Zendesk: Zendesk launches product powered by Local Measure and Amazon

As Zendesk awaits final approval for its Local Measure acquisition, it is already leveraging the latter's technology and has transitioned two chief technology officers to its Sydney office. In February, ARN reported Zendesk had acquired Sydney-based Local Measure to expand into complex service environments and boost its artificial intelligence (AI) voice capabilities. The proposed acquisition will be implemented via a scheme of arrangement and its closing is subject to standard conditions, including the customer experience (CX) software vendor's shareholder approval and necessary regulatory and Australian court approvals. The transaction is expected to be finalised in May 2025. A month since the acquisition, the integration contact centre specialist has announced Zendesk for Contact Centre, with "advanced voice powered by Local Measure and Amazon Connect" during its annual Zendesk Relate conference held in March 2025. Zendesk Contact Centre brings AI-powered voice capabilities to contact centre conversations, "without the cost and complexity of traditional CCaaS [contact centre as a service] solutions," said Zendesk product engineering and AI president Shashi Upadhyay. The announcement follows the transition of Zendesk chief technology officer Adrian McDermott and chief technology officer for North America and Asia Pacific Jason Maynard to Local Measure's Sydney office after the initial acquisition announcement. McDermott said Local Measure has a robust application layer built on Amazon Connect. "When integrated with Zendesk, [we] will accelerate our ability to provide a comprehensive end-to-end platform solution for our customers," he said. The first phase of a relationship In an interview with ARN, conducted just after the acquisition, Local Measure CEO Jonathan Barouch said it had been approached a couple of times in 2024, but ultimately chose Zendesk as it "was the best home". "Financials aside, I think we were really passionate about our culture around our core values, and around our team," he said. "We do [calls] every 18 months to get the team together. For us, we were looking for a place that kind of shared that spirit of entrepreneurship and camaraderie. "You know, it's always scary for a small company to learn to land in a big business; ... we are 60 people." Zendesk's Maynard told ARN the two companies had moved beyond the "early dating phase of getting to know one another" and were focused on working together to focus on co-developing products. "We've had a native voice product in the market for over a decade and it has worked really well for our small business customers," he said. "However, as our customers have grown and moved toward larger contact centres, we realised they needed more capabilities. "[Local Measure] stood out because their approach aligned so well with ours. They shared similar values when it came to product development, ease of use and the overall philosophy of how we go to market." "It felt like a natural next step for us to deepen that relationship," he reiterated. The AI imperative One of the cornerstones of the acquisition was Local Measure's relationship with Amazon Web Services (AWS), which goes back to 2020. In 2022, Local Measures signed a three-year strategic collaboration agreement with AWS, making it the first technology partner of the cloud giant within Australia and New Zealand (A/NZ) to do so. When the acquisition was announced, Zendesk CEO Tom Eggemeir said "by acquiring Local Measure, we are fast-tracking our ability to deliver a fully integrated, AI-powered voice solution that combines Zendesk's platform with Amazon Connect." Barouch said over the past two years, Local Measures has been "focusing on AI". "We now have a gen AI [generative artificial intelligence] competency with AWS, though we're not yet at the point of fully automated experiences," he said. "Our team is still small and while we're excited and experimenting with different things, there are still some latency issues. "We've done a few proof-of-concepts and taken a different approach by asking about the tasks that a human agent does that we can automate or eliminate right now." For example, Barouch explained, in many contact centres agents are often writing things down by hand, like personal identifiable information (PII) or credit card numbers, while talking to customers. "But with our technology, as we transcribe voice calls in real time, we're also performing entity extraction to understand the conversation and populate the case," he said. "If it's an insurance claim, for instance, the agent would usually be taking notes and typing it into a form, possibly even putting the customer on hold. "But with our system, this is all done magically in real time, so by the time the conversation ends, the claim form is fully filled out. This dramatically changes the experience because the agent can focus on the conversation without distractions, which is pretty cool." Local Measure has also launched real-time translation with two of its customers. "These companies now have English-speaking agents in the Philippines serving non-English-speaking customers, which allows them to operate 24/7 without having to find skilled labour in those languages," said Barouch. "This results in significant cost savings and a greater ability to serve minority or disadvantaged communities, offering customer service in multiple languages." It was also looking at automating tasks like dispositioning, tagging relevant topics for reporting, summarising calls and performing warm handovers. Adding AI will help customers when getting transferred to another agent to ensure that any new agents speaking with the customer will already have a summary of their issues and a suggested solution. "These are just a few of the improvements we've been building, anticipating that eventually, we'll have the tech to fully automate agenting experiences," said Barouch. Securing the data When it comes to security, he explained that Local Measure doesn't store any customer data, it's all stored within the customer's account. "In fact, our gen AI tools improve security. For example, in the Connect product, we have the ability to scrub PII in real time," Barouch noted. "We can perform data masking and scrubbing before the information is even stored, and we provide access controls to determine who can view the full version versus the redacted version." Maynard explained this was similar on the call centre vendor's side. "Even in places where customers opting to transcribe those calls into a conversation and into a ticket," he said. "We have PII redaction masking to make sure that anything sensitive in those conversations can be masked protected in the in the proper ways, and you much more secure to have it in that workflow than." He told ARN Zendesk has built out a lot of the "advanced data privacy and protection capabilities into the product" to protect that type of information, even if it's coming through telephony, chat or email. "Just the ability to work with unstructured data and have many more controls at a granular level; ... the textual level is another level of protection that I think gives customers confidence that their data that's in the cloud is protected," Maynard said. Overlap of customers and partners The strong emphasis on security from both organisations will resonate with both customer groups, as there is already a significant overlap in their customer bases. "Some of them are excited because they feel like, 'Finally, we don't have to buy a third-party product for the enterprise-level stuff and we want everything on Zendesk," noted Barouch. "They love Zendesk; for them it's great ... - one contract, one relationship and one fully integrated product." Then, there are customers who aren't on Zendesk yet and are really curious, he explained, and want more information about Zendesk, its products and services. "We're in a phase where we're working as partners, independently, and obviously all of this is subject to close in May," he said. "We're doing our best to help them understand our roadmap without going too far into specifics. Barouch believed there was "no sense of competition or awkwardness". "The industry is so well-known and established," he said. "It's almost like a Hoover, synonymous with customer service. It was interesting to see how genuinely curious people were about the capabilities that could be unlocked once everything is finalised." As for partners, Barouch said Zendesk has a number of "amazing partners". "We've got a bunch of partners. There's a bit of overlap in the Venn diagram," he said. "I think we have to upskill the Zendesk partners on our products and we have to upskill the AWS partners on Zendesk. "We've got two buckets of education. The ones in the middle are ready to go; that's who we're going to be leaning on to start," he added.