8 ways to transform customer service strategy

A B2C customer service strategy has 4 key components:

1.  A central hub for customers provides one place to track orders, initiate returns, and discover new products.

2.  Support that’s always available empowers customers to self-serve with 24/7/365 automated support and seamless escalation to live agents when needed.

3.  A unified view for support teams equips agents with a unified inbox and complete customer context.

4.  Seamless service and marketing breaks down the silos between marketing and service to personalize every interaction.

Excellent service drives repeat business and customer loyalty. After product quality and affordability, consumers stay loyal to their favorite brands because of high-quality customer service, according to our future of consumer marketing report. And bad service is costly: our report also found that 1 in 5 buyers stop shopping with a brand after just one negative experience.

In the digital era, the stakes are higher than ever. According to Microsoft, 90% of customers prefer to self-serve. Businesses with the right tools and strategies will come out ahead. Happy Wax, a home fragrance brand, saw a 5% boost in average order value (AOV) after adopting Klaviyo Customer Hub.

“Customer expectations are at an all-time high, and managing loyalty, referrals, rewards, and subscriptions can be a challenge,” says Rachel Fagan, VP of marketing at Happy Wax. “We wanted to simplify the experience for our loyal customers, and Klaviyo Customer Hub made that possible.”

B2C businesses need a documented service strategy. Ad-hoc, reactive support not only creates inconsistent experiences, it’s costly and time-consuming if teams approach each situation as if it’s new and unique.

Here’s a clear playbook for removing the guesswork so every customer gets what they need, when they need it.

The traditional view of support as something that starts after a purchase is outdated. In B2C, service isn’t just about solving problems. It’s about creating an exceptional experience from the very first moment a customer engages with your brand.

Pre-purchase, integrate service and marketing to help customers make better decisions and drive conversions. Product pages with details about product features and value, embedded live chat to answer customer questions, and reviews and feedback that showcase real customers’ experiences are all examples of service elements used in marketing.

Use data to proactively address issues before they occur. Imagine a customer orders a sweatshirt but receives the wrong size. Frustrated, they reach out to customer service for a resolution—only to receive an email promoting matching sweatpants. The disconnect is both glaring and damaging, and could be prevented with proper exclusion rules.

Apparel brand Ministry of Supply uses Klaviyo Customer Hub to provide bespoke experiences at scale. Equipped with details on purchase history, the brand makes personalized recommendations for what customers should consider next.

“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,” says Aman Advani, CEO and cofounder of Ministry of Supply.

Modern consumers prefer self-service over relying on agents. 92% of shoppers expect a response from customer service within 24 hours, according to our future of consumer marketing report. And millennial and Gen Z consumers are more likely than their older counterparts to expect brands to respond about a negative experience within just 1 hour.

A reactive approach to customer service won’t keep pace with these expectations. So invest in these essential self-service components:

• Knowledge base and FAQ: YouTube videos, blog content, usage instructions, and other informative resources that are easily accessible to customers

• Order tracking and management: a signed-in customer experience where customers can find full order history and offers

• Return initiation and processing: a signed-in customer experience where customers can initiate returns with a single click from their accounts

• Subscription management: a signed-in customer experience where customers can modify their recurring subscriptions

• Account-based experiences: recommendations based on browsing and purchase history, special discounts, replenishment reminders timed to usage patterns, dynamic on-site content

These self-service resources deflect common and repetitive requests, freeing up time for team members to focus on high-complexity scenarios. Happy Wax drove 1,200 self-serve support interactions in less than 2 months with Klaviyo Customer Hub, a 75% YoY reduction in order tracking tickets.

Klaviyo Customer Hub is “now a central part of our customer retention strategy,” says Fagan.

According to our future of consumer marketing report, after a negative experience with a brand:

• 50% of consumers will give you a second chance if you offer them compensation.

• 27% will return if you ask them for suggestions on how to improve.

• 25% will come back if your customer service follow-up is exceptional.

The takeaway? Customer service—and, to be clear, all of the above win-back strategies are forms of service—has a massive impact on revenue.

But conventional KPIs like ticket volume and time to resolution don’t capture this impact. Rethink your metrics to quantify how service affects customer lifetime value (CLV), AOV, loyalty, and brand sentiment.

Service interactions can also turn into new sales opportunities. For example, loyalty programs not only build community, they drive retention by rewarding customers and incentivizing them to come back. Personalized recommendations based on purchase history make customers feel understood while driving cross-sells.

Good customer service requires unified data and a streamlined tech stack. Any B2C service stack should contain the following:

• Customer data platform (CDP): collects, unifies, and stores customer data from multiple sources and makes it available for manipulation and distribution to systems of insight and activation channels

• Self-service customer hub: empowers customers to manage their orders, returns, and support from one account

• Omnichannel communication tools: allow you to manage mobile, web, brand app, email, SMS campaigns, and more from one place

• Personalization engines: analyze data and provide valuable customer insights

• Automation and AI capabilities: adapt to buyer behavior in real time and at scale

These tools should integrate with your marketing automation platform so that campaigns are powered by real customer information, and engagement data is fed back into your CDP to influence future strategy.

Above all, choose technology that will scale with your business. B2C businesses have high-volume, short sales cycles, and your tech stack should be able to handle tens of thousands, or even millions, of transactions and customer profiles.

Strategy is nothing without the right team. While the exact roles you hire for will depend on your brand’s needs, here are some of the main functions that a modern B2C service team handles:

• Frontline support focuses on general customer issues and manages incoming tickets, escalating when necessary.

• Support specialists handle more complex customer issues and often specialize in a particular area or product.

