Grant Deken

This week, Klaviyo expanded Customer Agent—our AI-powered platform for customer service—with three major additions: Custom Skills, Custom Tools, and Agent Guidance. Any brand can now build entirely new AI workflows for their specific use cases, connect Customer Agent to any system in their stack, and govern how the agent behaves across every interaction. These purposefully are not feature updates.

Big bets are being made in the customer service space right now. From acquisitions to consumers expecting more from AI, brands are starting to ask what good customer service looks like in the agentic era. My team at Klaviyo has been thinking about this for a long time. Here’s one of the mental exercises we did to understand the mechanics behind great customer service. Think about a customer service moment that stayed with you.

Customer service has always been a reflection of the technology that powers it. Call centers scaled when phones became ubiquitous. Help desks expanded with email. Live chat rose alongside the modern web. Now, we’re at the beginning of another shift that will redefine not just how service is delivered, but who owns the customer experience itself. To understand how customer service will evolve over the next year, don’t start with scripts, staffing models, or even AI tooling. Start with data.