Getting started with Klaviyo's Customer Agent

You will learn

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:

1. Navigate to Service > Customer Agent in Klaviyo’s main navigation.
   
2. Click Get started to enable Customer Agent. Klaviyo will begin automatically syncing with your Shopify storefront to train Customer Agent. This may take a few moments, but you can continue setting up while it syncs.
3. Next, you can add additional public URLs, like your help centers or knowledge base, to continue training Customer Agent.
4. Finally, you can 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 for the question in your helpdesk platform (Klaviyo Inbox, Zendesk, or Gorgias).

   • Send a message: Enter a custom message and any helpful links (e.g.,an email address to contact or directions to your help center).

     Only the helpdesk solutions listed above are supported for the Send to helpdesk option. If you use a different helpdesk provider, we recommend setting up a custom message instead to direct visitors on how or where they can get assistance. Learn more about support handoff settings.

     
      

5. Now you’re ready to test your agent! Navigate to the Playground tab to ask a question about one of your products or policies. You will see how well Customer Agent learned your website.
   • Tip: Converse with and ask a variety of sample questions a shopper might have, ranging from broad to specific. This helps you reveal any knowledge gaps you may want to close by adding additional knowledge sources. 
     
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6. If you are confident with the responses, turn on at least one channel in the bottom left corner of your screen to activate Customer Agent on that specific channel. If you’d like to continue testing or improve Customer Agent’s knowledge, continue with the rest of this guide for additional training and optimization tips.
   

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.
• 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 SMS:

• 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