You might know Klaviyo as a B2C email and SMS marketing automation platform, but that’s just one piece of a more complete customer platform. The company recently announced some new capabilities that make this clearer and demonstrate the increasing need for B2C companies to deliver unified experiences across the entire customer lifecycle. Klaviyo’s Chief Product Officer, Adil Wali, walked me through what’s new and shared the company’s vision for a new era of consumer relationships.
A little background. Klaviyo’s co-founders started the company as a database in 2012, quickly adding email marketing and, over the course of the next decade, SMS, attribution, and reviews. In 2023, it announced its customer data platform (KDP – K for Klaviyo) with advanced analytics.
Wali pitches Klaviyo as fundamentally a data company. The idea is that the data platform underlies the use cases you need to support customers. It is the “nucleus of the business.”
Although the first use case was marketing, that was never intended to be the only one. With the Klaviyo Data Platform providing capabilities such as unified profiles and segmentation, there are many opportunities for new use cases.
But it’s the entire platform introduced as a B2C CRM that is interesting.
The recent announcement from Klaviyo introduces what they call “the only CRM built for B2C.” What does that mean exactly? How does a B2C CRM differ from one that supports B2B?
Wali explains it this way – a B2B CRM is designed to support high-touch interactions, primarily at the account or company level. So, it’s a smaller number of companies, a smaller number of interactions, and usually longer sales cycles. A B2C CRM, on the other hand, supports low-touch, high-scale interactions. Wali said the communication needs to be scalable, and there’s a heavier reliance on technology to support them.
But that’s just the start. A B2C CRM includes support for both Marketing and Service because it combines all customer data into a single platform and effectively enables companies to blur the lines between marketing and service. As per Wali: 
People have been talking about for years this idea of blurring the lines between marketing and service? Talked about, hey, you know, service needs to move from a cost center to a revenue center, or revenue driver. [ ] And we talked about it for a while, we haven’t really gotten it right. And I think a big reason for that is the real unlock is if you start to move those service interactions up the funnel – like, up that consideration funnel and sort of buyer funnel, because today, service is this thing that happens after there’s a problem, right
In other words, Klaviyo enables B2C companies to use service capabilities to drive more first-time buyers because you can bring service interactions further up the consideration funnel.
With the announcement of the B2C CRM came new capabilities for marketing and service.
A new customer hub – Along with marketing capabilities, Klaviyo is now offering a service solution; the first component is the Customer Hub. The Customer Hub is a signed-in consumer experience – a one-stop destination to manage everything about their shopping experience, from what they’ve bought and looked at, their wish list, loyalty points (with third-party integration), returns, and more. There’s even a chat with Klaviyo AI, which can seamlessly escalate to a real support person, keeping the full context of the conversation and the entire history of the customer relationship available to the service rep.
Expanded marketing analytics – Wali argues that analytics have always been a big part of the Klaviyo platform, but now there’s a Marketing Analytics solution that provides new capabilities for marketers to better understand customer and purchase behavior. Not only understand it but make it actionable. For example, marketers can identify patterns like repeat purchases or cart abandonment by a person or a segment. They can also create dynamic customer segments that they can use throughout the entire experience, such as a VIP shopper. These segments can support personalized campaigns or personalized service and be used to automate outreach. Wali said they can also track how trends are changing in real-time.
New marketing capabilities – Although the primary focus is the CRM and new Customer Hub, Klaviyo also announced some enhancements to the firm’s marketing solution, including the ability to orchestrate campaigns across multiple channels, including email, SMS, and mobile messaging. Automated SMS conversations allow customers to interact with a company, as well as offering a good way for Service to engage with customers.
Coming soon – channel affinity, where AI can predict the right channel to engage a customer and a new Campaign Builder that is fully omnichannel.
B2C has traditionally been transaction-driven. But that’s no longer the case. Customers expect seamless experiences; they don’t distinguish between marketing and service. And that means B2C companies can’t separate these functions and expect to be successful.
According to Klaviyo’s pitch: 
Marketing isn’t just pushing messages. Service isn’t just fixing problems. Analytics isn’t just collecting data.
 B2C companies need to move away from a siloed customer-funnel approach, and a platform like Klaviyo that brings all customer data together under one roof can help them unify teams and data across the business.
To be fair, this is not only a B2C challenge. Bringing customer data together is challenging for companies of all types and sizes. That’s why customer data platforms are fast becoming a must-have technology that sits at the foundation of all tech stacks.
Klaviyo sees itself as unique, and in some ways it is. However, when I look at its offering, it’s easy to draw comparisons across other platforms, like HubSpot (which is more B2B driven) and Bloomreach (a closer B2C comparison), both of which have a customer data platform underlying all the solutions or components or hubs (choose your term) built on top. It’s about connecting teams on a common data set, allowing each to see what the other is doing and enabling interactions that build off each other.
What I do see as unique for Klaviyo is the desire to bring service capabilities further up the funnel. Automated SMS is one example of this, but finding ways to leverage service capabilities earlier and not only after a purchase is smart. Wali talked about his former time at a retailer where they had customer support specialists (stylists) interact with new customers, helping them make purchases in addition to providing post-sales support. Today, AI can provide some of these capabilities.
Ultimately, the idea is to break down silos for end-to-end seamless customer experience. Klaviyo is helping to do this with its latest announcement, and it’s something more B2C companies are thinking about.
Image credit – Pixabay
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