8 ways to transform customer service strategy

Good customer service requires unified data and a streamlined tech stack so that your strategy is always data-informed. Unify marketing and service data to enrich every campaign, touchpoint, and message with a single source of truth.

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
• Personalization engines: analyze data and provide valuable customer insights
• Omnichannel marketing automation tools: allow you to coordinate and automate mobile, web, brand app, email, text messaging, WhatsApp, and more communications from one place
• Omnichannel, AI-powered helpdesk: streamlines customer inquiries across all channels into a single unified inbox for customer service management
• Self-service customer hub: empowers customers to manage their orders, returns, and support from one on-site account
• AI customer agent: answers questions, recommends products, and resolves issues instantly while adapting to buyer behavior in real time 

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.

The traditional view of support as something that starts after a purchase is outdated.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 web 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 from your consolidated tech stack 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 a self-service 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. 62% of consumers would prefer to shop with AI that remembers their purchase history over explaining their preferences to sales associates, according to Klaviyo’s 2025 BFCM forecast.

A reactive approach to customer service won’t keep pace with these expectations. Make sure your brand invests 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
• Data-based experiences: recommendations, special discounts, replenishment reminders, dynamic on-site content, and loyalty program reminders, all based on browsing and purchase history

These self-service resources deflect common and repetitive requests, freeing up time for team members to focus on high-complexity scenarios. Happy Wax, for example, reduced order tracking tickets by 75% after implementing a self-service customer hub. Self-service 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 (LTV), AOV, loyalty, and brand sentiment.

Service interactions can also turn into new sales opportunities. You might, for example, trigger a follow-up flow offering a free gift or discount after a customer initiates a return through your AI customer agent. When every conversation includes complete profile, order, and marketing data, replies are accurate, personal, and on-brand, improving buyer confidence in the long-term.

On that note: AI agents have been part of a standard B2C customer service strategy for some time, but they’re often siloed away from storefront and customer marketing data. When AI customer agents are instead trained on product and customer data, they’re in a much better position to start generating sales while serving customers more effectively. 

Here are just a few of the outcomes you can expect when your AI customer agent is trained on all your data:

• Faster, higher-quality responses: AI customer agents can answer questions in real time about sizing, product materials, and more, because they’re trained on your product catalog and help docs.

• Personalized product recommendations: AI customer agents can recommend products as a chat is happening based on a customer’s past orders and buying intent.

• Smoother escalation: Data-informed AI customer agents can escalate more complex queries to a live agent with complete conversational context.

• Proactive engagement: When a customer is showing high buying intent on your website, an AI customer agent can proactively offer support and help guide a purchase.

• Post-purchase support: An AI customer agent doesn’t disappear after check-out. If a customer needs to track their order, modify a subscription, or initiate a return, the AI agent can solve the problem automatically.

Let’s say someone places an item in their cart but doesn’t complete the purchase. An AI customer agent can proactively offer answers to common questions about the product, so the customer feels more confident about a purchase.

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. To set your team members 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.

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.

The takeaway is that your customer service strategy needs to meet customers where they are—on multiple channels, with full context about who they are and how they interact with your brand. 

On the back end, you can deliver this experience through a unified helpdesk that keeps every customer conversation—from email, text messaging, web chat, WhatsApp, and even social—in one place. Whereas the customer experiences your service as consistent and personalized across multiple channels, your AI and live agents are accessing all those interactions through one inbox.

This isn’t just helpful for customer service, though—it’s crucial for marketing, too. If you’ve ever seen a promotion for a brand you’re having an issue with, you know why. When marketing and service are connected through a unified helpdesk, you’ll be able to pause that text campaign for the customer with an open helpdesk ticket that’s being resolved on Instagram. 

And on the flip side, you’ll also be able to send a post-resolution win-back flow to keep satisfaction high after the ticket has been resolved.

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
• AOV: how much money customers spend in an average order
• LTV: 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.

To isolate the impact of service on these metrics, run correlations using proxy metrics (i.e., low CSAT vs. high CSAT, logged-in customers vs. guest check-outs). Whatever metric you choose, make sure it separates customers who have benefited from your service program from those who haven’t.

Implementing all these strategies may seem daunting, but don’t worry—you don’t have to do it all at once.

First, audit your service program to identify areas that need improvement or do not currently exist. Then, 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.

Finally, 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 the complete Klaviyo Service suite, which includes:

• Customer Hub: a personalized destination where customers can manage orders, redeem offers, discover products, and get support—all in one place
• Klaviyo AI (K:AI) Customer Agent: a 24/7 AI assistant that’s trained on your storefront and customer data to answer questions, recommend products, and resolve issues instantly, across web chat, email, text messaging, and WhatsApp*
• Helpdesk: brings AI and human agents into a unified workspace across email, chat, SMS, WhatsApp, and social, providing full customer context for faster response times and more personalized interactions**

*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.