Retail brands using Klaviyo's AI customer service tool can now build entirely custom agent workflows beyond the platform's standard capabilities. Klaviyo (NYSE: KVYO) announced the launch of Custom Skills for Customer Agent on April 30, 2026, giving brands the ability to extend their AI agent beyond out-of-the-box capabilities and build customer experiences unique to their business on the same CRM foundation that already powers their marketing.
What Custom Skills Add to Customer Agents
Customer Agent already handles order tracking, returns, and product recommendations. Custom Skills takes it further, letting brands define their own logic in plain language, build skills from scratch, customize how existing ones behave, and connect them to any system in their tech stack.
Every brand manages customer interactions in its own unique ways. A luxury brand handles a return differently from a global retailer with multiple product lines. A subscription brand has different loyalty mechanics than a one-time purchase brand. The feature is designed to address those gaps without requiring developer involvement.
According to Klaviyo's April 30 press release, the three components of the update, Custom Skills, Custom Tools, and Agent Guidance, are intended to work as a layered system. Custom Skills define what the agent does. Custom Tools connect it to external systems. Agent Guidance governs brand voice, escalation rules, and handoff behaviour.
Use Cases Klaviyo Highlights
With Custom Skills, Klaviyo identifies use cases including a reservation concierge that learns preferences across sessions; a personalized gifting advisor that helps shoppers find gifts for someone else without impacting their own customer profile; and connections to physical-world systems such as store locators, appointment booking, and warranty claims.
These examples represent workflow types that standard prompt-based AI service tools cannot execute, according to Klaviyo's announcement. The company states that configuring escalation logic, enforcing multi-step return sequences, or isolating a gift recipient's answers from the buyer's profile all require the kind of custom logic that Custom Skills is designed to enable.
How It Differs From Helpdesk-Based AI Tools
Most AI-powered service tools are built as stand-alone systems or on legacy helpdesks, which manage tickets but lack the customer context needed to make interactions personal and actionable. Customer Agent is fundamentally different because it's built directly on Klaviyo's data platform, meaning every interaction is informed by real-time customer context like purchase history, browsing behaviour, and loyalty status. Every conversation and resolution is written back to the same profile to improve future service interactions and fuel better personalized marketing experiences.
That architectural distinction is central to the company's positioning. Andrew Bialecki, co-founder and co-CEO of Klaviyo, stated: "At the core, this is about where AI lives. As AI becomes a primary interface for customer interactions, this architectural difference becomes more important. When brands can provide immediate context, resolve requests, and confidently guide the next step for customers, they will have an advantage. Klaviyo's autonomous approach, building agents where the data already lives, positions Custom Skills not just as a feature, but as part of a longer-term structural advantage in how brands deliver customer experiences."
Early Adoption
James Thorngren, Marketing Director at Naked Wardrobe, said: "We've trusted Klaviyo for years, so when Customer Agent launched, we moved immediately." He added, "Now, with Customer Agent, AI is out there styling our customer, answering questions, selling the right piece, at two in the morning when our team is asleep."
High-growth enterprises, including Mattel, TaylorMade, Glossier, Liquid Death, and Daily Harvest, are among more than 193,000 paying Klaviyo customers.
Platform Context
Customer Agent was first broadly released in September 2025. At its flagship event, K:BOS on September 25, 2025, Klaviyo unveiled its Marketing Agent and broadly released its Customer Agent, establishing the company as an AI-first B2C CRM unifying data, marketing, service, and analytics in one platform. The March 2026 expansion of pre-built retail skills, covering order tracking, returns, subscriptions, product recommendations, and loyalty, preceded the Custom Skills release by approximately five weeks.
Klaviyo states that Customer Agent currently resolves 65% of questions autonomously. HappyWax VP of Marketing Rachel Fagan reported that in a 90-day period, Klaviyo Customer Agent handled over 50% of support conversations without any service team involvement, giving customers instant answers while freeing staff for high-touch interactions.
Implications for Retail Marketing and CX Teams
For retail brands evaluating Custom Skills, the practical distinction from standard AI service configurations lies in the ability to define multi-step logic, connect to third-party systems, and write interaction data back to customer profiles, all without engineering resources. Brands using Klaviyo for email and SMS marketing may find the tightest advantage in the shared data layer: service conversations that update the same customer profile, driving marketing segmentation. Teams considering adoption should account for the operational overhead of maintaining custom skill logic as return policies, product catalogues, and escalation rules evolve over time.
Custom Skills for Customer Agent is available now in managed beta. Brands can join the waitlist through Klaviyo's Customer Agent product page.
