Getting started with Klaviyo's Customer Agent

Learn how to activate Klaviyo's Customer Agent, an AI-powered tool that provides instant support to your website visitors. Customer Agent ingests information from your Shopify store, and learns any additional information you provide, to answer shopper inquiries across web chat, SMS and email (beta).

Before you begin

Customer Agent is supported in the following channels:

1. Web chat, which should be enabled via Customer Hub settings and set to live on your site
2. SMS, via an active sender that can receive inbound messages (toll-free, short code or long code) 

Customer Agent offers full support for accounts with: 

1. A Shopify storefront
2. Conversations occurring in English

Non-Shopify and non-English speaking merchants will experience limited and experimental functionality with Customer Agent.

About Klaviyo’s Customer Agent

Customer Agent is a 24/7 virtual assistant tool that helps your site visitors quickly get answers to their questions. It automatically learns from your Shopify storefront and any additional knowledge you provide to reduce the volume of inquiries handled by your human support team.

Customer Agent acts as a first point of contact for support and sales questions. It answers questions across web chat, SMS, and email (beta), and has the ability to:

• Provide tailored, real-time product recommendations
• Instantly answer common inquiries (e.g., product-specific questions, store policies, etc.).
• Give order status and tracking updates
• Escalate questions it can’t answer to your support team or communicate alternative help options. 

Learn more about how Customer Agent learns.

Enable Customer Agent

To enable Customer Agent:

Set it up

The Get started page provides a dynamic checklist to guide you from initial sync to live launch.

1. Enable and Sync

1. Navigate to Service > Customer Agent.
2. If this is your first time, click Get started to enable Customer Agent.
3. Complete all the onboarding steps, including add your website URL so the Agent can learn from your website.
4. Once you’ve completed the onboarding steps, you’ll land on the Get Started page

2. Configure Voice and Tone

1. On the Get started page, locate the Up next card or find Set voice and tone in the task list.
2. Click Update voice and tone.
3. Customize how the agent communicates (e.g. formal vs friendly) to match your brand.

3. Connect a Helpdesk

1. Click the Tell where to hand off task (or Connect to Helpdesk).
2. Specify how you’d like Customer Agent to handle conversations when it can’t answer a customer’s question:
   • Send to helpdesk: Customer Agent creates a new support ticket in your platform (Klaviyo Helpdesk, Zendesk, Gorgias).
   • Send a message: Enter a custom message (e.g., directions to your help center).

4. Train and Test

1. Click Add your FAQs to upload files, snippets, or URLs that cover policies not found on your product pages.
2. Click Take for a test drive or Test skills.
3. In the Agent Preview tab, ask questions about your products or policies.
   • Tip: Try follow-up questions to probe Customer Agent’s knowledge further.

5. Launch

When you are confident in the responses, click into the launch pages for the channel(s) you want to launch your Agent on, and follow the steps on that page.

For more in-depth information on the launch pages, check out this article.

Key features and best practices

Test and train your Customer Agent

Customer Agent learns by scraping your website’s pages, but it may not be able to answer every type of question right away. To ensure your Customer Agent provides accurate and helpful responses, it’s important to test it by asking a variety of questions about your website in the preview environment (the Playground tab in Klaviyo). Test extensively before launching your Customer Agent, and continue to test regularly after it goes live.
 

If you notice gaps during testing or want to proactively address common customer inquiries, you can improve your Customer Agent’s knowledge by manually adding information in the Knowledge tab.
 

You can upload:

• Files
• Snippets
• Webpages

Learn more about how to test and train your Customer Agent.

Note that Customer Agent uses your website to inform its tone and messaging in responses. Currently, you cannot customize the tone or style of Customer Agent directly. 

Expand its visibility/impact

When your Customer Agent is live and trained to answer questions, increasing its visibility so customers are prompted to engage with it and learn it’s available to answer their questions. Best practices for this include:

For Web Chat:

• Set web chat settings to All users so that any site visitor can engage with Customer Agent, not just authenticated visitors. To do this, go to Customer Hub -> Extensions -> Web Chat -> Visibility.
  • Note: You'll also need to enable Customer Agent on the web chat channel by going to Customer Agent -> Settings -> Channels and toggle web chat to on.
• Create and display FAQs on product pages. When a shopper clicks a question, the Customer Hub interface launches and Customer Agent answers in the Chat tab.
• Enable a hub launcher, which is a floating chat widget that opens the Chat tab when clicked.

For Text Messaging:

• Once you've turned your Customer Agent on for Text Messaging, you'll see a new tab in Customer Agent > Settings > Marketing that lets you specify an agent conversation starter. This is the default text that will be inserted into the SMS editor if you check 'Include Agent Conversation Starter'. 
• Update cart or browse abandonment flows to see if your customers have any questions that your Customer Agent can help answer. Use natural questions like “Can I answer any questions before I check out?”
• Update your welcome series flow to introduce your Customer Agent. Use guiding questions like “Not sure which style is right for you? Just reply here.”
• Update your post-purchase flows to let customers know they can ask order questions.
• When sending your next SMS Campaign, let customers know they can reply with questions.
   

Monitor Customer Agent’s conversations on the dashboard

All of Customer Agent’s conversations are recorded in your overview dashboard, along with key performance metrics such as the Conversations resolved by AI and AI attributed revenue. A low resolution rate can indicate knowledge gaps and areas where your Customer Agent may need additional training.

Review these metrics regularly, either weekly or monthly depending on your volume of customers engaging with Customer Agent, or more frequently if you are making significant updates to your website, products, or policies.

Additional resources

• Understanding how Customer Agent learns
• How to change your support handoff method
• Getting started with Customer Hub