Zendesk, a global specialist in customer service software, has made an addition to its portfolio. The company announced a definitive agreement to acquire the artificial intelligence (AI)-powered quality management platform, Klaus. This acquisition supports Zendesk's ambitions to shape the future of AI-driven customer experience (CX), according to the company.
Klaus, renowned in the industry for its AI capabilities, is crucial to managing the rising volume of customer interactions. The evolution of customer service, influenced heavily by AI, has seen a significant uptick in customer interactions. This trend has increased pressure on customer service teams to not just maintain, but also tangibly enhance the quality of service and efficiency.
By leveraging Klaus, Zendesk's customer base will be able to deliver uniform high-quality service across all channels, and most importantly, across both human and digital agents. This move will unlock the potential of every customer interaction by serving to boost loyalty.
Adrian McDermott, Chief Technology Officer at Zendesk, highlights the necessity of AI-driven quality assurance (QA) in this evolving landscape.
He said, "As AI drives up the speed and frequency of customer engagement, only AI-powered QA can keep up as companies work to identify and fix gaps in their customer service operations. The combination of Zendesk AI and Klaus capabilities will ensure both digital and human agents deliver highly personal and empathetic service."
Both Zendesk and Klaus believe in an AI-centric, personalised CX that pre-empts and meets customer needs. Martin Kiva, CEO and Founder of Klaus, emphasises that, "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' AI can analyse 100% of customer support interactions, as compared to most QA software that struggle to score more than 1-2% of these interactions. The system not only identifies conversations with positive or negative sentiment, it also spots discrepancies, churn risk, escalations, and follow-ups across all dialogues.
This versatile capacity, extending even to interactions conducted by outsourced teams, is a game-changer in optimising agent performance and productivity, and consequently enhancing customer satisfaction.
The integration of Klaus marks Zendesk's latest stride in workforce engagement management (WEM). This follows the acquisition of Tymeshift, a contemporary workforce management tool, in June 2023. The finalisation of the Klaus acquisition is predicted to take place in Q1 2024, subject to specific regulatory approvals and conventional closing conditions.
Overall, Zendesk states the company is on a mission to simplify the complexity of business and make it easy for both companies and customers to create connections. Zendesk's customer experience software unlocks interactions, enabling businesses to build more meaningful relationships with their customers.
