Klarna put a person back beside the chatbot

In May 2025 Klarna's assistant was still taking two-thirds of customer service chats, with faster responses than at launch and fewer repeat issues. Kristen Doerer, writing at CX Dive, reported the change next to those figures. The company was hiring people again, and a customer was supposed to be able to reach one.

A year earlier Klarna had said the assistant could do the work of 700 representatives. In February 2024 it said the bot had taken two-thirds of chats in its first month, 2.3 million of them, resolved in under two minutes on average. Spokesperson Clare Nordstrom said that by May 2025 response times had improved 82 percent since launch and repeat issues had fallen 25 percent. Over that same stretch the company had gone hard at AI, laid people off, and paused hiring.

Sebastian Siemiatkowski, the chief executive, told Bloomberg that cost had weighed too heavily. CX Dive quotes him: when cost dominates, "what you end up having is lower quality," and investing in human support was where he wanted to go. He said a customer should be clear that a human is available if they want one. Nordstrom stated that as policy. She described the split as speed from the assistant, and a person when the chat needs a personal response.

The hiring was a pilot. Siemiatkowski called it an Uber-type setup. Nordstrom said it would pay competitively, let people work remotely with control of their hours, and bring in students, professionals, and entrepreneurs. The role mixes serving the customer with sending product feedback back while the issue is fresh. The assistant would keep the easy chats. One aim, he told Bloomberg, was to replace thousands of outsourced customer service workers.

Julie Geller, at Info-Tech Research Group, told CX Dive to automate the routine and to keep a clear path to a person when the issue is emotional or complicated. A model can handle a simple chat and then misread the customer, and a thread with no exit leaves people stuck. A Verint survey from the previous year, cited in the piece, found that more than two-thirds of customers had had a bad chatbot experience, and that the top complaint was the bot's inability to answer. A Five9 survey from March 2025 found that 86 percent say empathy and a human connection matter more than speed when they judge a good experience.

1. Say in the chat that a person is available. Siemiatkowski treated that sentence as a brand decision.
2. Choose the share the bot keeps. Klarna left it on the two-thirds it already handled.
3. Score quality beside cost. Repeat issues, and chats the bot cannot answer, were already figures Nordstrom was willing to quote.
4. Make the human role part of the journey. The pilot is remote and is expected to feed the product team while the customer is still in the thread.
5. Put the handoff at the moment the bot cannot answer. That was the top complaint in the Verint group.

A customer experience workshop is a good place to redraw one live journey where the bot answers first. Bring a week of chats that had to be repeated, and mark where a person should have taken over.