[00:00:00] Phillip: A lot of sayings that we all say that maybe we don’t quite mean, like, “let’s keep in touch over the summer,” or “I’m so hungry I could eat a horse,” or “I’m literally dying.” But let’s add to the top of the pile: service is the new storefront. Now, I’ve heard this for years, okay, that we’re going to take these cost centers in e-commerce and in retail, we’re gonna turn them into these profit centers. But it takes a special kind of organization and team to do it, and it takes a special kind of platform that delivers a differentiated product to do it. And some really have over the years. But some just deliver a promise with a trademark tagline. When I sat down with Kelly Thacker and I asked her, is that really what you’re doing here at Klaviyo? She challenged me. I… I was actually surprised at the answer, because what Klaviyo has actually built here, and the products that they’ve announced at Klaviyo London, has risen to the challenge. They’re not just bundling a bunch of LLM features into an AI and saying these are CX tools for the brand marketer. They’re saying you can actually trust your brand with your customer, because your data is the context for your brand’s experience. And why is this important? Because we’re in the age of AI? Because we’re in the age of LLMs, or answer engines? No. Because customers are living in those tools, and they’re asking for recommendations. They trust the recommendations, but they still want control. Our data, Future Commerce data, tells us that 77% of customers want to click through and finish the purchase on the brand website.
[00:01:43] Phillip: And that means that they’re having the relationship with the brand, not with the answer engine. And that means they want the service relationship with the brand. And as these brands scale, they need to be able to deliver the experiences at scale. And they need to be able to answer the kinds of questions that customers have at scale, and free up resources for the human in the middle, the human in the loop, so that they can deliver better service overall. Kelly Thacker at Klaviyo, she answers these questions for me, and we have a really honest conversation about what is real and what is hype in AI in this industry. I hope you enjoy this. Let’s go live to my conversation with Kelly at K:LDN 2026. One thing I keep hearing from marketers is that the job doesn’t get any smaller even though we’re using AI. It’s actually getting a little harder. You go slow, slow, slow, and then fast. And that makes the job a little strange for marketers, because the expectation now is more personalization, more channels, more testing, more speed, and then more relevance. And as we’re hearing in this season, more context, more customer context, and more automation. But somehow, we’re doing all with less headcount. And that’s why Klaviyo’s latest release caught my attention. So, as you may have heard, Composer is what’s allowing these teams to live less in a tool, building every campaign, every message, every workflow, and making CRM more of an operating layer that helps you to get work done. And that super matters right now, because B2C teams are carrying more channels and carrying out more customer expectations and personalization pressure, and somehow doing it all in the same number of hours in the day.
[00:03:31] Phillip: So this newest release is built to take more of that busy work off of your plate. Composer can audit your campaigns and identify what’s missing. And then there’s Customer Agent, which can resolve shopper questions across chat, email, SMS, WhatsApp, and now in more than 100 languages. And Klaviyo’s social marketing can turn Instagram DMs and comments into profile data that triggers all of your flows. And I think that last one is super interesting, because social interactions, they usually disappear into the platform. With Klaviyo, those signals can become part of the customer profile that actually shape what you do with that data next. And so this release is not just more marketing tools. It helps you actually have customer relationships in your system. It makes it a CRM platform, and then you can act on it. So no more copy pasting, no more hopping across channels, and no more “did anyone follow up on that” in your team Slack. You need more connected data and more automation, and that’s what Composer and Customer Agent and Klaviyo Social Marketing all helps you to do. That gives you more time for the work that actually needs a human. So you can see all of this. That’s available right now from Klaviyo at klaviyo.com/new. That’s klaviyo.com/new. Now let’s get you back to the show. I’m gonna… I’ll come out hot though, because I have some hot takes on this.
[00:04:57] Kelly: I love a good hot take.
[00:04:59] Phillip: Alright. And I want you to…
[00:05:00] Kelly: I may challenge your hot take.
[00:05:01] Phillip: I want you to set the record straight. I think that’s the thing.
[00:05:04] Kelly: I’m gonna set the record straight. Yeah. Based on all of the customer conversations and what we’re building, hit me.
[00:05:09] Phillip: Hello, and welcome to Future Commerce, the podcast at the intersection of culture and commerce. I’m Philip, and we are coming to you live from K:LDN here, 2026. And what a turnout. This has been such a great event so far.
[00:05:22] Kelly: Incredible.
[00:05:23] Phillip: Yeah. And I’m here with Kelly Thacker.
[00:05:24] Kelly: Wait. I said the h is not silent.
[00:05:27] Phillip: Not… I said it.
[00:05:28] Kelly: I said Thacker.
