Customer service has moved beyond being a cost center to becoming a significant revenue driver for brands. Because of this, investments and tech upgrades for support may be easier to justify than in the past.
But for customer service leaders who want to grow the revenue function of their team, it’ll be important to make the right investments in improving efficiency without eroding the customer experience.
Here, we share what we learned from our customer service research, including the current state of the standard customer service tech stack, how brands are measuring ROI, and where service leaders are planning to spend their tech budget over the next year.
The customer service tech stack
How to measure customer service performance
Investing in AI and automation
2026 customer service tech stack budgets
What’s in a standard customer service tech stack?
Our customer service research shows that 36% of companies juggle 4–7 different tools in their service tech stacks, while another 33% are managing 8 or more.
But what’s more important than how many tools you’re using is whether your tech stack is integrated, meaning it consolidates all of your customer data in one place. Behind the scenes, that’s what can improve the brand experience for the customer while making your human agents’ jobs a lot easier, too.
According to our research, customer service leaders are already on the right track in that regard. Here’s what they have in their tech stacks:
- CRM: 62%
- Social media management tools: 54%
- Shared email inbox dedicated to customer service: 46%
- Live chat software or messaging platforms: 46%
- AI-powered agents or virtual assistants: 45%
- Helpdesk or ticketing systems: 44%
- Customer data platforms: 42%
- Self-service knowledge base or portal: 36%
Based on those numbers, it’s clear that the foundation for most customer service tech stacks is a CRM that keeps all your customer data in one place. Rather than, for example, keeping order history in one system, support tickets in another, and customer preferences in a third, everything lives in a single customer profile that all your teams can access in real time.
That means when a customer contacts your service team about a delayed order, your support agents can see their order history, shipping status, past conversations, and preferences in one place. And that can help them solve problems without asking the customer for information or asking them to repeat themselves.
Unified profiles also allow for customer data from support interactions to be fed back to marketing. If one of your goals as a customer service leader this year is better alignment between service and marketing, a great place to start is by drawing on the same data to personalize the customer experience from end to end.
Razor brand Dollar Shave Club used to use separate, complex platforms for email marketing and customer data, which made it difficult to personalize their customer experience at scale. When they switched to a consolidated B2C CRM that makes more dynamic, personalized messaging possible, it reduced their total cost of ownership more than 30%.
How are brands measuring customer service performance?
Most customer service leaders feel good about the returns they’re seeing from their technology investments: according to our customer service research, 77% agree they’ve delivered positive ROI and measurable business impact.
That said, “measurable business impact” can mean different things to different brands. Our research shows there’s no consensus on the customer service metrics that matter most, though some of the most commonly tracked metrics include:
- Customer satisfaction score (CSAT): 53%
- Employee engagement or agent satisfaction: 40%
- Quality assurance or interaction quality scores: 36%
- Response time or speed to resolution: 35%
- Customer retention or churn rate: 35%
These metrics are all valuable for customer service quality and efficiency, but none of them measure direct financial impact. Only 24% of teams track revenue or up- and cross-sell influenced by service interactions, for example, and just 20% monitor cost per contact or cost to serve.
This might help explain why less than a third (31%) of brands strongly agree they have clear metrics that accurately measure their service performance and impact.
Some customer service teams are finding more creative ways to track revenue back to service. Women’s intimates brand Thirdlove, for example, implemented a self-service hub where customers can track orders, reach out to support, redeem loyalty points, and more.
In 2025, the hub generated more than $200,000 in revenue for Thirdlove. And within a 30-day period, their loyalty point redemption rate rose to an all-time high of 30%.
How are customer service teams investing in AI and automation?
When we asked them what changes they were planning for 2026, 38% of customer service leaders said they plan to invest in new AI-powered tools like AI customer agents and predictive analytics.
Already, 1 in 3 service teams have partially implemented AI across parts of the customer service journey, and 1 in 5 have fully implemented it. Many teams have used AI and automation long enough to see if it’s paying off.
Most seem to think so: 63% agree that AI and automation have improved the quality and efficiency of their customer service interactions.
