Come for the burnout, stay for the gatekeeping - Customer Support Klaviyo Employee Review

1.0
Jan 15, 2023
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Immediate co-workers are very friendly and there's very much an 'we're all in this together' feel (more on that in Cons) Benefits were excellent when I was there Lots of really intelligent people Salaries were pretty competitive when I was there The customer that really get the product love it. Internal operations, particularly the IT team, were amazing.

Cons

Supporting this product is insanely difficult. You honestly need an engineering background to work in basic support. You spend more times telling the customers what the product can't do than what it can. Why? Because the overwhelming majority of the customerbase are entrepreneurs at the lowest pricing tiers. They do not have the capacity to run this service, which is almost a full time job because of the complexity and non-intuitive nature. You will spend most of your days being browbeat by them in chat (with amazing hold times) and tickets (which stack up in a backlog of near 100. Oh....and you have to give the same full support to the customers on the free tier. And yes, there are customers that find ways to skirt this system and only utilize free. And you're expected to solve each issue in 20 mins. I'm not kidding. It can take twice that time just to fact gather and document. We're all in this together...there is a lot of commiserating among support team members about the role, the never-ending workload, the stress, the constant moving target that is the support benchmarks. You admire and get a little jealous when you see others leave. You will be stuck in your role with almost no upward mobility. The advancement structure in support keeps you tied into your same role for years as you are fighting for the same roles as all of your peers. Even better, the management team in support will have far less experience than you, but still gatekeep you. Their former reports and friends will get promoted. This is prevalent outside of support as well, many of the managers were holdovers from the startup days and had zero tech experience, let alone management experience. You can have a great resume, education, experience and the person determining your future at Klaviyo was misspelling names on coffee cups two years before this. As another poster said, you will be managed out. No one ever gets fired unless (not counting the recent slew of layoffs) they really do something wrong. That way you can contribute to the point where you do everything in your power to leave. And those layoffs....woof. Maybe scale back the office that no one uses and retain employees with that overhead? The gatekeeping is even part of their management interview training - they tell you not to be 'wowed' by degrees and experience. I wish I were making this up. The support director was wonderfully unprofessional - loved the sound of her own voice in meetings, rudely shut down town hall Q&A questions and would giggle about her lack of technical knowledge on the product. She had zero original ideas, cared nothing about employee development.

Explore other reviews about Klaviyo

5.0
Jul 20, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Klaviyo is an amazing place to work, the culture is great, perks are amazing, and the people really care about their roles and the company.

Cons

So many product launches, are to keep up with the many many changes.

5.0
Jul 19, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Good benefit, good WLB, genuine good people

Cons

The race to inject AI into everything has really sucked the soul out of this job

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