[00:05:29] Phillip: I said… thank you.
[00:05:30] Kelly: Great to be here. Thank you for joining us.
[00:05:33] Phillip: I’m so glad to be here. And it’s my second year, but I know that this is a multi-year event, and it’s representing the entirety of the European ecosystem for all of Klaviyo, and what a turnout it is for…
[00:05:45] Kelly: Great turnout. And then it is the entire… people flown in from all parts of Europe.
[00:05:49] Phillip: That’s…
[00:05:49] Kelly: Right. But then tonight, we are headed to Paris, because we get to take this show on the road, and then we are going to Germany. We’re going to Berlin.
[00:05:56] Phillip: That’s great.
[00:05:57] Phillip: Yeah. I just came from Paris. I’m missing all the hot weather.
[00:06:00] Kelly: I know. Think it is.
[00:06:01] Phillip: But you’re gonna turn the heat up anyway. I have a hot take right out of the gate.
[00:06:04] Kelly: Let’s go.
[00:06:05] Phillip: I have been hearing the phrase “service is the new storefront” for the better part of eight, ten years now. We’re going to turn a cost center into a profit… I’ve heard this many, many times.
[00:06:19] Kelly: I’ve been marketing that for about ten years.
[00:06:20] Phillip: I’m sure you have. But I think this is your job to do. It is. And I’ve seen the transformation around what Klaviyo’s old model and the old product used to be into the suite that it is today.
[00:06:35] Phillip: How are you delivering on it?
[00:06:36] Kelly: Yeah. So just to be clear, we still have the old product. It is getting better, but we’ve evolved it. So, just focused on marketing, just, you know, more focused initially on the SMB market, now focusing on SMB all the way up to the biggest enterprise, and then extending into service. And outside of retail, we really support anyone in the B2C space. So it’s been all those… that whole, like, evolution of who we are has been in the last probably about eighteen months. I’m gonna give you a hot take on top of your hot take.
[00:07:05] Phillip: Okay.
[00:07:06] Kelly: Haven’t you heard that we are all going to deliver a one-to-one personalization for the last ten years?
[00:07:11] Phillip: Fifteen years maybe.
[00:07:12] Kelly: Right. Yeah. But do you think today, more than any other time in, like, the technology history, we’ve been able to do it? We… we are actually… I think it’s more. On that.
[00:07:23] Phillip: Yeah. More possible now than it is.
[00:07:24] Kelly: Right. So I think it’s the same thing for turning a cost center into a revenue center. It’s the same reason that now we have the ability, the technology, to be able to collect the data from anywhere and to make that data available to agents, not just human agents, but now AI agents. And so take your… like, what’s your favorite store that you like to shop? Like, a retail store.
[00:07:48] Phillip: Where I like to go.
[00:07:49] Kelly: Name your best store.
[00:07:50] Phillip: Oh my gosh.
[00:07:50] Kelly: Because of the experience.
[00:07:52] Phillip: Oh, the experience. Yeah. Like, an example. Like, the perfume store.
[00:07:56] Kelly: Okay. Great.
[00:07:57] Phillip: Right.
[00:07:57] Kelly: So imagine that person that has… a really…
[00:08:00] Phillip: A million people just hated my guts for it, but that’s okay.
[00:08:02] Kelly: I… I don’t hate you for that. Your preference. It’s bougie. Whatever. Alright. So imagine that you take the… the person at that store who is incredible at her job or his job. They know all the products. They know how to deliver the most delightful customer service. Right? And imagine you can democratize that for any brand and across any channel. So now, with having data, kind of the ability to take data from anywhere, from any signal, from any channel in real time, and now you’re, like, handing that data to, again, a human agent or an AI agent. And that AI agent all of a sudden has the ability to not just take a question about “where is my order” and really turn that into more of a conversion moment. So that is, like, the power of where we are today. And, again, I think never has there been a time where technology has been ready for us to do that. And so we’re here. We’re excited. I think as a company that started really focused on the brand side and marketing, being able to tell a marketer, like, oh, now you have the ability to take all those incredible signals that you’re getting and to hand it over to their service side so that they can help deliver revenue. That is a dream, and yeah, we’re here. I believe it.
[00:09:12] Phillip: I mean, I’m believing it. Think that’s the challenge today, is that I keep hearing… I hear a lot of things. We’re in the age of autonomy. It’s something I’ve been talking about all year, that businesses want to automate more than ever before. Not just through rote automation, “I’m connecting this thing to that thing.”
[00:09:31] Phillip: How do we empower not just, like, the marketer, the operator, to have more autonomy in their role?
