Since Klarna outsourced 750 roles last year, unresolved customer and merchant queries have quadrupled, two outsourced employees tell Sifted.
Merchants are now waiting up to a month for their support requests to be reviewed, according to internal documents seen by Sifted.
“Because of the lack of [functioning] processes, if Klarna had an audit tomorrow on what I work on, I'm fairly sure they wouldn't pass it,” says one former Klarna employee who is now employed by Foundever, a Miami-headquartered company which now handles customer support for the buy now, pay later giant.
Klarna did not respond to Sifted’s request for comment.
Increasing backlogs
A large majority of the 500 employees were moved from Klarna to Foundever in late November 2023.
Two months on, two of those outsourced workers at Foundever tell Sifted that they don’t have access to Klarna systems.
“We are no longer associated with Klarna directly. We are using a virtual desktop now rather than having direct access to Klarna systems. So that's incredibly slow,” one source says.
According to the other employee, this has meant that the workload has “almost tripled”.
As a result, queries from merchants are stacking up. “Merchants wait up to a month for a reply from us now,” the first source says.
“In our queues [before the outsourcing], we'd have maybe 200 tickets that we would be working on. That's started hitting the thousands.”
Foundever disagrees with the description of the employees. "While we recognize it has been a new way of working for many of our agents, they have had all the data access they need to perform their responsibilities and we have not seen a degradation in system performance as part of the transfer," a Foundever spokesperson says.
An internal document seen by Sifted shows eight Dutch merchant applications that are over 25 days old — and yet to be reviewed by the merchant support team at Foundever. Klarna’s website says the process should “usually take less than 24 hours”.
According to the two people at Foundever that Sifted has spoken to, the teams covering the UK, Belgium, the Netherlands and France are hardest hit when it comes to the backlog of requests — which are mostly those from smaller businesses — due to the volume of merchants in the region.
“We get the impression that the bigger enterprise merchants are being looked after quite well to keep up the image, but then everything behind the scenes is pretty chaotic,” the first source says.
Outsourcing
In September 2023, 250 Klarna employees in Germany and Sweden were moved to Foundever, which has about 170k employees managing customer support for numerous other companies. In late October Klarna outsourced another 500 roles to Foundever and to management consultancy Accenture, which took over the financial crime prevention roles.
When Klarna announced its plans to outsource 500 roles, it said that the previously outsourced customer-services staff “have reported a favourable shift in the work culture and new growth opportunities”.
But outsourcing was badly handled, one source told Sifted at the time, with Klarna employees picking up work that was not being done by the outsourced staff.
“There was an absence rate of around 60% of people that moved over to Foundever, so we ended up supporting the Swedish queues of queries purely because they [the outsourced employees] weren't going to work,” the source told Sifted.
According to Foundever, this is incorrect. “This figure was approximately 5%, which is within industry averages. Planned absences ranged from 10% to 18%, which also aligns with industry averages,” the spokesperson at Foundever says.
The shift from Klarna to Foundever has also taken its toll on the mood at work, say the two outsourced employees.
“There's no team atmosphere and the culture has kind of died. So morale is part of why [the backlog is growing], the first person says.
The spokesperson at Foundever says: “At Foundever, we are deeply committed to the employee experience because we believe the employee experience is the customer experience.”
“We prioritize developing our people through training and recognition, as well as providing them with opportunities to develop their skills, knowledge and careers. In fact, 84% of our associates grow in their career.”
