It’s a scenario customer service teams know all too well. Klaviyo’s 2026 customer service research surveyed more than 500 customer service decision makers and found that managing these spikes in demand is a top challenge for service teams heading into the new year.
Self-service is one of the most effective ways to relieve the pressure.
People increasingly want to help themselves. According to Klaviyo’s 2025 AI Shopping Index, 68% of shoppers prefer AI agents over humans for quick answers. Microsoft, meanwhile, reports that 90% of consumers expect self-service support options from brands.
Most brands are leaning on self-service options to handle volume. Our customer service research found that the most common expectation among service leaders is that 21%–60% of customer interactions will be handled through self-service channels in the next year.
That makes sense: when customers can get instant answers, they often have a better customer experience, and your team can focus on complex issues that actually need human support. In fact, according to our customer service research, brands where over 60% of customer service interactions are handled by self-service channels are 73% more likely to strongly agree that investments in customer service technology have delivered a positive ROI.
Here are 4 practical self-service tactics your brand can implement this year, all grounded in data from our recent customer service research.
Offer a personalized self-service hub
Always-on support with AI agents
Answer contextual FAQs immediately
Build omnichannel customer service
1. Offer a personalized self-service customer hub
A customer hub, or self-service portal, is a signed-in, on-site destination where customers can manage their orders, redeem loyalty rewards, and get quick answers from AI agents when they need them.
Brands are starting to invest in customer hubs, according to our customer service research: 49% report they already have one in place, and 35% are planning to implement one.
What makes a customer hub successful?
A self-service customer hub is most effective when it’s personalized. That means it’s pulling from real-time customer data to serve shoppers based on their own purchasing and browsing behavior.
When your self-service hub is embedded in a CRM that houses this data, customers can create a better customer experience for themselves by:
- Tracking their orders without customer service team involvement
- Starting returns on items they’ve purchased
- Updating subscriptions in just a few taps
- Getting complementary product suggestions that match their preferences and behavior
- Viewing their loyalty rewards and coupons, and deciding how to redeem them
- Accessing fast support when they’ve exhausted self-service options
Apparel brand Ministry of Supply implemented a customer hub to give customers instant access to their order history alongside personalized product recommendations. Within a year, account holders completed over 12,000 self-serve interactions, each one representing a potential customer service ticket.
How to evaluate the success of a self-service customer hub?
To evaluate the impact of your customer hub, monitor key metrics like:
- The total number of self-serve accounts customers have created with your brand, and how many accounts stay active over time
- The number of self-service interactions customers complete on their own
- Hub-generated revenue, such as when a customer interacts with a product or a reward in the hub and completes a purchase within 1 day
- Customer effort score (CES), which measures how much effort a customer has to exert to resolve their issue
2. Provide 24/7/365 support with AI customer agents
When it’s trained on your brand’s product catalog, FAQs, brand guidelines, and customer data, an AI customer agent can provide accurate, instant responses to common questions. This frees up your human team to focus on more complex interactions that need a personal touch.
According to our customer service research, 43% of brands use AI customer agents or virtual assistants on their website, and 33% plan to implement one in the next year.
What makes an AI customer agent successful?
An AI customer agent is only as good as the data it’s trained on. But that training isn’t one and done.
Your customers are always interacting with your brand across multiple channels and generating data that can help you better serve them. An AI customer agent that’s embedded in your CRM has access to that real-time data so it can deliver accurate, consistent answers wherever and whenever someone reaches out.
For example, when a customer asks for an order update, the AI agent already knows who they are and can pull the right details instantly, without human support.
After adding an AI customer agent as a service option, natural home fragrance brand Happy Wax saw a dramatic reduction in customer service tickets. Within a 90 day period, over 50% of conversations handled by their AI agent were fully resolved without any human involvement.
How to evaluate the success of an AI customer agent?
To understand the impact of your AI customer agent, monitor key metrics like:
- The amount of time your human customer service team saves on routine inquiries after implementation of your AI agentce.
- Total conversations initiated between AI agent and customers
- Total or percentage of conversations your AI agent successfully resolves without any human intervention
- 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
3. Answer questions with contextual FAQs on specific pages
Contextual FAQs are focused help sections embedded directly within specific pages throughout your site. Rather than diverting shoppers to a help center, contextual FAQs embed bite-sized, page-specific answers right where customers need them: on product pages, at check-out, and within your self-service hub.
If you sell outdoor gear, for example, customers aren’t just asking about sizes or materials. They want to know how products perform in extreme weather, how much they weigh, or whether they pack down small enough for their luggage. This kind of proactive documentation can reduce friction and support workload without adding extra steps for the customer.
What makes contextual FAQs successful?
Contextual FAQs should be thorough and specific. Detailed answers help customers quickly resolve any purchasing doubts and can potentially speed up time to purchase. They also give AI search and shopping tools the context they need to deliver high-quality information in chat queries.
When building your FAQs, use expandable sections or accordions to keep pages scannable. Within those sections, each answer should fully address the question, including edge cases, specific use cases and benefits, product usage details, and common follow-up questions.
These FAQs are not meant to replace your help center. Instead, they act as high-intent, in-context explanations that help customers and AI algorithms by clearly answering real questions at the right moment.
How to write good contextual FAQs?
Here are some examples to help you get started on your contextual FAQs:
- Product detail pages: Add sizing guides, material specifications, use case scenarios, care instructions, and recommendations on how customers can use products with other products.
- Shopping cart and check-out pages: Include shipping options and timelines, returns and exchange policy summaries, accepted payment methods, and instructions on how to apply promotional codes.
- Customer account pages: Tell customers how to update personal and billing information, manage preferences, and control privacy and preference settings.
- Post-purchase pages: Detail the order and delivery process, including delivery estimates, order tracking, and information on your return policies.
Measure the success of your contextual FAQs by tracking the reduction of simple or FAQ-based customer service tickets. Fewer tickets suggest that customers are finding answers on their own, letting your team focus on more complex issues.
4. Develop self-service across channels, especially mobile
Your self-service strategy needs to meet customers where they are: on their phones.
When shoppers are already browsing, buying, and interacting across mobile channels, it’s only natural that they expect to find answers and resolve issues without switching to a desktop.
Our customer service research found that 46% of brands have already added mobile app features to their self-service strategy, with 34% planning to implement them in the next year.
What makes cross-channel self-service successful?
When customer service fits into a customer’s existing messaging habits, getting help feels as easy as texting a friend. On mobile, then, self-service needs to be:
- Fast
- Flexible
- Conversational
Your AI customer agent, for example, should load quickly on mobile, save conversation history, and support messaging across not only mobile web chat, but also text messaging and WhatsApp.
How to evaluate the success of cross-channel self-service?
Understand how well your mobile self-service is performing with metrics like:
- Volume of customer service conversations on mobile channels
- Resolution rates like first response time (FRT), first contact resolution (FCR), and time to resolution (TTR) on mobile channels
- Customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores on mobile channels
Turn customer self-service into a competitive advantage
Self-service is about helping customers get answers quickly and easily, on their own terms. Whether you’re handling 100 or 10,000 tickets a month, the right self-service approach helps you keep up with rising customer expectations without adding strain on your customer service team.
The best self-service experiences are intuitive, helpful, and frictionless. Delivering those experiences requires a customer service tech stack that:
- Unifies customer data across channels.
- Automates routine interactions.
- Provides AI-powered tools that learn from every interaction.
Klaviyo makes this possible with an AI-first CRM designed for B2C growth. Explore Klaviyo Customer Hub and K:AI (Klaviyo AI) Customer Agent to empower your customers with the information they need, when they need it.
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