[00:09:41] Kelly: Focus more on the strategic stuff.
[00:09:42] Phillip: Correct.
[00:09:43] Kelly: Automate the things that are more manual that we shouldn’t be doing anyway.
[00:09:46] Phillip: And that becomes more of a generalist role than it used to be, like a specialist role. And I think… so this… we could go deep on that. But I… I think that in that way, the other side of that is the consumer is becoming a lot more… they have this other side where they want to self-service everything.
[00:10:09] Phillip: Right? And so you have autonomy… sovereignty on the other end. They want to be able to fulfill all of their own needs. You could say that that’s happening with their taxes. Maybe they’re putting their health information to ChatGPT. I don’t know if that’s still advised. But for service, it could be that they want to use their LLM or their answer engine for self-service. Why would they go to the brand? Tell me how they wind up at the brand and how the brand better serves them, and the portal of choice is not the LLM?
[00:10:44] Kelly: Yeah. I mean, it’s a good question. I think the way that consumers discover has really changed. And so some of the foundational models have done that in… So a good… great… now if you’re looking to find the best, I don’t know, running shoes, or what to wear in Paris…
[00:11:03] Kelly: You have the ability to go to your, you know, AI of choice and ask that question just to discover. But there’s been a lot of research and… and data that’s showing that consumers ultimately wanna go to a brand site, just in the same way that consumers are never gonna stop shopping in real life. They wanna go to the store. It’s a very tactile experience. You wanna feel things. And all of a sudden, when you land on the brand site and it’s done really well, you have the ability to, like, hyper-personalize based on who that customer is. All of a sudden it feels like that incredible experience, right, that storefront experience where you’re in a store, you’re being greeted in an experience that’s been very much, like, personalized for who you are, what you’ve shopped, what you love, what your orders are. And so it… it kind of makes it a true, like, incredible, fun, curated experience, which an LLM just can’t provide.
[00:11:52] Phillip: Yeah. I’ve…
[00:11:53] Kelly: Heard something like that. Yeah. So you wanna be able to serve your customers where they are. You wanna be able to deliver, like, the brand ethos that you are. And that is, like, the website is where all that stuff shows up, or the marketing, or the service. And so, we have found consumers that are able to go to an experience that feels like it was built for them, it’s personalized for who they are, they can ask questions, they can chat, right in line, where they are, like, that just makes a way better experience. And they’re gonna become more loyal to that brand, they’re gonna shop back at that brand. And so… we’re just… we’re, as a very, like, deeply rooted customer-centric company, we don’t do anything without talking to our customers, without having the data to back it up. It is how we build. From day one, it’s how we’ve built. And all of the brands that have been using Customer Agent have seen such incredible results. And so it’s been such a fun ride to be at a company that started as a database. So we know that data-first has always been our mentality. When you have always been a data-first company, it means that you can just have incredible, powerful AI. And so that means we can deliver these really delightful experiences and turning agents, again, whether they’re human agents or AI agents, turning them into true, like, brand ambassadors, some of the best sales reps, like, that’s… that’s the end game that we’ve all been talking about for ten years. And, yeah, it’s been fun to actually deliver on that.
[00:13:14] Phillip: There… this happens in the human-driven service world. So I don’t wanna say this is exclusive to AI. But there’s a thin line between service that delights and service that frustrates.
[00:13:24] Kelly: Yeah. Right? Oh, that’s… we call it the dumb bot experience.
[00:13:28] Phillip: Yeah. Sure.
[00:13:28] Kelly: Where you could be, like, the most loyal VIP customer, and then all of a sudden you ask a question with one of the chatbots and it is like, “can you give me your email address?” And you’re like, ugh, you should just know me.
[00:13:42] Phillip: You should know who I am.
[00:13:43] Kelly: You give them your email address, and it’s not like, oh, this is a moment to delight that customer. Instead, they’re asking you questions that they actually already have in the marketing profile, but it just hasn’t been surfaced to the agent. And so, yeah, you have this really frustrating experience that we’ve all had. Like, that… this is the moment to end that bad frustration.
[00:14:04] Phillip: Mhmm. This is more amusing than anything. I… I believe, and… and maybe I could be proven wrong, but I believe that a poor experience with an agent feels worse than a poor experience with a human service rep.
[00:14:21] Kelly: Yeah, for sure.
[00:14:22] Phillip: And so I sense that there’s some hesitation on the part of a brand to give up part of their experience over to an agent. And so that’s why the human in the loop has to be so important to this. How do we integrate that not just as a talking point, but how do we actually make it real?
[00:14:41] Kelly: Yeah. Okay. Question. Do you know the number one most asked question to an agent, human or AI?
