6 customer service trends B2C brands need to know in 2025

Marketing and customer service are often treated as separate functions. But when these teams operate in silos, it leads to fragmented customer interactions and missed opportunities.

That’s because your marketing team can’t tailor messaging that truly connects if they don’t understand the pain points your customers have voiced in the past, and your customer support team can’t provide optimal service when they don’t understand the customer’s history with your brand.

Imagine this: a customer orders a sweatshirt but gets the wrong size. Frustrated, they contact support—only to receive a promo email for matching sweatpants. The disconnect leaves the customer questioning whether the brand truly cares about their actual needs.

Without integration, marketing will continue promoting products to unhappy customers. But this can also result in you launching campaigns or providing service that miss the mark entirely.

A B2C CRM keeps all customer interactions across marketing and service in one place, creating a single source of truth for all your teams. In addition to unifying the data and detailed customer profiles you need for personalized support and marketing, it also:

• Tracks every customer interaction on every channel, so your teams never recommend the wrong products to customers or miss a complaint buried in an old email thread
• Gives you visibility into every click, purchase, and action in real-time, so the right team can react instantly to what customers want or need
• Captures full customer history from the moment they sign up, so marketing can refine targeting and customer service always has the full story

According to Gartner, voice-of-the-customer insights are the backbone of aligning marketing and service teams with customer expectations. When these expectations aren’t built into marketing and customer service KPIs, cross-functional efforts fall short of truly putting the customer first.

Customers don’t care about your internal goals—they care about getting the right support, recommendations, and resolutions. Put your customers front and center with these strategies:

• Align teams around customer-centric goals. Set joint KPIs that focus on solving customer problems, improving retention, and driving customer lifetime value (CLV).
• Work from one omnichannel helpdesk: Consolidate support on the back end by organizing all customer inquiries via email, web chat, SMS, WhatsApp, and social media into one unified workspace that’s also pulling from marketing and customer data. This ensures all agents have the omnichannel data they need to personalize service.
• Leverage analytics for smarter decisions. Analyze customer data to identify pain points, predict needs, and personalize interactions.
• Automate flows for faster support. Automated emails and texts respond to customer data and real-time behavior, allowing you to build cross-channel experiences.

Gone are the days when customers tolerated waiting on hold for answers or solutions. Now, they want fast, intuitive self-service support options for finding answers on their own, on their own time.

These days, over 90% of consumers expect self-service support options, according to Microsoft. But right now, Gartner reports that only 14% of issues are fully resolved through self-service. Even for simple problems, Gartner finds that fewer than 36% of customers find a solution without further help.

According to PwC data, while more than 50% of consumers would stop buying from a brand due to poor experiences, almost a third would leave simply because of disjointed ones. That means it’s not always about bad service—inconsistency is enough to drive customers to competitors.

This is where self-service customer experience hubs come in.

When response times lag, customers don’t wait. They move on. Picture your customer sending your support team a quick question about delivery times, only to get a robotic, “We’ll get back to you within 24–48 hours.” Meanwhile, your competitor replies instantly, solves the customer’s issue, and wins their business on the spot.

Klaviyo’s 2025 future of consumer marketing report found that when consumers have a negative experience with a brand, 81% expect a response within 24 hours. Meanwhile, 27% of Gen Z consumers—whose spending power is expected to explode over the next 5 years—expect a reply within a single hour.

Speeding up response times doesn’t mean working faster—it means working smarter. Here’s how brands can meet rising expectations with automation:

• Answer simple product queries with AI customer agents: Give customers the instant guidance they would expect from an experienced salesperson by making sure your AI customer agent is trained on your storefront, help resources, and customer database (more on this next).
• Ticket prioritization: Use AI to automatically route urgent tickets faster and make sure high-priority issues get immediate human attention. Keep existing customers top of mind—you can even tag repeat customers as high-priority tickets.
• Helpdesk consolidation: Bring all customer inquiries across email, web chat, text messaging, WhatsApp, and social into a unified workspace where all agents, both AI and human, can access full customer context—empowering them to not only respond faster, but also personalize every interaction.

On that note: AI is reshaping customer service, and businesses that don’t adapt will be left behind. According to a recent Gartner survey, 85% of customer service leaders plan to explore or pilot conversational AI in 2025.

