Just Riffing: Klarna Forgot the Value of Annoyance
Because being annoying can actually serve a purpose..
Sometime last year, Klarna’s CEO, Sebastian Siemiatkowski, bragged in an interview about how his company hadn’t hired people in over a year.
For context, this is Sebastian Siemiatkowski.
CEOs’ obsession with making the need for human workers obsolete is odd to me. But then I remember that *I* actually like people. In contrast, many of these CEOs were former software engineers. Not exactly a group of people known for their empathetic and agreeable nature.
Anger and disgust aside, my next couple of thoughts were:
1.) Dealing with any type of issue using Klarna is about to be a bitch
2.) The girls WILL increase their scamming
Six months later, Mr. Nutcracker (because truly, what else do you think of when you see the photo above?) is changing his tune. He was most recently quoted saying that “the AI job cuts have led to ‘lower quality’ customer service.”
No shit.
It was also reported that its consumer credit losses shot up to $136 million, 17% higher than in Q1 2024, and that 41% of BNPL borrowers struggle to repay loans on time, up from 34% last year.
Struggling to pay back or just not doing so?
If knew that the “person” in charge of handling my delinquencies was an AI chatbot that can’t hound me and is unable to call me out on my shit, I too would be “struggling to repay loans” (i.e. deleting every notification email and ignoring text messages).
A robot can’t judge you. It can’t guilt you. It can’t make you feel shame.
But a human being on the end of a phone line saying:
“I see here that you have an outstanding balance of $237.87 that you haven’t paid in two months. Any reason why? When do you plan on paying us back? Would you like to figure out a payment plan?”
That is going to irritate you. That is going to anger you. You may feel talked down to. You may feel shame. And for a majority of people, those feelings will spur action.
Unfortunately, the Klarna team opted out of providing that super special, annoying, and condescending human touch in favor of AI.
Think about it like this.
Everyone has an alarm clock on their phone. Do you actually wake up at the first ring? Or do you hit snooze a few (or more than a few) times before getting out of bed?
Now, imagine if instead of the phone, the person waking you up is a real person. Sure, you may ignore them the first couple of times, but after the second, someone is going to get annoyed—either them at you not waking up, or you at them for waking you up. An argument or a screaming match will ensue, but at the end of the day, you’ll be out of bed.
The annoyance. The anger. The irritation. It all causes friction that spurs action.
Sure, a robot can be annoying too. But it’s different because we know it’s not human—just an object that beeps and boops and only does what it’s told to do. And if it annoys us too much, we can escape it by turning it off, breaking it, or making ourselves unreachable.
You may be able to make yourself unreachable to some humans but you can’t turn them off, and you can’t break them without going to jail.
I think that’s what Klarna’s CEO and many of his peers forget about when rushing to use AI: that people have value outside of being productive and efficient at their jobs.
Humans have a very human-like ability to be petty, annoying, pushy, condescending and all those less-than-desirable qualities that, yes, cause friction, but also get shit done.
Outside of that, humans are essential to any customer support team. They are the front lines. They are the first to sense when something’s off. They can tell you what features customers are actually asking for. They flag fraud. And they know more about users than any CEO or higher-up. I would know, I worked in customer support for two years.
The insights they gain from customer interactions are invaluable. Their role shouldn’t be thought of as dispensable.
At the end of the day, they are the face of the company. They are the first point of contact between a business and the people it serves. What are you telling your user base when you’re so willing to take their money and attention, but in times of trouble, they aren’t deserving of a human touch?
I’m kind of glad Klarna’s CEO is backpedaling. That he learned through experience that just because you can replace people with AI, doesn’t mean you should. The future of AI as it relates to customer service probably looks more like humans working with these tools rather than the tools replacing them.
Hopefully, other tech bosses will follow suit… I’m looking directly at you, Marc Benioff.