Exit Klaus: Zendesk acquires AI-powered quality assurance platform

Tallinn/San Francisco – 13 Feb, 2024 – Klaus, AI-powered quality assurance (QA) platform from Estonia, has been acquired by Zendesk, industry-leading SaaS company for customer support management. Founded by Martin Kõiva and Kair Käsper 2018 in Tallinn, Klaus has been Acton Capital’s 3rd investment out of the new ACTON VI fund and has raised a total of $19.3 million from investors including GFC, icebreaker and Creandum. With the successful transaction, Acton Capital is selling all its shares to US-based 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,” explains Martin Kõiva, CEO and co-founder of Klaus.

“As part of Zendesk, we will continue to build and deliver these crucial capabilities, but now at an even greater scale.”

Martin Kõiva, Klaus

“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,” adds Klaus’ co-founder Kair Käsper.

“Klaus is the perfect showcase for the implementation of AI to drive day-one business value and shares the DNA of Estonia’s great success stories.”

Julius Luehr, Acton Capital

“Martin, Kair and their team have built a best-in-class SaaS solution to help companies establish a loyal customer base and a core differentiator through exceptional CX. With the integration into the Zendesk portfolio they’ve found the ideal environment to unlock Klaus’ global potential,” says Julius Luehr, Partner at Acton Capital.

Adrian McDermott, CTO of Zendesk: “Workforce engagement management is key to not only meeting, but exceeding customer expectations. A traditional satisfaction score won’t tell you everything you need to know. It won’t tell you where there are gaps in your service, or where there are opportunities for coaching and additional training for your support teams. With Klaus as part of our WEM portfolio we have new features such as AI-powered AutoQA. We can give businesses everything they need to automatically and accurately assess the performance of their support teams to deliver consistent, high-quality service across every channel and through both human and digital agents.”

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 1-2% of interactions and cannot recognize systemic trends, Klaus’ AI scores 100% 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 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.