• Enablement supports the service team by creating knowledge bases, FAQs, and training on new products.

• Voice of the customer represents the customer’s perspective by gathering customer insights through user interviews, focus groups, and data analysis.

• The chief customer officer, also known as the “chief experience officer,” owns customer experience strategy. At some organizations, this executive oversees just customer service; at others, they oversee marketing, sales, and service.

• Lifecycle marketers follow the customer through their journey and collaborate with customer service teams to ensure that customers receive the right messaging and marketing.

Prioritize hiring for patience, exceptional communication skills, and adaptability. Every conversation is different and B2C service teams work in a high-volume environment. Because there’s so much overlap between service interactions and sales opportunities, training protocols should blend both disciplines.

Your customers expect your team members (including customer-facing marketers) to know who they are, what they’ve purchased, and their history of interactions with your brand. So to set agents up for success, make sure they have access to a unified inbox and unified customer profiles.

As with your broader customer experience strategy, create performance metrics for your service teams that reflect revenue objectives.

Data should always inform your service strategy. Unify marketing and service data to enrich every campaign, touchpoint and message with a single source of truth.

Web personalization, persistent product viewing history, wishlists, on-site recommendations, and coupons are just a few examples of how to use data to deliver a deeply personalized experience. Our future of consumer marketing report found that higher spenders (customers who average more than $100 per order) notice personalization more, so taking the time to integrate data into your service strategy can pay big dividends.

Predictive analytics, meanwhile, helps anticipate customer needs. Replenishment reminders or discounts for customers who are likely to churn are ways to deliver proactive service at scale.

Remember that with great data comes great responsibility. While some consumers are willing to share personal information with brands to enable personalization, they also expect brands to have strong policies on data protection and security, according to our future of consumer marketing report.

Make sure your brand has a strong data management plan, and where possible, share it with your customers so they can rest assured that their data is safe.

Buyer attention is more fragmented than ever. Our future of consumer marketing report found that:

• 29% of consumers discover new retail or ecommerce brands through organic social media.

• 23% find brands through the web.

• 15% prefer in-person browsing.

• 10% rely on recommendations from social media influencers.

• 7% prefer traditional advertising.

• 6% rely on online marketplaces.

• 5% lean on word-of-mouth recommendations.

Things are no different when it comes time to make a purchase:

• 53% of consumers shop with their favorite brands on mobile websites.

• 40% prefer desktop websites.

• 33% shop from marketplaces.

• 29% prefer brand mobile apps.

But more than half of buyers say their biggest frustrations when shopping the same brand in different places are different prices, different promotions, and different product availability across different channels—a glaring unforced error in the digital age.

Besides making sure messaging and offers are consistent across every channel, take note of customer preferences and behavior and act accordingly. When someone opts in to SMS, send texts at least once a month. And use channel engagement to prioritize messaging.

Remember, it takes multiple messages across multiple channels to drive revenue. A unified platform makes it easy to carry conversation history across channels, so you always know where a customer left off.

Finally, make sure that your service strategy is mobile-first and customers can get the help they need wherever they need it.

To put it all together, measure your customer service program’s successes (or shortcomings). Track operational metrics like:

• Customer satisfaction (CSAT): a score that represents how satisfied customers are with each service interaction

• Net promoter score (NPS): a close cousin of CSAT that asks how likely buyers are to recommend your business to someone else

• Customer effort score: how easy or difficult it is for customers to resolve their issues

• First response time: how long it takes for a support agent to respond to an incoming customer request (measure overall or by channel for more granular insights)

• Average handle time: tracks the time an agent actively spends working on a ticket, including interactions and follow-up work

• Resolution time: how long it takes your service team to close out a customer ticket, from when the ticket is opened to when it’s fully resolved, including any wait time or follow-ups

• Ticket reopens: how many times a ticket is reopened by a support agent, indicating that the first attempt to solve a customer problem was unsuccessful

• Ticket volume: how many tickets your service team closes within a given window of time

But also track revenue-focused metrics that show how your service program impacts your business’ bottom line:

• Churn: how many people stop being customers during a set period of time that reflects customer behavior (for example, if your average customer purchases 4x a year, measure churn on a quarterly basis)

• Retention: how many customers stay with your company over a set period of time

• Average order value (AOV): how much money customers spend in an average order

• Customer lifetime value (CLV): the total revenue you can expect from a customer over their entire journey with your brand

• Up-sell/cross-sell: the percentage of orders that include an up- or cross-sell, typically recommended via on-site blocks

Benchmark your goals against other companies in your industry and of a similar size to understand how you measure up against your peers.

Implementing all these strategies may seem daunting, but don’t worry—you don’t have to do it all at once. Here’s how to level up your customer service in just a few months:

1.  Audit your service program to identify areas that need improvement or do not currently exist.

2. Categorize these initiatives into short, medium, and long-term:

  • Short-term: Prioritize low-effort, high-impact changes as quick wins.

  • Medium-term: Make structural changes to your service program, such as setting up the infrastructure for better data analysis or   introducing new KPIs.

  • Long-term: Pursue strategic initiatives that will set you up for success, such as unifying your customer data on a single platform or  hiring for new roles.

3. Make a week-by-week implementation plan, assign roles and responsibilities to your core project team, and identify key decision makers for each initiative.

These strategies will transform your customer service program from a reactive, ad-hoc function to a proactive, deliberate growth driver. And it all starts with unifying your data on a single platform.

Klaviyo B2C CRM was designed to deliver personalized experiences at scale, so you can create memorable customer experiences by the thousands or millions.

Create the ultimate customer experience with Klaviyo Customer Hub, and try Klaviyo Service.