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.