Future Tech
Zendesk | January 08, 2024
Zendesk today 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."
"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.
WEM is a critical capability for today's 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.
About Zendesk
Zendesk is on a mission to simplify the complexity of business and make it easy for companies and customers to create connections. Our customer experience software unlocks the power of billions of interactions, enabling businesses to build rich, meaningful relationships with their customers. The company was conceived in Copenhagen, Denmark and today operates in more than 20 countries around the world.
About Klaus
Klaus is an AI-powered quality management platform that helps companies drive revenue through excellent customer service. Headquartered in Tallinn, Estonia, Klaus was founded in 2018 by Martin Kõiva, Kair Käsper and Egon Sale and has nearly 100 employees.
Read More
Software
Persistent Systems | January 05, 2024
Persistent Systems (BSE: PERSISTENT) (NSE: PERSISTENT), a global Digital Engineering and Enterprise Modernization leader, announced a multi-year Strategic Collaboration Agreement with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to accelerate the pace of innovation and development of generative AI solutions for clients. Persistent is a long-standing AWS Partner and has a proven track record of early scale generative AI adoption across multiple industry verticals leveraging services like Amazon CodeWhisperer and Amazon Bedrock. Amazon CodeWhisperer provides generative AI-powered code recommendations directly in multiple integrated development environments (IDEs) to help developers build applications quickly in more than 15 coding languages; Amazon Bedrock is a fully managed service that makes foundation models (FMs) from leading AI companies accessible via an API to build and scale generative AI applications.
This strategic collaboration with AWS will help Persistent to further increase the impact it delivers to its clients that are embracing generative AI. Through this teaming, Persistent will have access to additional resources from AWS to build proofs of concept to help clients identify tangible business outcomes from generative AI. This will also support use case discovery and rapid build out of solutions with additional go-to-market funds from AWS. One of the key benefits to combined clients will be continued early access to AWS's generative AI services and investments that will help clients with their aspirations around growth, time-to-market, and better customer experience.
The Strategic Collaboration Agreement builds on Persistent's 30+ years of software engineering heritage, its best practices from more than 120 AWS engagements for cloud migration and modernization, and its 2,500 AWS practitioners to enable flexible and scalable generative AI-powered solutions tailored to clients' unique needs. Persistent's AWS Migration Competency status provides proven cloud expertise to help clients move successfully to AWS through all phases of complex migration projects. This collaboration reflects Persistent's proficiency in building robust cloud infrastructure, crucial in today's cloud-first, AI-first world, enabling clients to implement cloud-powered generative AI solutions.
These combined assets from AWS and Persistent can bolster the value provided to joint clients, helping them unlock the full potential of their technology investments.
Rajiv Sodhi, Senior Vice President – Hyperscaler Business & Strategic Alliances, Persistent:
"Enterprises across industries are looking to tap into the transformative potential of generative AI to reimagine, redefine, and rethink their business models for improved customer experiences and business growth. Combined with our newly acquired AWS Migration Competency status and our SCA, AWS will help us scale generative AI adoption among our clients so they can identify and implement use cases where this technology can have a real impact. We remain committed to helping clients reach their technology goals by leveraging the agility, breadth of services, and rapid innovation that AWS provides."
Quan Yang, Vice President of Research IT, Regeneron:
"Generative AI unlocks new opportunities to transform the life sciences industry. We are modernizing our legacy research applications to help accelerate the drug development process and simplify workflows. With Persistent's Digital Engineering expertise, powered by the AWS platform, Regeneron's research and pre-clinical development teams help bring our new life-savings drugs to market faster."
Chris Sullivan, Vice President, Worldwide System Integrator Partners, AWS:
"We are delighted to be working with Persistent to help our customers accelerate growth, enable business transformation, and enhance their digital experience. Together, we aim to redefine what's possible with generative AI, setting new standards for efficiency, innovation, and technological advancements."
About Persistent
With over 22,800 employees located in 21 countries, Persistent Systems (BSE: PERSISTENT) (NSE: PERSISTENT) is a global services and solutions company delivering Digital Engineering and Enterprise Modernization. As a participant of the United Nations Global Compact, Persistent is committed to aligning strategies and operations with universal principles on human rights, labor, environment, and anti-corruption, as well as take actions that advance societal goals. With 268% growth since 2020, Persistent is the fastest-growing Indian IT Services brand according to Brand Finance.
Read More
Software
ON24 | January 24, 2024
Today, ON24 marks the next chapter of its innovation strategy with the launch of its next generation intelligent engagement platform. With AI-powered intelligence at the core, ON24 will now enable enterprises to continuously engage audiences through hyper-personalized experiences that deliver connected insights and drive cost-efficient revenue growth.
“AI will fundamentally reshape sales and marketing and reimagine the customer experience. This means that sales and marketing teams must embrace AI to innovate and adapt, or risk being left behind,” says Sharat Sharan, co-founder, President and CEO. “With the launch of the ON24 Intelligent Engagement Platform, we are excited to leverage our unique foundation of first-party data to give our industry-leading customers an AI advantage, so that they can combine best-in-class experiences, personalization and content, to capture and act on connected data and insights at scale to drive revenue growth. And, we believe AI will continue to be a key differentiation for our own business and technology strategy moving forward, powering a new era of intelligent engagement.”
Built on its foundation of first-party data, the ON24 Intelligent Engagement Platform combines best-in-class digital experiences, including the company’s flagship webinar, virtual event and content marketing products, with its new AI-powered Analytics and Content Engine (ACE) to provide an integrated go-to-market solution. The platform’s comprehensive set of capabilities will help sales and marketing teams to:
Scale personalized experiences: Build best-in-class, branded experiences that reach their prospects and customers at scale and are hyper-personalized for individuals.
Automate continuous engagement: Interact with prospects and customers 24/7 through AI-generated content and always-on nurtures.
Deliver connected insights: Track audience engagement data across interactions and analyze engagement across key audience segments.
Drive revenue growth: Enable data-driven actions across go-to-market teams to generate pipeline and build lifetime customer relationships.
“Today’s launch of the ON24 Intelligent Engagement Platform brings our AI innovation together with more than a decade of market leadership, product development and first-party engagement data,” said Jayesh Sahasi, EVP of Product and CTO at ON24. “We believe this will unlock even greater value for our customers, providing AI-powered intelligence that keeps getting smarter, more personalized and more effective over time."
About ON24
ON24 is on a mission to help businesses bring their go-to-market strategy into the AI era and drive cost-effective revenue growth. Through its leading intelligent engagement platform, ON24 enables customers to combine best-in-class experiences with personalization and content, to capture and act on connected insights at scale.
ON24 provides industry-leading companies, including 3 of the 5 largest global technology companies, 3 of the 5 top global asset management firms, 3 of the 5 largest global healthcare companies and 3 of the 5 largest global industrial companies, with a valuable source of first-party data to drive sales and marketing innovation, improve efficiency and increase business results. Headquartered in San Francisco, ON24 has offices globally in North America, EMEA and APAC. For more information, visit www.ON24.com.
Read More