[00:14:49] Phillip: I… I mean, I assume it’s WISMO. WISMO.
[00:14:51] Kelly: Yeah. 52%.
[00:14:52] Phillip: Where’s my order for those?
[00:14:55] Phillip: I don’t know how you’re listening to this and you don’t know what…
[00:14:57] Kelly: It means. “Where’s my order?” Still, 52%, most-asked question, still today. Can you imagine if 52% of your human reps’ time was given back just by not having to answer those questions? And so we, like, we believe that every brand needs to own their comfort level of how much do you wanna automate with an agent versus how much do you wanna escalate to a human. And so, as of our agent experience, we build those escalation rules in, and we allow the brand to make that choice. I think that if you train up your agent and it knows, again, number one, it needs to know who you are. Who… who is your business? What do you care about? Who do you build for? What is your brand colors? What’s your voice? Is it clever? Is it… is it, like, I don’t know, like California? Like, whatever it is, like, the… the agent needs to act on behalf and represent your brand in the most real way. So number one, like, know your business. Number two, know your customer. And I think most of the frustration comes from agents that actually just don’t know who you are.
[00:16:03] Kelly: And so I give an example which I think most customers, marketers at least, get super excited about. When you’re having a customer conversation with an agent, just imagine the best AI agent that you have. Right? And I give an example, like here in London, maybe I just moved to Manchester. I share that I’m a size zero, obviously, or two, whatever. Right? I… I share that I’m looking for a coat, and, but moving from London to Manchester, I’m not really sure about the right fabric. And so all of these rich signals, right? Like, imagine if all of those signals could be fed back into the profile to enrich it so the next marketing send could be that much more personalized, and then vice versa. Imagine if your AI agent was able to know all of that rich data about who you are. And so that question that you asked about, “I’m going to a wedding, I need to find a great dress.” It’s like, “know you live in… oh, are you still in Manchester, or is this wedding outside?”
[00:17:02] Kelly: “Are you still a size two? Or are dresses a different fit than coats?” Like, all of a sudden, that frustration turns into delight. But again, if you are, like, as a brand, “I’m not comfortable with that. I’d rather have a stylist answer those questions.” No problem. You build in the escalation rules, and so the agent is literally just acting on whatever feels most comfortable. And then as the agent gets smarter over time, as the brand gets more familiar and comfortable with that model, then you can continue to enhance what the agent is able to answer versus not. So I think you just have to meet… like, we believe deeply that you meet your customers where they are. Like, we at Klaviyo believe that you build for the future, you meet customers when they arrive, and you help them, like, slowly get comfortable with that change.
[00:17:49] Phillip: The… I’m having been on the brand side for a decade. I know the best… the best human service reps…
[00:18:02] Phillip: …did all of this instinctively.
[00:18:04] Phillip: Right? They built the profile based on a conversation that they had. Right? They didn’t have to be told. They also were the ones that performed the best. They had the probably best…
[00:18:12] Kelly: Had to be trained.
[00:18:13] Phillip: Yeah. They… they had a level of training, but they’re the ones who opened up the CRM or the… the back end of the system. And they were like, well, they would build the profile, because they knew it was the right thing to do for the brand. And I think that just the consistency of the level of experience, not just for the customer. We always think about the customer at the end of the day.
[00:18:30] Phillip: But the brand experience of having a level of predictability of experience of what it’s like from rep to rep, that has been a challenge as an operator myself. And so, never mind the CX piece and operationalizing it as a… a CX team. You have now this ability to engineer something that just… I don’t think could be done at a team level before without a tremendous amount of training.
[00:19:00] Phillip: And so what you’re talking about now is, I think, table stakes. Most people assume that that’s what we’re going to do. What comes after that?
[00:19:10] Phillip: And who’s winning right now? What… what brands are winning with… with service?
[00:19:15] Kelly: So I really dislike shopping. I had no way… I… I was like… right now, surprising to me. Do I say this out loud because of what my role is? No. But I do. Like, I don’t like the whole going to a shopping mall. It’s overwhelming for me. I’d much rather be outside. But I do love a good outfit. Right? And so I like going to stores that feel curated for me. I like knowing when something new is coming in that may be my size or maybe my vibe. And so I really do think the future is, like, forget marketing and service, it’s just brand, and the kind of the true silo that exists between those two departments will be fully gone. And I do believe that there will be, like, my… I will have an agent that will be shopping on my behalf across all the brands that I love, across brands that I don’t love, like, just discovering new things, and it’ll be coming at me with recommendations, knowing my… it’ll be connected to my calendar. It’ll know that I have certain events coming up. It’ll know my inventory, my closet inventory. It will know what groceries I have. Like, it’s truly gonna be connected to every part of my life to remove the friction so that I don’t have to do what I actually do not like doing. So I do think that brands will be building experiences not just for humans, because there are lots of people that will still love to go shopping, and that is still very much gonna be that tactile experience that people love. But I do think that brands are gonna have to start building for agents.