If your brand is one of those adopting AI to reduce costs and improve efficiency, you need to develop processes for understanding how it’s delivering value. Here’s what you can do in 2026:
- Establish your baseline before implementing. What’s your current response time? How many tickets does each human agent resolve per day? What percentage of inquiries are repetitive questions that AI could assist with? These benchmarks are your baseline to compare against once an AI agent is in place.
- Track key metrics for your AI agent, like how many conversations are initiated between your AI agent and your customers, the percentage of conversations your AI agent successfully resolves without any human intervention, and AI agent-generated sales, such as revenue from placed orders that occur within 24 hours of a shopper clicking a product card in a conversation with your AI agent.
- Track how AI impacts complex issues. Are human agents spending less time on repetitive questions and more time on complex issues? Have your CSAT scores gone up after implementing an AI agent? Sometimes, AI can actually increase response time for human agents because they’re handling high-touch requests, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing if it means higher customer satisfaction.
- Measure deflection and containment rates. Check how many customers started with your AI agent and ended up needing to be transferred to a human. High transfer rates might indicate that your AI isn’t quite ready to handle what you’re asking it to do, which can affect the customer experience.
Clothing brand Ministry of Supply, for example, tracks how their AI shopping assistant is performing without human involvement. In a 60-day period, their AI assistant resolved 84% of product recommendation chat queries and 75% of “where is my order?” chat queries autonomously.
How are customer service team costs and structures changing in 2026?
According to Indeed, the average hourly wage for customer service representatives in 2025 was $19.37. But there’s no universal blueprint for how to staff a customer service team. It depends heavily on company size and revenue.
Our customer service research reveals that 49% of entrepreneur-stage companies (less than $2.5 million in revenue) run customer service with 10 people or less, while 55% of enterprise companies (over $500 million in revenue) have teams of more than 100. Midmarket and SMB support teams are spread more evenly across team sizes.
So far, AI isn’t strongly affecting customer service team size: 44% of service leaders report no significant change in team size after implementing AI or automation. 25% say their team size grew, with AI supporting modest growth. Only 12% report a decrease in team size due to AI automating some tasks and eliminating roles.
If your goal is to increase productivity without increasing headcount, here are a few tools that can help:
- AI customer agents: AI agents can recommend products, answer simple questions about product availability or policies, and pass the conversation to a human agent with full context.
- Self-service portals: Self-service hubs are personalized on-site destinations where customers can track orders, start returns, favorite items for later, see personalized recommendations, and redeem loyalty points.
- AI-powered helpdesks: AI-powered helpdesks aggregate customer data and support conversations from every channel into one shared workspace. This equips human agents with the information they need to anticipate support needs and personalize exchanges, without bouncing between platforms.
How are brands planning their 2026 customer service tech stack budgets?
When we asked where they’re planning to invest in the year ahead, customer service leaders agreed on these 3 priorities:
- Improving agent training and onboarding tools: 42%
- Investing in new AI-powered tools: 38%
- Improving data integration and reporting: 36%
Company size seems to influence future investment. Enterprise and midmarket companies, for example, are most likely to prioritize new AI investments. But SMBs and entrepreneurs are most likely to prioritize agent training and onboarding, indicating that AI adoption is scaling fastest in larger organizations with established infrastructure.
Build a revenue-generating customer service team in 2026 with Klaviyo
BuCustomer service costs are rising, but strategic investments in the right technology, team structure, and automation can deliver measurable ROI while improving customer satisfaction.
In 2026, the most cost-effective customer service technology unifies customer data and breaks down silos between service and marketing, enabling personalized experiences across all touchpoints while reducing the need for costly tool integrations.
By unifying customer data, you can reduce technology complexity, improve efficiency for both human and AI agents, and measure the true impact of service on customer lifetime value.
With Klaviyo, the CRM built for B2C, you have all your marketing and service needs in one unified platform. And with Klaviyo Service, you can deliver exceptional customer experiences with:
- Klaviyo Customer Hub: a personalized, on-site destination for self-service that offers new paths to purchase
- K:AI (Klaviyo AI) Customer Agent: a 24/7 personalized AI assistant built to resolve, recommend, and convert
- Klaviyo Helpdesk: an AI-powered workspace for fast resolutions and smart selling opportunities
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