Two weeks ago, Zendesk announced its acquisition of Klaus, the contact center quality assurance (QA) platform provider.
Klaus automates quality scoring and leverages conversational analytics to offer additional insight into every contact center conversation.
That aids manual evaluation, allowing contact center supervisors and quality analysts to isolate coaching opportunities more easily.
Yet, Klaus also provides learning management solutions to seize these opportunities with targeted coaching and improve agent performance.
From there, contact centers may measure the impact of the coaching via automated quality scoring.
As such, Klaus effectively allows brands to build this cyclical connected learning strategy. In itself, that is an exciting new platform and proposition for Zendesk to offer its customers.
However, the customer experience analysts who took part in our soon-to-be-released BIG News Update spotted three more reasons why the acquisition may make waves.
1. It’s Likely to Add Significant Insight to Every Zendesk Ticket
When Zendesk integrates Klaus into its stack, every ticket will likely come with that automated quality score.
However, Zendesk may go further, leveraging Klaus’ conversational analytics to add more data to every ticket. That could cover customer sentiment, hot topics, long pauses, keywords, and more – alongside the customer’s contact reason.
These insights will allow supervisors to get into the weeds when analyzing agent performance. Yet, they could also aid root-cause analysis, complaint management, and resource planning initiatives.
Consider the latter, as many resource planners now leverage Zendesk after its 2023 acquisition of the workforce management (WFM) platform Tymeshift.
Soon, they may use Klaus QA data to evaluate how changes to agent schedules and breaks impact performance – at both an individual and team level.
If Zendesk unites these WFM and QA tools within a central workforce engagement management (WEM) suite – it may compete with the likes of NICE, Verint, and Calabrio at the top of that market.
That potentially opens up another growth engine for Zendesk to land new customers and cross-sell its helpdesk, CRM, and conversational AI solutions.
2. It Funnels Lots More Data Into the CX Ecosystem
"What Zendesk does very effectively is pull the contact center into the rest of the CX "at large" ecosystem," said Liz Miller, VP & Principal Analyst at Constellation Research.
That ecosystem compiles commerce, marketing, and sales data for a unified CX approach.
Yet, perhaps most pertinently, that cross-function data will feed the new AI models that many service, sales, and marketing teams plan to implement in the coming years.
