Service Is the New Storefront

"Service is the new storefront" has been a slogan for the better part of a decade, usually followed by a promise to turn a cost center into a profit center that never quite arrived. What changed is not the ambition. It is that the plumbing finally exists.

Recorded live at K:LDN 2026 in London, this conversation is about what becomes possible when a brand can pull customer data from any channel and hand it, in real time, to a human or an AI agent.

Phillip Jackson sits down with Kelly Thacker of Klaviyo's product marketing team. Her argument is that the prize is democratization: taking the best in-store associate, the person who knows both the products and the customer, and making that experience available on every channel and to every brand, not just the ones who can staff a great team.

Kelly is candid about the failure mode too, the dumb bot that asks a loyal VIP for an email address it should already have. The fix is an agent that knows the business and the customer, with escalation rules the brand sets and widens as trust grows. The number that makes the case is blunt: where is my order is still the most common question to any agent, human or AI, and automating it hands time back to people for the work that actually needs them.

She closes by looking further out, to a world where marketing and service stop being separate departments and brands begin building for agent-to-agent shopping, where a customer's agent transacts with a brand's.

You Don’t Have to Babysit Your Agent Anymore

What you'll learn

• Why the cost-center-to-profit-center promise is finally deliverable, and what specifically changed
• What separates an agent that delights from the dumb bot that frustrates
• How brands set the line between automation and human escalation, and widen it over time
• Why where is my order is the single most valuable question to automate
• How service data feeds back into marketing and the rest of the relationship
• What agent-to-agent shopping is, and why it is closer than it sounds

Pull quotes

"You could be the most loyal VIP customer, and then a chatbot asks, can you give me your email address, and you think, you should just know me." — Kelly Thacker, Product Marketing, Klaviyo [TK]

"We meet customers where they are. You build for the future, and you help them slowly get comfortable with that change." — Kelly Thacker [TK]

"A poor experience with an agent feels worse than a poor experience with a human, so the human in the loop has to be so important to this." — Phillip Jackson [TK]

"This is the moment where people will either rise to the occasion or they'll be forgotten." — Kelly Thacker [TK]

Chapters

• [TK] Cold open and introductions
• [TK] Service is the new storefront, an old promise made real
• [TK] Democratizing the best in-store associate
• [TK] The dumb bot, and what a good agent must know
• [TK] Human in the loop, escalation rules the brand controls
• [TK] Where is my order, automating the most common question
• [TK] Signals from a service chat that make marketing smarter
• [TK] The future, one brand experience and agent-to-agent shopping
• [TK] Brands doing service and experience well

In-Show Mentions:

• Learn more about Klaviyo’s Composer

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