Zendesk has signed a definitive agreement to acquire the quality assurance (QA) platform provider Klaus.
The acquisition comes after Zendesk’s 2023 roll-up of Tymeshift, a workforce management (WFM) provider that builds solutions exclusively for its platform.
Now, by combining these two platforms, Zendesk has a fully-fledged workforce engagement management (WEM) portfolio – and may try to compete with the likes of Verint, NICE, and Calabrio in that market.
Yet, Adrian McDermott, Chief Technology Officer, Zendesk, kept the focus on the immediate benefits Klaus may bring to its customers.
“As AI drives up the speed and frequency of customer engagement, only AI-powered quality assurance can keep up as companies work to identify and fix gaps in their customer service operations,” he said.
The combination of Zendesk AI and Klaus’ capabilities will help businesses navigate greater complexity and volume and ensure both digital and human agents deliver highly personal and empathetic service.
Indeed, with customer service teams facing more complex customer conversations – thanks to the uptick in self-service for simple queries – Klaus’s QA offering will help ease the burden on contact center agents that leverage Zendesk.
Furthermore, Klaus’s software scores 100 percent of customer support interactions. As such, each ticket may soon come with a quality score alongside additional snippets of conversational intelligence. Such intelligence includes sentiment insights, predicted churn risk, transfer rates, and more.
All this information may help quality analysts, supervisors, and resource planners – including those who utilize Tymeshift – in developing their employee engagement strategies.
For instance, those planners may spot at what time, on which channel, and in which environment (i.e., in-office or at-home) agents work best. Such insights will help them optimize schedules and bolster agent performance simultaneously.
From an AI standpoint, Klaus provides “plug-and-play” Auto-QA and smart filters to aid manual contact evaluations – alongside the aforementioned conversational analytics.
Martin Kõiva, CEO and Founder, of Klaus, is excited to now bring these capabilities to a broader audience.
“Zendesk and Klaus share a vision of AI-led, personalized CX with businesses fully anticipating and acting on their customers’ needs,” he said.
“QA software plays a critical role in this, ensuring consistency, assessing both human and digital agent performance and providing actionable insights for strategic planning.
“As part of Zendesk, we will continue to build and deliver these crucial capabilities, but now at an even greater scale.”
Klaus also brings with it a range of big-name brands, including SoundCloud, Universal Music Group, Epic, Pipedrive, Wise, Automatic, Bolt, and Glovo.
The acquisition of Klaus is expected to be finalised in the first quarter of 2024, following regulatory approvals and other customary conditions being met.
