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Zendesk Partners with Local Measure to Deliver Zendesk VoiceZendesk Partners with Local Measure to Deliver Zendesk Voice

Australian ISV brings voice and more with its out-of-the-box Amazon Connect solution. It’s the beginning of the next stage in bringing AI to the contact center.

Sheila McGee-Smith

January 27, 2025

5 Min Read

Last week, at its 2025 sales kickoff, Zendesk announced it is partnering with Local Measure to bring advanced voice solutions to large businesses and enterprises. There are three elements of this announcement I find worthy of examination, each discussed below.

Who is Local Measure?

Local Measure is an Australian-based, independent software vendor that in 2021 built an out-of-the-box CCaaS solution based on AWS Amazon Connect, Engage. Since then, the company has continued to innovate the solution, today describing the Engage platform as a pre-built, multilingual contact center platform that uses the power of AWS and generative AI.

I first became familiar with Local Measure at AWS re:Invent 2022. At the event, Local Measure announced it had signed a multi-year strategic collaboration agreement with AWS to expand its global presence and accelerate the development of its Amazon Connect-based Engage contact center solution.

In a sign of its commitment to the Local Measure relationship, AWS arranged for me to have a one-on-one meeting with Jonathan Barouch, CEO and founder, Local Measure as part of the analyst summit held in conjunction with re:Invent 2022. I was so impressed with Barouch, Local Measure, and its role in the Amazon Connect ecosystem that I made it a point to catch up with Barouch during re:Invent 2023 and 2024. We were joined by Nuri Gocay, chief solutions officer, Local Measure (pictured here in 2024).

Jonathan-Sheila.jpg

With the support of AWS and its initial customer success, Local Measure has expanded in several dimensions since I first met them in 2022. First is the size of the contact centers it supports. Barouch reports the ideal customer profile for Local Measure Engage has between 50 and 750 agents. The company has also grown - current and prospective Local Measure customers are now supported by sixty employees located not only in Australia and New Zealand but in Ireland, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Canada, and the United States. Finally, Barouch and his team stay close to the Amazon Connect product team to make sure Engage continues to integrate with the latest offerings from Amazon Connect as well as add its own, especially AI-based, features.

Local Measure’s partnership with AWS has reaped rewards, and dare I say, awards. At re:Invent 2024, Local Measure was named AWS Marketplace Partner of the Year, Asia Pacific and Japan, for the second year in a row, awarded to partners with significant AWS Marketplace transactions.

Amazon Connect and Zendesk

Early in Amazon Connect’s journey, an integration to Zendesk was built, as one of the leading CRM solutions. The integration was made simple for both companies by the fact that, like many CX software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings, Zendesk is built on AWS.

Zendesk initially managed its own on-premises data centers but started migrating to AWS in 2017. For its core applications, Zendesk uses a variety of Amazon services, including:

  • Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, which provides secure and resizable compute capacity

  • Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), a way to store and retrieve data from anywhere on the Internet.

  • Amazon SageMaker, which provides developers and data scientists with the ability to build, train, and deploy machine learning models quickly

The common AWS infrastructure facilitates joint customers pairing Local Measure’s robust voice capabilities with Zendesk’s AI-powered digital channels and CRM application to create a full customer experience platform. In the aforementioned AWS re:Invent 2024 awards, Zendesk was one of two finalists in the Customer Experience Partner of the Year, Global Technology category.

In response to emailed questions, Adrian McDermott, Chief Technology Officer, Zendesk, wrote, “Our partnership with Local Measure enhances our existing relationship with Amazon Connect and lets us serve customers with complex voice requirements not currently available in our native voice product … As AI continues to drive a convergence in the customer service software marketplace, this partnership with Local Measure gives us a more strategic approach to our upmarket customers, contact center buyers, and AWS,” McDermott added.

It is worth noting that there is nothing exclusive about Zendesk’s relationship with Local Measure. McDermott reports that, ”Zendesk partners with several voice vendors in our ecosystem and this partnership doesn't change that.”

Why Voice Has Become More Important to CRM Vendors

Over ten years ago, I wrote in “The Blurring Line Between CRM and Contact Center Software” that recent developments illustrated the growing overlap of CRM and contact center software, and that overlap should be expected to continue in the coming years. Initially, the battleground between the two types of platforms was fought on who would deliver digital interactions to agents. I would call this battle a draw – with some customers choosing email and chat support from Salesforce and Zendesk and others choosing email and chat support from their contact center vendor.

In the past two years, the clash between CCaaS and CRM vendors has shifted to who will own the customer experience-specific artificial intelligence applications in the contact center – both automation and agent assistance. It is increasingly clear that voice interactions – specifically voice transcripts – are a key data asset in bringing AI to the contact center.

Why the rise in the importance of having voice transcripts? For years, companies have talked about the voice conversations that occur between agents and customers as a treasure trove of “unstructured data.” Now, large language models can analyze and understand the context of a conversation, not just the words spoken, but also the implied meaning, intent, and emotions. Previously, this would have required extensive human interpretation.

Let me close with this graphic from Local Measure, which I believe illustrates the promise of AI in the contact center over the next few years. Many companies have started their AI journeys in the contact center with AI supporting humans – with agent assistance. Humans supporting bots is an interesting next step already being deployed by market leaders – for example, where the best agent solutions to a customer problem are programmed for automated delivery. Finally, I think of bots supporting bots as the next stage – Agentic AI.

Agentic AI as next Contact Center Phase

About the Author

Sheila McGee-Smith

Sheila McGee-Smith, who founded McGee-Smith Analytics in 2001, is a leading communications industry analyst and strategic consultant focused on the contact center and enterprise communications markets. She has a proven track record of accomplishment in new product development, competitive assessment, market research, and sales strategies for communications solutions and services.

McGee-Smith Analytics works with companies ranging in size from the Fortune 100 to start-ups, examining the competitive environment for communications products and services. Sheila's expertise includes product assessment, sales force training, and content creation for white papers, eBooks, and webinars. Her professional accomplishments include authoring multi-client market research studies in the areas of contact centers, enterprise telephony, data networking, and the wireless market. She is a frequent speaker at industry conferences, user group and sales meetings, as well as an oft-quoted authority on news and trends in the communications market.

Sheila has spent 30 years in the communications industry, including 12 years as an industry analyst with The Pelorus Group. Early in her career, she held sales management, market research and product management positions at AT&T, Timeplex, and Dun & Bradstreet. Sheila serves as the Contact Center Track Chair for Enterprise Connect.

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