[00:20:44] Phillip: I agree with that.
[00:20:45] Kelly: Right? And so all of a sudden you have, like, true, like, agent-to-agent experiences. And so, like, in this short future, which is not, like, a long time away, it’s not… we’re already doing that at Klaviyo. Right? You’re building for this future, for agents that are gonna be representing other brands. And then all of a sudden you have this, like, proactive, like, WhatsApp or text or whatever your channel preference is, like, feeding you things that maybe you should think about. It’s gonna know your loyalty status at all these different places. It’s gonna have this profile of who you are, and not just me, but my entire family. Knowing that school starts, your kids need to size up, like, all the things. I think this is, like, the future, whether we like it or not. I was at the… I shared with you, the business of fashion, business of beauty forum last week in Napa.
[00:21:34] Kelly: And I was asking, like, a room full of founders, like, how uncomfortable does this make you? And half the room raised their hand, the other half was, like, fully leaned in.
[00:21:43] Kelly: So I think it’s, like, the era of the haves and the have-nots. Like, this is the moment where people will either rise to the occasion or they’ll be forgotten. And so I feel like this… it is different from personalization, where we were saying it’s table stakes. Of course, you have to know what customer to send to what channel, what time, what content. Most brands haven’t been able to deliver on that, and they’re still here. But I do think in this AI era, like, that is going… going to change. And, again, there will be brands that will, like, stay on top, and then there will be brands that will be forgotten. So, agent-to-agent, I love that. Very much the future.
[00:22:16] Phillip: And I think that that’s happening right now. We have a whole piece at Future Commerce. We’ll link it up in the description below about… we believe that there is a best-practice way for you to be building for a future where humans and agents can coexist together, that you don’t have to separate them on separate rails. Yeah. That’s a whole separate conversation. We don’t have to get into it now. What brands are winning on service?
[00:22:38] Kelly: So many brands. I mean, again, I don’t… I… I don’t separate service from marketing. I think just experience. So I was just with the… the Skin Rocks team.
[00:22:50] Phillip: Oh, wow. I don’t…
[00:22:51] Kelly: Know if you know them. Yeah. It’s such an incredible, like, brand story of how they started and how they’ve grown in the short three and a half years. And they, like, very much believe… like, they have, like, a no-bullshit mentality. And so their whole philosophy and ethos is around helping you, like, understand skin and kind of the science of skin better. So really kind of removing the 15 steps that every human needs to do especially as they age. Like, it’s all about, like, selling you and marketing to you only what you need, removing the, like, marketing parts of, like, skincare. And I just… I know there’s something so beautiful about, in this age of just constant consumerism, that you have a brand that very much stands behind… it’s like, if you don’t need something, we’re not going to tell you to buy it. And so the way that their marketing and servicing is very much, like, anchored to support staff, they’re all aestheticians, like, beauty experts. They’re not only recommending products that they have in their portfolio, but they’re recommending products they don’t have. So sunscreen was an example. Ultra Violette is an incredible brand also. And I think they do a great job at, like, marketing and service, but they have a great SPF. Like, they are known for their SPF.
[00:24:05] Kelly: And so with Skin Rocks, they were like, guess what? We don’t have SPF, but we’re gonna recommend this killer product because we believe in the ingredients. And we believe in what they’re doing. So I think any brand that can stand behind their ethos, that can really kind of anchor to that, and regardless of whatever else is going on in the world, they stand behind it, I think is doing an incredible job. So Skin Rocks is amazing. Dermalogica also incredible. So they’ve built this skin analysis tool. You take a photo, and then you upload the photo, and all of a sudden, like, every single email, every single support, everything that you get from Dermalogica is all fully aligned to who you are and what your skin type is. And so all of a sudden it feels like things are very personalized to you. Like, the noise of everything else goes away. So I think incredible experience is all about personalization. Do you know me? Do you… are you treating me like your best customer? Am I getting, like, very personalized communications when I chat with your human agent or your AI agent? Do you know who I am? Like, that is great service. So those are two brands I think you’re doing a great job.
[00:25:11] Phillip: I love it. Kelly Thacker, VP of Product Marketing. Thank you so much for joining us.
[00:25:15] Kelly: Thanks for having me.
