Klarna's ITSM Solution
We share learnings on how fast growing payment solution company Klarna use Jira Service Desk and a selection of Atlassian Marketplace apps to meet rising customer expectations. Klarna implemented an IT Service Management (ITSM) solution across the company servicing multiple teams, departments and roughly 4000 users. ‘Customers’ by our definition refer to those who visit and use the ITSM service. Learn how Klarna meet rising customer expectations with Jira Service Desk, eazyBI, Insight and Refined.
About Klarna
Klarna is one of Europe’s largest banks and offers payment solutions for 85 million customers across 17 countries.
Industry: Banking and Finance
Locations: Head office in Stockholm, Sweden. Offices in 14 countries globally.
No. of employees: Approx. 2700 (September 2019)
Refined products in use: Refined for Jira Server
No. of Users: Roughly 4000 users
On Rising Customer Expectations
Customer expectations are hitting all time highs. Companies are expected to deliver again and again on personalized service, value for customers, and fast service. Meanwhile customers have more choice over brand, product/service and how to buy these. According to consumer research by SalesForce, 76% of consumers expect companies to understand their needs and expectations. The American Marketing Association (AMA) flagged speed of service across industries and better technology driving up expectations. That plus a recent report from Forrester puts increasing value on saving the customers time and adds self service and the expectation that customers can choose where to find answers as a key part of this. All of these findings share a common indication of rising customer expectations. Striving to meet customer expectations is becoming increasingly important in order for a company to compete.
Further, if customer expectations aren’t met there is a chance customers simply won’t use the service. According to a 2018 analysis by PwC 34% of customers say they will walk away from a brand after one bad experience. The bottom line is that organizations need to adapt to their customer needs so that their expectations are not only met but exceeded.
“Today’s ‘wow’ becomes tomorrow’s ‘ordinary’ for today’s divinely discontent customers”. – Jeff Bezos in his 2018 annual letter to Amazon shareholders
Building a support solution with Jira Service Desk
Klarna is a golden example of a customer-centric organization constantly adapting their processes to exceed customer expectations. Klarna implemented Jira Service Desk and Atlassian Marketplace apps including eazyBI, Insight* and Refined to provide a “smoooth” support service for around 3000 employees and 350 teams. The IT team built the solution with 50 customer portals servicing the entire organization. Jira Service Desk offers a flexible service desk experience integrating directly with Jira. Jira Service Desk in particular excels when it comes to trackable speed of service with the inbuilt SLA features and easy to build queues for tight and efficient processes.
Addressing multiple team requirements
Klarna’s ITSM solution has 50 service desk portals including an IT service desk portal, incident reporting, Atlassian support and many more. With so many service desk portals Klarna needed a way to group the portals to improve the navigation, and organize resources according to business and team requirements. With Refined for Jira’s organization infrastructure they could achieve this. Klarna used Refined to group the service desk portals into relevant business units. For example, HR Support had different needs compared to IT, so being able to group the request types, knowledge base articles and useful links according to the business unit was important. By doing so they increased the likelihood of a customer filing a request in the correct service desk, and improved the self service for customers.
For Klarna, improving the user experience, adding context to issues, and reporting on the customer support usage were strategies put in place to meet customer expectations
User experience, clear context and reporting with Marketplace Apps
For Klarna, improving the user experience, having a clear context behind request types and issues, and reporting on the customer support usage were further strategies put in place to meet customer expectations.
To build a ‘smoooth’ user experience, Klarna used Refined for Jira to customize the look and feel of the help center and customer portals. Klarna connected a rich collection of knowledge base articles. They used Refined so that customers could search and get hits from knowledge base articles in-frame and according to context (with Refined you can search and connect more than one knowledge base space).
Using Insight, Klarna injected context into their operations and ensured scalability. Insight is an asset management app for Jira that provides the context for an issue. Thanks to Insight, Klarna was able to automatically flag which team the reporter belongs to, what equipment they need help with and where that reporting customer is located, to name a few. With this kind of context information on each issue the likelihood of providing effective support in an efficient way is greatly increased. Thus it is likely the customer expectations are not only met but exceeded.
Using eazyBI’s reporting app for Jira, Klarna have been able to measure the progression of their support service usage since it was first introduced. The tool displays an overview showing a significant increase in tickets being raised mapped against the introduction of Jira Service Desk, additional business units and eventually a full powered Klarna Service Desk.
When it comes to ITSM, customers expect fast delivery of service, they expect to be able to easily find answers themselves and they expect answers to be readily available in context. If these expectations aren’t met, customers simply won’t use the service and the organization can be left behind. Jira Service Desk when combined with Refined, Insight and eazyBI provides a personalized, customer-centric ITSM service that won’t keep the customer waiting.
Refined for Jira, eazyBI and Insight are available for free trial from the Atlassian Marketplace.
*Insight is an app by Mindville. Atlassian acquired Mindville in August 2020.