Zendesk has unveiled a new CCaaS platform: Zendesk for Contact Center.
The announcement follows last month’s acquisition of Local Measure for a reported $100MN.
Local Measure is a close contact center partner of AWS. It offers a CCaaS platform known as “Local Measure Engage.”
While that acquisition is yet to close, Zendesk for Contact Center signals a relaunch of that product.
The CRM giant has especially high hopes for it, too. Indeed, Zendesk issued a press release suggesting it will advance the solution to “redefine the contact center landscape”.
That’s not necessarily from a capability perspective. After all, Local Measure offers many of the same capabilities as Amazon Connect, just pre-packaged.
Instead, Zendesk may aim to redefine the landscape by converging its contact center technologies.
First, it had CRM. Yet, over the past two years, it has picked up quality assurance (QA), workforce management (WFM), and customer support automation providers.
These roll-ups were of Klaus, Tymeshift, and Ultimate, respectively.
Additionally, Zendesk inked an iron-clad partnership with Poly AI for voice AI. It has also developed an employee service suite (more on this later!).
The core contact center capability was this missing piece. Local Measure has solved this.
Yes, it had Zendesk Talk, which became Zendesk Voice. However, this was a CCaaS lite for SMBs built on Twilio. Local Measure is a CCaaS platform leveraged by organizations with thousands of seats.
Now, by immersing it within a deep customer service stack, Zendesk may pull the technologies together, innovate, and help support teams centralize their data.
“It’s all enterprise-grade. All its products are properly integrated,” claimed Jonathan Barouch, Founder & CEO of Local Measure, in an interview with CX Today at Enterprise Connect 2025.
If you think about other CCaaS vendors, they don’t have the knowledge repository, the multiple years of tickets and engagements on which you can train AI. Zendesk does.
Nevertheless, one potential concern Zendesk may have in chasing the CCaaS market is upsetting many of its close contact center partners. Now, they’ll become rivals.
The likes of NICE, Genesys, and Five9 have long-term, close relationships with enterprises. To protect those accounts, they could now recommend alternative CRM partners.
However, the opportunity to differentiate and deliver that converged stack appears too great, and Barouch is all in on this mission. He summarized:
Customers think: I want to buy where my data is. I want to buy from a brand that has customer trust. I want to buy from a brand that has a multi-product portfolio. I think in that converged world, Zendesk wins.
Once the Local Measure acquisition closes, Barouch and his team will join Zendesk. There, they will support many of the company’s 100,000+ customers as they transition to the platform.
Zendesk CEO: We Want 10, 20, or 30 Thousand CCaaS Customers
High demand from Zendesk’s customers helped drive the acquisition forward, according to Barouch.
While Zendesk has many close relationships with CCaaS providers, those customers didn’t necessarily always want to partner; they wanted something native.
As such, since news of the Local Measure acquisition broke, Zendesk has received a “tremendous” influx of inquiries from brands “with 50 to several thousand seats”.
“Every week over the past five weeks, the inbound interest has increased,” revealed the Local Measure man.
“We have approximately 60 customers globally, which we’re really proud of. They love us and renew, some with hundreds, some with thousands of seats.
Tom [Eggemeier], the CEO, said: “We’ll love those customers, too, but we want it to be ten, 20, or 30 thousand customers.”
Of course, that brings a significant scaling challenge. Yet, Barouch believes the CRM giant will be well set to deliver once the Zendesk for Contact Center product reaches general availability.
He noted: “There are lots of people across Zendesk that understand contact centers, all the way up to the CEO,” who – up until 2019 – served as President of Genesys.
“So we’re heavily engaging with that talent to create champions across the business and leverage a Center of Excellence for Contact Centers model,” concluded Barouch.
The Local Measure team may also offer an overlay of expertise across the business.
Yet, they won’t just bring contact center nous. Indeed, they also offer deep knowledge of Amazon Connect, Bedrock, and other AWS applications.
With this, Local Measure established a highly composable CCaaS platform that should – given that Zendesk also sits on AWS – integrate tightly into the provider’s portfolio.
Beyond that integration, the Local Measure team may drive innovation beyond the contact center and across Zendesk applications.
For instance, data from its workforce engagement management (WEM) suite could influence routing within the Zendesk for Contact Center.
Pouncing on such opportunities may help Zendesk take further advantage of its converged service stack and capitalize on its chief differentiator.
Introducing the Zendesk Resolution Platform: A New Agentic AI Hub
Zendesk announced the new CCaaS platform during its annual conference: Zendesk Relate 2025.
However, the contact center solution didn’t lead the vendor’s keynote; its new agentic AI platform did.
The Zendesk Resolution Platform acts as a hub for AI agents. These agents reason, learn, and adapt to – over time – automate more and more customer contacts.
While the platform will provide pre-built AI agents for customization, it also offers an AI Agent Builder to help contact centers create unique agents for specific service needs.
Yet, the platform doesn’t only offer AI agents; it also houses the new Zendesk Knowledge Graph and Knowledge Builder.
The Knowledge Graph consolidates knowledge sources for the AI agents to access. Meanwhile, the Builder uses AI to analyze successful tickets before filling gaps within those knowledge sources and updating existing content.
Celebrating the platform’s release, Eggemeier said: “The only metric that matters in customer service is resolution. The Zendesk Resolution Platform is not just making service faster; it is making Agentic AI actually work for service, solving every issue with less effort and better outcomes.
Our network of AI agents built with service at the heart works like a well-trained search and rescue team, ensuring every interaction leads to a resolution.
Other notable platform features include an Action Builder that connects AI and human workflows and a no-code App Builder. The App Builder allows businesses to develop custom apps and apply them across the Zendesk ecosystem.
Lastly, the vendor promises a purpose-built QA module and AI Insights Hub to monitor AI agent performance – alongside AI Reasoning Controls. The Controls offer real-time visibility into an AI agent’s thinking.
The Zendesk Employee Service Suite: Another New Solution
Zendesk is expanding its platform to support a new type of service: employee service.
Indeed, the vendor has put forward a new solution where teams working in Zendesk can receive “rapid resolutions” to their HR- and IT-related queries.
The offering – known as the “Zendesk Employee Service Suite” – connects with HCM and ITSM systems. It also boasts AI agents that delve into these systems to share answers to various employee queries.
Additionally, it provides a “tailored agent workspace” for employees to manage task lists, check approvals, and more.
Last year, Salesforce inserted a similar employee service module into Service Cloud.
However, with its WFM solution, Zendesk could – over time – present a deeper suite here.
Eggemeier added: “The new employee service suite is easy to implement and scale across departments, ensuring quick time to value and a low total cost of ownership.
Zendesk future-proofs employee service with an easily integrable, adaptable, and customizable solution that empowers organizations to navigate a rapidly evolving workplace while leveraging the power of agentic AI.
Lastly, the vendor plans to build upon the suite “in the coming months” and release IT Asset Management, helping service leaders track their employees’ hardware and software.