This is because AI not only speeds up response times for FAQs, but can also turn service conversations into additional sales. You can think of AI as a mechanism for closing the marketing-service loop: while AI is serving a customer in a support capacity, it can also recommend products and capture more customer data for future promotions.

Are consumers impressed when you include their names in emails? No. But 74% of them expect more personalization in 2025, according to our future of consumer marketing report—which makes it crucial to figure out what types of personalization your specific customers find meaningful.

The higher-spending customers we surveyed in our report (those who spend over $100 on average on a retail or ecommerce product) are even more likely to expect personalization than those who spend less. And millennials (32%) and Gen Z (33%) are far more likely to notice personalized offers compared to baby boomers (17%).

Our report found that consumers tend to find offers, discounts, and product or service suggestions based on their unique behavior the most meaningful. For example, if you have a segment of customers who have requested to know when an item is back in stock, send them a personalized discount for the color or style they’ve indicated they’re interested in.

But right now, there’s a huge gap between what customers expect and what brands are delivering. Of those who took Klaviyo’s customer experience quiz, only 12% of brands currently deliver real-time personalization across every touchpoint, and only 5% provide personalized, AI-powered experiences that truly impress. 

Here are a few ways to improve those numbers at your business:

• Collect zero- and first-party data from your website and app, marketing engagement, customer feedback, and customer service interactions. A unified tech stack is essential, here.
• Leverage customer segmentation to refine your service and marketing efforts. A B2C CRM does this for you, taking data from all of your channels and updating them in real time to help you reach the right audience.
• Personalize marketing based on customer service data, and vice versa. Support teams can respond faster and more personally to customer inquiries because they have visibility into that customer’s complete history with your brand. Marketers, meanwhile,  can tailor future product recommendations based on an item a customer has returned, or pause promotional campaigns when a customer has a support ticket open.
• Personalize self-service hub experiences and AI agent interactions with recommended products, wish lists, and previously viewed and purchased items for every customer.

Knowing where your customers are most engaged allows you to reach them and support them at the perfect time. Our future of consumer marketing report found that mobile is the preferred channel for purchasing from B2C brands across industries:

• Retail and ecommerce: 53% of consumers shop via mobile websites.
• Personal service and wellness: 37% of consumers shop via mobile websites.
• Restaurants: 37% of consumers shop via mobile websites, and 38% shop in-store.
• Hotels: 39% of consumers shop via mobile websites.

But different generations discover brands on a variety of channels. For example, Gen Z and millennials are more likely to use organic social media to find new brands, whereas Gen X and baby boomers are more likely to use search engines.

With generational preferences all over the map, your customer experience must remain consistent across all channels. One-third of consumers are frustrated by inconsistent pricing and promotions across channels, according to our future of consumer marketing report. 

Here’s how you can guarantee great omnichannel customer experiences:

• Remember that consistent should never mean impersonal. Segmenting your audience with a B2C CRM lets you create tailored experiences for each customer, adjusting them for channel-specific preferences.
• Analyze customer feedback to identify trends early, allowing you to adjust your messaging and offers.
• Use AI to predict not only the best content for each customer, but the channel they’re most likely to engage on next—ensuring more relevant and effective campaigns across channels.
• Offer support that’s tailored to each channel, like dynamic FAQs and knowledge bases with quick answers on the web, a pre-sales AI agent embedded in your storefront for instant help, and live agents via text messaging or WhatsApp. 
• Make it easy for agents to deliver an omnichannel support experience with a unified helpdesk. When your human and AI customer agents can access email, chat, SMS, WhatsApp, and social media conversations from one inbox, support conversations can flow more easily without clunky interruptions. 
• Integrate self-service with loyalty programs by making it easy to check and redeem points through personal accounts on your website.

Exceptional customer service has become a key driver of loyalty and revenue. But the baseline of great customer service is constantly changing. Fail to keep up, and you’ll fail to compete.

Customer service excellence is non-negotiable in 2025, and you need the right tools to execute it.

Klaviyo is the only B2C CRM. It unites service and marketing data infrastructure and automation with a suite of service products you can use to build an exceptional customer experience:

• 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**

Don’t just adapt. Excel.

*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.