Hey everyone,
Klaviyo has launched Custom Skills for Customer Agent, a major expansion that lets you build AI-powered service workflows that actually match how your brand works, not just the out‑of‑the‑box basics. Custom Skills is now available in managed beta, alongside Custom Tools and Agent Guidance.
Up until now, Customer Agent handled core retail use cases like order tracking, returns, product recommendations, subscriptions, and loyalty with pre-built skills. With Custom Skills, brands can go further and design their own AI capabilities on top of the same CRM foundation that already powers their marketing.
What launched
With Custom Skills for Customer Agent, brands can now:
- Build new skills for brand‑specific workflows in natural language (“Handle warranty claims for outerwear,” “Run a gifting quiz for recipients,” etc.).
- Customize how existing skills behave and make decisions, using your own logic and rules.
- Connect to any system in your stack via Custom Tools (APIs, inventory systems, loyalty platforms, reservations, returns tools, and more).
- Control how the agent behaves with Agent Guidance – brand voice, tone, escalation rules, and when to hand off to a human.
This release is part of Klaviyo’s move from a fixed set of AI features to an extensible platform for building, connecting, and governing AI agents on top of Klaviyo’s data platform.
What you can build with Custom Skills
Here are a few examples brands are already exploring in beta:
- Guided product quizzes: Run a short quiz (scent profile, skin type, style, etc.), save answers to the customer’s profile when appropriate, and use them for on‑site and campaign personalization.
- Personalized gifting advisors: Help shoppers find the right gift with a recipient‑focused quiz, while keeping those answers out of the buyer’s profile so your data stays clean.
- Warranty and repair flows: Verify eligibility, check coverage, and kick off replacements in a single conversation, rather than bouncing between multiple tools or teams.
- Store locator and reservation concierge: Connect to store/booking systems so the agent can find nearby locations with inventory, make reservations, and remember preferences over time.
Because these are skills you define, the range of use cases is wide with anything from troubleshooting devices to coordinating appointments across locations.
Why this is different from helpdesk‑based AI
Most AI service tools are built on helpdesks or as standalone point solutions. They’re good at moving tickets, but they don’t really know the customer: no full purchase history, loyalty tier, browsing behavior, or marketing context, and very little writes back when a case closes.
Customer Agent is built directly on Klaviyo’s data platform, where the full customer profile already lives (i.e. orders, browsing, loyalty, predictive scores, and more). That means:
- Before a customer sends a single message, the agent already knows who they are and what they’ve done.
- Every conversation writes back to the same profile that powers your campaigns and flows, so service makes marketing smarter and marketing context makes service better over time.
Early results reflect that: for example, Naked Wardrobe deployed Customer Agent across web and text, resolved 84% of support conversations autonomously, and saw a 28% increase in average order value without adding headcount.
Where to learn more and what to do next
If you want to go deeper or share this with your team, here are good next stops:
- Newsroom announcement (managed beta details + press release)
Klaviyo Brings Custom AI Skills to Customer Agent, Built on its CRM - Product overview
Customer Agent overview – what Customer Agent is today and how Custom Skills, Tools, and Agent Guidance fit into the broader Service platform. - Deep dives from the product and PMM teams
- Technical blog (Grant Deken, Head of Product for Klaviyo Service): We built Customer Agent as a platform, not a product
- Launch blog (Kelly Thacker, Vice President of Product Marketing at Klaviyo): Custom Skills for Customer Agent are here: build the AI workflows your brand needs
To request access to Custom Skills managed beta, use the waitlist link and contact paths in the newsroom announcement; that page will always have the most current beta details and eligibility criteria.
Question for you
If you could hand one non‑WISMO workflow to an AI agent today, end to end, what would it be? Warranty claims, guided product quizzes, store locator, something else entirely?
Drop your use case (and what systems it would need to talk to) in the replies. Those examples can help shape how we prioritize future Community content and product education around Custom Skills.
