasing its use across other territories going forward, explains Chatzoglou. “About 10% of our agents use Cobrowse globally, which equates to around 5,000 sessions a week. Working with Cobrowse has been very good. The engineers have been very responsive, and we’ve enjoyed working with the team so far”.

Before introducing Cobrowse, Klarna was experiencing a backlog of support tickets. While Cobrowse is not being used to address legacy tickets, it has helped the business improve its first-contact resolution rate for new engagements and its overall customer satisfaction rates, allowing the support agents time to tackle the backlog using conventional methods”.