Dive Brief:
- Klarna’s use of AI is slashing customer service costs without hurting customer satisfaction, the company said in a Q1 2025 earnings report Monday.
- Customer service costs per transaction have dropped 40% over two years, from $0.32 per transaction in Q1 2023 to $0.19 in Q1 2025, according to the release.
- Consumer satisfaction remained steady after the rollout of its AI assistant, the company said. “This shift allows us to serve a growing customer base with consistently high quality, and at a fraction of the previous cost,” the company said in an earnings report.
Dive Insight:
Klarna might be on the vanguard of AI assistants, but the buy now, pay later firm is still figuring out the balance between automation, self-service and human customer service.
Earlier this month, Klarna said it was hiring customer service representatives and that it wanted to always give customers the option to speak to a human. That move was a shift from its previous strategy in which it laid off workers in favor of going all in on AI ahead of an IPO. Since 2023, Klarna has reduced its workforce by about 39% and reshaped the makeup of its workforce to include a larger share of tech employees.
Klarna’s AI chatbot plays a crucial role in customer service. It handles two-thirds of all customer inquiries, according to Klarna spokesperson Clare Nordstrom.
“Since launch, our response times have improved by 82%, with customers now resolving their issues in under two minutes on average, leading to a 25% drop in repeat issues,” Nordstrom told CX Dive earlier this month. But human interactions are still necessary and the company says it's looking to hire representatives for “empathy, expertise, and real conversations.”
The company has likely been able to keep customer satisfaction levels high by making sure its AI chatbot is tackling the right questions, according to Julie Geller, principal research director at Info-Tech Research Group.
“Look under the hood and you’ll see Klarna’s AI triaging the high-volume, low-complexity requests that eat up queue time — the ‘easy stuff,’ as Klarna calls it,” Geller said in an email. “When you automate the right slice of the journey, CSAT generally doesn’t drift.”
Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski credited the company’s growth to embedding AI throughout the business. Of its remaining employees, 96% use AI daily, the company said in a news release Monday.
The firm hit about 100 million active users in April. Revenue grew 15% to $701 million, led by revenue growth in the U.S.
But the company also reported a $99 million net loss, up from $47 million last year.
While customer service and operations costs went down in 2025, costs increased for processing and servicing, technology, sales and marketing, and other areas of the business. Customer service and operations cost the company $51 million in the first quarter of 2025, down from $57 million during the same period a year ago.
