11 customer service best practices that drive revenue and build loyalty

B2C customer loyalty has hit a turning point. According to Klaviyo’s future of consumer marketing report, most consumers today are loyal to only 1–2 brands.

Your B2C business needs to crack into your target customers’ inner circle. A great product with great marketing can go a long way, but to make it to the top of your target customer’s mind, you need great customer service.

Compared to B2B customer service, B2C customer service is much more high-volume and transactional. That means speed, personalization, and frictionlessness are the name of the game.

Today, brands that build a flywheel with a B2C CRM, aligned marketing and service teams, and top-tier customer service can create exceptional customer experiences. They can develop a loyal existing customer base that leaves sparkling reviews and promotes word-of-mouth marketing like it’s their job—and they can grow fast, cost-effectively, as a result.

And if you can make your post-purchase experience as smooth as your purchase experience by leveraging self-service, AI agents, and personalization, you can turn your customer service into a lever for growth, boosting repeat purchases and customer lifetime value (CLV).

Put simply, customer service isn’t a cost center anymore. It’s a lever for growth.

If your customers need to call you just to initiate a return or update their subscription status, turning them into loyal fans could be a tall order. And if they have to hear an on-hold jingle, it might just be impossible.

According to Microsoft’s State of Global Customer Service Report, 90% of customers prefer to self-serve. That means an overwhelming number of your customers want to be able to track orders, initiate returns, update their subscription status, and escalate to a live support agent on their own.

With tools like Klaviyo Customer Hub, you can give even more control back to your customers. In their customer account, they can see their recently viewed items, favored products, and wishlists. They can also check their loyalty rewards status, redeem coupons that they’ve earned, and scroll through personalized product recommendations, powered by Klaviyo AI.

Aman Advani, co-founder and CEO of Ministry of Supply, used Klaviyo Customer Hub to build a quick, personalized, and seamless customer service experience. The results: over 650 self-serve support interactions and over 2,000 new customer accounts in less than 4 months.

“We see Klaviyo Customer Hub becoming what we think of as the future of shopping—a very curated one-to-one experience, unlike traditional ecomm, which is one to many,” Advani says. It’s not just our customer service tool—it’s one-to-one access to Ministry of Supply. That’s really powerful.”

Creating FAQs and help centers is another way to empower your customers to self-serve. Your customers want to find the right answers to their basic questions as quickly as possible, like “Track my order,” “Start a return,” and “Manage my subscription.”

Whereas brand FAQs help your customers understand your company policies and values, such as your return policies and your company mission, product FAQs help your customers understand how to use specific products and troubleshoot any potential issues that could arise.

These FAQs can range from written guides to videos to a combination of both. Just make sure they’re clear and concise and easy to navigate, and that they provide step-by-step instructions. The Hemingway App is an excellent tool for measuring the accessibility of your writing.

Consider linking to your product and brand FAQs from your post-purchase emails (confirmation, shipping, and delivery) or sending your customers an “onboarding” email if this is the first time they’ve ordered one of your products. This will give your customers everything they need to know about the product, mitigating potential customer support tickets and building trust in your brand.

You can pinpoint which issues matter most to your customers by analyzing their behavior after check-out, most frequent web search terms, and most common support tickets.

Our future of consumer marketing report found that after a negative experience, 32% of consumers contact customer service first.

In addition to being able to self-serve or find support content about their issue, customers need to be able to easily request support from a live agent through website chat, email, SMS, or social media.

Be sure to include CTAs to your customer support options anywhere and everywhere that’s customer-facing, including your:

• Marketing emails

• Post-purchase emails

• Website

• Social media pages

• Mobile app

• Chatbots

• Support content

Consumers are used to instant everything, especially online. In fact, 92% of consumers expect a brand response within 24 hours of reaching out about a negative experience, according to our future of consumer marketing report—and 22% expect a response within 1 hour.

AI support agents can respond to your customers in a single minute. Whether you train them on customer data stored in your B2C CRM, your support content, or product catalog, an AI support agent can answer common pre-purchase questions like, “What’s your return policy,” resolve simple post-purchase requests like updating subscriptions, and summarize or link to your most relevant support content.

Another way to respond to your customers within 24 hours is to set up automated, personalized emails, texts, or push notifications that confirm their support request, then send follow-ups based on their interactions (or lack thereof) with your brand.

Finally, consider building prioritization systems for urgent issues and providing proper coverage for anyone on your customer service team who is out of the office. For your customers’ urgent issues, you can use a tool like Klaviyo Inbox to filter by priority request, flag urgent issues to your customer service, and route different requests to specific teams or live agents.

Service and marketing need to be aligned to deliver on great customer experiences. Having a single source of truth on your customers gives your live and AI agents full context on every customer.

When your agents have access to real-time customer profile data, like site searches, add-to-carts, products ordered, they’re better equipped to grasp your customers’ exact issues with little to no back and forth, improving efficiency and reducing time to resolution.

