8 customer service best practices that drive revenue and build loyalty

To meet rising consumer expectations, you don’t just need to align customer service and marketing. You need to treat them as one feedback loop that drives the entire customer lifecycle.

True consolidation like this starts at the level of your data infrastructure, with a B2C CRM that has a built-in customer data platform and a robust ecosystem of integrations that connect every piece of marketing and customer service software you use.

When customer service and marketing are pulling from the same data foundation, every agent and marketer gain access to a 360-degree view of the customer. This includes order history, marketing engagement, loyalty status, and past conversations—all under one roof.

And when your customer agents have access to real-time customer data, they’re better equipped to grasp your customers’ exact issues with little to no back and forth, improving efficiency and reducing time to resolution. 

On the flip side, when marketers have access to customer service data, they can suppress promotional messages while helpdesk tickets are open or send personalized offers that follow up on customer service interactions.

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 a self-service hub, you can give control back to your customers. When shoppers can log in to your website to access a single interface for tracking their own orders, starting their own returns, redeeming offers, and accessing answers to FAQs, you’re accomplishing two things: driving revenue with your customer service function and freeing up agents to focus on higher value interactions.

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 a self-service 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,” Fagan says. “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.”

With the proliferation of AI chatbots, customer service automation has actually become an intricate balancing act between what to automate and what not to automate.

On one hand, some customer service automation is essential for efficiency. There’s no reason human agents need to spend time answering frequently asked questions ad nauseam, or get involved with simple order tracking and returns (especially when customers can self-serve, too). 

At the same time, if customers can’t access a human agent when they feel they need one, this translates as a poor customer experience. The tickets that need a human touch are those that require the most empathy, nuance, or judgment, especially if the customer relationship is at risk or is particularly 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

So, it’s essential that your customer service automation is responsive to customer needs. That means:

• AI customer agents are trained on your customer and storefront data so they’re starting from a position of as much nuance as possible.
• AI customer agents answer FAQs until they hit an appropriate complexity threshold, at which point they escalate to a human agent.
• Customer service tickets are automatically routed to the right team via a shared helpdesk (more on this next). 
• AI and human agents are empowered to engage high-intent shoppers. If someone is about to abandon a cart, for example, an AI agent can reach out to ask if there are any questions and nudge them toward a sale. 

This is how strategic automation can not only serve the customer better, but also drive revenue and repeat purchases.

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

The thing is, they want access to that service on the channels they prefer, whether that’s through your website chat, email, SMS, WhatsApp, or social media.

This added complexity means you’ll need to simplify operations on your back end. To make sure no message is missed and no customer has to repeat themselves, you need a system that consolidates all of these interactions to one unified inbox for both human and AI agents. 

This not only makes it easy to filter helpdesk conversations by priority request, flag urgent issues, and route different requests to specific teams or live agents—no matter the channel.

It also makes it easy to deliver on speed. According to our future of consumer marketing report, 81% of consumers expect a brand response within 24 hours of reaching out about a negative experience—and 38% expect a response within 4 hours.

Automated flows are some of the most important messages you can send because they’re triggered by customer behavior. According to Klaviyo’s latest email marketing benchmarks, flows generate up to 30x more revenue per recipient than campaigns because they’re so timely and targeted.

But when flows are disconnected from service, the result can be less than ideal. The last thing you want to see is irrelevant marketing content when you have a negative experience with a brand.

That’s why it’s important for your B2C CRM to create dynamic segments of your customers with open tickets and suppress promotional messages until their issue is resolved—which is possible with a consolidated marketing and customer service tech stack.

But it’s not just about avoiding a negative interaction. Marketing and service connection can generate positive outcomes, too, like automating personalized offers after certain customer support interactions—those that are particularly difficult, for example, or that pertain to a certain product category or type of customer. 

According to our future of consumer marketing report, many customers are willing to give brands a second chance after a negative interaction if they receive a discount. When you can automate that process by connecting service to your marketing flows, you’re turning your customer support function into a revenue driver.

Our future of consumer marketing report found that 74% of consumers expect more brands to personalize experiences in 2025, while 27% remember exclusive discounts and personalized offers.

Suppressing promotional messages during open tickets is one thing, but proactive personalization is how brands can transform their customer support function into a revenue driver.

Here are a few ways to make this happen:

• Empower helpdesk agents with the browsing data they need to recommend products during customer service interactions.
• Set up automated AI chat pop-ups that offer help when someone is about to abandon their cart.
• Automatically create personalized follow-up offers after someone returns an item or leaves a negative review.
• Create follow-up tasks for a human agent to reach out to VIP customers after they’ve had any interaction with an AI customer agent.
• Offer loyalty members the option to redeem points, earn rewards, or access special offers during a support interaction.

Happy Wax, for example, created a sophisticated review follow-up flow for customers who leave reviews with less than 3 stars. In that scenario, the flow pings the internal customer service team to reach out and offer a new scent, free of charge.

While personalization is table stakes these days, 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
• 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.

Once you make intentional improvements to your customer service and marketing efforts, you’ll need to see how each activity and channel is influencing revenue and customer satisfaction.

Pulling from the data in your CRM, create shared dashboards and reports for marketing and service teams to track:

• Revenue impact: Look at reduced churn rates through proactive support, and higher LTV associated with increased customer satisfaction.

• Operational efficiency improvements: Monitor reduced support ticket volume through self-service, faster resolution times, first response time, and lower cost per resolution with AI customer agents.

• Customer experience and satisfaction: Analyze net promoter scores (NPS) or customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores after implementing customer service improvements.

When you’re constantly reviewing these metrics alongside each other, you’ll be able to better understand which customer service interactions are generating revenue and which marketing efforts are improving customer support interactions with better customer data.

Then, you can make data-driven improvements to continue to increase customer satisfaction, like using order tracking data to send proactive notifications with estimated delivery updates when there will be delays, or using LTV data to automatically route high-value customers to support agents.

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 Service, you can build an exceptional customer experience with:

• Customer Hub: a personalized, on-site destination for self-service that paves new paths to purchase 

• Klaviyo AI (K:AI) Customer Agent: a 24/7 personalized AI assistant built to resolve, recommend, and convert*

• Helpdesk: an AI-powered workspace for fast resolutions and smart selling opportunities**

*K:AI Customer Agent is currently available in English. Additional languages will be available in 2026.

**Klaviyo Helpdesk supports two-way conversations in any language, as long as both the customer and agent use the same language. Klaviyo does not translate messages between languages. The Helpdesk interface will appear in the language you’ve selected in your Klaviyo account settings.