Zendesk recently announced it had signed a definitive agreement to acquire Klaus, the industry-leading AI-powered quality management platform. And AI is driving a rapid increase in customer interactions and radically transforming the world of customer service. Customer service teams are now being asked to increase their ROI by managing a rising volume of interactions while providing quality service and increasing their organization’s efficiency.
Through Klaus, Zendesk customers can deliver consistent and high-quality service across every channel and both human and digital agents (bots) – all while unlocking the power of everyday customer interactions to increase loyalty.
As digital agents resolve more service inquiries without human interaction, having a QA solution that analyzes human and digital agent performance is essential to maintaining quality control. Even though most QA software can only score 1% to 2% of interactions and cannot recognize systemic trends, Klaus’ AI scores 100% of customer support interactions. It locates conversations with positive or negative sentiment and identifies outliers, churn risk, escalations, and follow-ups across all conversations, even those done by digital agents or outsourced teams. Klaus spots knowledge gaps and coaching opportunities that can be used to improve agent performance and productivity, all of which lead to higher customer satisfaction.
WEM is a critical capability for today’s customer service leaders. The acquisition of Klaus will also be the latest addition to the company’s existing workforce engagement management (WEM) solutions, including Tymeshift, a modern workforce management tool built exclusively for Zendesk. The company acquired Tymeshift in June 2023. The acquisition of Klaus is anticipated to close in Q1 2024 upon receipt of required regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions.
KEY QUOTES:
“As AI drives up the speed and frequency of customer engagement, only AI-powered quality assurance (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 help businesses navigate greater complexity and volume and ensure both digital and human agents deliver highly personal and empathetic service.”
— Adrian McDermott, chief technology officer, Zendesk
“Zendesk and Klaus share a vision of AI-led, personalized CX with businesses fully anticipating and acting on their customers’ needs. 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.”
— Martin Kõiva, CEO and founder, Klaus