If your customer service tech stack feels fractured and stitched together, consider removing all redundant tools and integrating any essential software into a single, unified customer service platform like Klaviyo Service.

Rachel Fagan, VP of marketing at Happy Wax, a home fragrance brand, saw a 75% drop in customer support tickets related to tracking orders after implementing Customer Hub, while also increasing repeat purchases.

“Customer expectations are at an all-time high, and managing loyalty, referrals, rewards, and subscriptions can be a challenge. We wanted to simplify the experience for our loyal customers, and Klaviyo Customer Hub made that possible. It’s now a central part of our customer retention strategy,” Fagan says.

One of the last things a customer who just had a negative experience with your brand wants to see is irrelevant marketing content. If you accidentally sent them the wrong pair of shoes, sending them an email about a pair of leggings that could match the shoes they don’t actually have could annoy them even more.

That’s why it’s important to create segments of your customers with open tickets and suppress marketing until their issue is resolved, which is possible with a consolidated tech stack.

With tools like Klaviyo Customer Hub, you can easily automate this process. By using Klaviyo’s web chat or a third-party helpdesk and syncing your customers’ ticket data into their unified customer profile, you’ll soon be able to create a segment based on which customers currently have an active issue. Then, you can press pause on any promotional campaigns that were going to be sent their way.

This kind of segmentation will also come in handy when you want to customize the support experience or personalize special offers based on customer value and history, especially for VIP customers like repeat buyers and big spenders.

In a way, personalization is kind of like when your roommate does their dishes: you expect it, but it’s still always nice to see their side of the sink empty.

Our future of consumer marketing report found that 74% of consumers expect more brands to provide personalization this year, and 27% remember exclusive discounts and personalized offers.

In addition to suppressing marketing to customers who have open customer service tickets, here are a few ways to personalize customer experiences:

• Note their most recent purchase in communications.

• Proactively request feedback after purchases.

• Follow up on browsing history with personalized discounts.

• Send product guides specific to a customer’s preferences, like skin type or favorite items.

Gone are the days when customers could only get support through the channels businesses prefer. Nowadays, you have to meet them on the channels that they prefer—most commonly, website chat with a live agent, or on the phone.

But it isn’t enough just to offer support through these channels. You also need to create a consistent, unified experience across all of them.

Track your customers’ interactions with your brand on each channel and create a holistic view of their relationship with your brand. Make sure your company policies and brand voice are uniform, regardless of the channel. And don’t forget to offer customers the option to easily switch over from one channel to the other and pick up where they left off.

While personalization is expected, you don’t want to violate your customers’ trust. Our future of consumer marketing report found that the most important brand value for consumers is strong data protection, so consider using zero- and first-party data you gather with the knowledge, permission, and explicit consent of your prospects and customers.

Examples of first- and zero-party data include:

• Answers to sign-up forms, quizzes, and surveys

• Google Analytics data

• Buyer behavior on your website

• Engagement data from email and SMS

In the spirit of transparency to your customers, you may even want to clarify the type of data you collect and how you collect it in your brand FAQs.

The things that get measured get optimized. For your customer service performance to hit its maximum potential, consider tracking metrics like:

Response times

Resolution rates

Customer satisfaction scores

Impact on customer retention and CLV

Consumer sentiment

If you constantly review these metrics and A/B test different support approaches, like your AI agent responses, escalation paths, and personalization levels, your customer service performance is more likely to improve.

Strategically implementing automation and AI will serve your customers better than going all-out on automating everything. Some tickets need the human touch. And some are better suited for automation and AI.

The types of tickets that need the human touch are the ones that require the most empathy, nuance, or judgment, especially if the customer relationship is at risk or is very valuable to your business. Here are a few examples:

• A customer forgetting to pause their subscription because of a family emergency

• Any issues your VIP customers have

• Any issue that highlights a fundamental flaw in one of your processes

By contrast, the types of tickets better suited for automation are your most common yet simple customer issues that don’t require a lot of emotional intelligence to resolve. If you can answer it in a FAQ, you can most likely automate it.

If you’re just getting started with an AI agent tool, consider using it for simple use cases first:

• Tracking orders

• Managing subscriptions

• Getting help with coupons or discounts

• Updating marketing preferences

• Answering questions about your products and policies

Eventually, you can train AI agents on real-time customer profile data to serve as the first agent that interacts with each of your customers. If it’s necessary for your customers to escalate to a live agent, then your AI agents can seamlessly make that transition.

Customer service isn’t just about fielding calls and emails from angry customers anymore. It’s about crafting one of the most important experiences that your customers will have with your brand.

With Klaviyo Customer Hub and Klaviyo Service, you can build an exceptional experience that will bring bigger spenders, more repeat buyers, and higher CLVs to your business.