Acquisition deepens company’s commitment to leading the future of AI-powered customer experience (CX) with new and transformative quality management capabilities

Zendesk announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Klaus, the industry leading AI-powered quality management platform. AI is driving a rapid increase in customer interactions and radically transforming the world of customer service. Customer service teams are being asked to increase their ROI by managing a rising volume of interactions while providing quality service, and increasing their organization’s efficiency in the process. With Klaus, Zendesk customers will be able to deliver consistent, high quality service across every channel and across both human and digital agents (bots) – all while unlocking the power of everyday customer interactions to increase loyalty.

“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,” said Adrian McDermott, chief technology officer, Zendesk. “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.”

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“Zendesk and Klaus share a vision of AI-led, personalized CX with businesses fully anticipating and acting on their customers’ needs,” said Martin Kõiva, CEO and founder, Klaus. “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.”

With digital agents resolving more service inquiries without human interaction, having a QA solution that analyzes both human and digital agent performance is crucial to maintaining quality control and providing best-in-class customer service. While most QA software is capable of only scoring 1 to 2 percent of interactions and cannot recognize systemic trends, Klaus’ AI scores 100 percent of customer support interactions. It pinpoints conversations with positive or negative sentiment, 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 results in higher customer satisfaction.

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WEM is a critical capability for  customer service leaders. The acquisition of Klaus will be the latest addition to the company’s existing workforce engagement management (WEM) solutions which includes 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 the first quarter of 2024 upon receipt of required regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions.

[To share your insights with us, please write to sghosh@martechseries.com]

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SaaS startup is already helping thousands of customer service agents at hundreds of enterprises to improve contact center quality and consistency; AI-automated analysis of 100% of interactions leads to focused insights and broad overview

Klaus, the AI-powered platform targeting an end to bad customer service, has raised a €12 million Series A round of equity funding led by Acton Capital. Joining the round were previous investors Icebreaker, Creandum, and Global Founders Capital. Klaus has found traction with hundreds of global enterprise customers, among them household names such as Glovo, SoundCloud, and Epic Games. The new round of funding will deepen Klaus’ core focus on product and engineering teams while bringing new growth through sales and marketing.

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Research commissioned by Microsoft shows that 95% of consumers say that customer service is important for brand loyalty, and more than 60% report having deserted a brand and switching to a rival company because of poor service. With customer reviews increasingly important for sales, the business impact of poor service can be devastating. In large enterprises with omnichannel contact centres, it is not unusual to have 2,000 or more agents handling over a million conversations per month. Such volumes make it nearly impossible to gain a real overview, and the bulk of customer conversations are a black hole. With manual review processes, it is a major time-suck to scrutinise even a fraction of 1% of total interactions.

Klaus’ AI-powered review automation platform enables the analysis and 100% coverage of customer interactions. It generates insights that are meaningful and can be relied on to bring radical service improvements to large and growing organisations struggling to maintain consistent service quality. Klaus is currently analysing over two million conversations daily from its mostly enterprise-size customers. It breaks this data down into searchable, trackable information with relevant highlights brought to immediate attention before they can become problems. Klaus’ UI is highly customizable, industry-agnostic, and runs on a cloud-based SaaS model. ‘Feedback scorecards’ that rate and track conversation quality has been at the heart of Klaus’ offering from the beginning.

Recent upgrades include customer satisfaction survey (CSAT) capabilities that are drastically boosting engagement and actionable intel through the use of its algorithms. With AI-boosted CSAT improving insight into external feedback, as well as the internal feedback provided by their core product, Klaus can now give a truly complete overview of the quality of customer support.

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Martin Kõiva, co-founder and CEO of Klaus, said, “The Series A funding means we can now scale our growth to the next level. To do that, we are seeking the best sales and marketing talent as well as adding to our team of PhD’d, data-science aces. As we hope to almost double our team in the next six months, we are excited that we have the resources to really find the best people.”

Kair Käsper, co-founder and CRO of Klaus, said, “We started with a simple idea that great conversations can turn customer service into a core revenue driver. We’ve now seen first hand how hundreds of Klaus’ customers have dramatically improved customer satisfaction scores (CSAT) and lowered first contact resolution times resulting in higher referral rates and more repeat business.”

The software integrates with all the most popular contact center platforms, including Zendesk, Salesforce, and Intercom. It pulls in every text and audio customer interaction, considers dozens of factors that are likely to be problematic, and finds all the outlier conversations that need to be looked at in more detail. These dialogues might be longer than most, include negative tone of voice, or show a customer waiting for a long time. Because Klaus reviews the entire data set, rather than random anomalies that might not be indicative of a trend, the structured feedback enables managers to give useful support to  their agents, even for the largest customer contact operations.

Julius Lühr of Acton Capital, the lead investor in this current series A round, said, “Especially in times of rising customer acquisition costs across the board, a loyal customer base sets the best companies apart in every industry. Klaus has developed the perfect tool to help companies stop flying blind and implement strategic customer support as a core differentiator. Emerging from Estonia, Klaus’ beautiful yet uniquely powerful product shares the DNA of the region’s great success stories.”

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[To share your insights with us, please write to sghosh@martechseries.com] 

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