The CRM powerhouse officially unveiled Zendesk for Contact Center, a move that signals a serious escalation in its platform strategy. Powered by its recent $100M acquisition of Local Measure—a well-known CCaaS partner of AWS—Zendesk is making it clear: it’s not content to play a supporting role in contact center operations anymore. It wants to be the platform.

And it’s not just about launching a new product. Zendesk is stitching together a full-stack service suite, and this latest move fills the last major gap.

 

From CRM Giant to Full-Service Contact Center Platform

Zendesk has spent the last two years quietly assembling the pieces. It acquired:

  • Klaus (Quality Assurance)
  • Tymeshift (Workforce Management)
  • Ultimate (Customer Support Automation) 

Add to that a strategic voice AI partnership with PolyAI, and now, with Local Measure Engage in its back pocket, Zendesk finally has the backbone it needed: a scalable contact center platform for enterprise.

“It’s all enterprise-grade. All its products are properly integrated,” said Jonathan Barouch, CEO of Local Measure, in an interview with CX Today at Enterprise Connect 2025.

Barouch also pointed out a key differentiator: Zendesk has years of customer data that others don’t, making its AI potential far more meaningful. “Other CCaaS vendors don’t have the knowledge repository,” he noted. “Zendesk does.”

 

But There’s a Risk: Will Partners Turn into Rivals?

Zendesk’s aggressive CCaaS play might ruffle feathers. Many top contact center platforms—think Genesys, NICE, Five9—have long-standing integrations with Zendesk’s CRM.

Now that Zendesk is entering their core territory, they may start nudging customers toward alternative CRMs. It’s a valid concern. But as Barouch told CX Today, Zendesk is betting big on something those vendors can’t replicate easily: trust, data, and a unified product stack.

“Customers think: I want to buy where my data is. I want to buy from a brand that has customer trust. I want to buy from a brand that has a multi-product portfolio… In that converged world, Zendesk wins.”

 

Zendesk Is Thinking Big — Really Big

Zendesk currently has around 60 CCaaS customers through Local Measure. But that’s just the start.

CEO Tom Eggemeier wants to scale that number by orders of magnitude. According to Barouch, demand is already spiking. “Every week over the past five weeks, the inbound interest has increased,” he told CX Today.

And they’re not just small shops. Inquiries are coming from brands with “50 to several thousand seats.” The company has its eyes on 10,000 to 30,000 CCaaS customers, and it believes the full weight of Zendesk’s global reach, sales, and engineering can make that happen.

Worth noting: Eggemeier knows this space well—before leading Zendesk, he served as President of Genesys.

 

And There’s More: Meet the Zendesk Resolution Platform

The CCaaS launch wasn’t the only headline from Relate 2025. Zendesk also debuted its Resolution Platform, a new hub for what it calls agentic AI—AI agents that think, adapt, and get smarter with use.

This platform includes:

  • AI Agent Builder – For creating custom agents tailored to specific support needs.
  • Knowledge Graph + Knowledge Builder – To consolidate help docs and auto-generate new content by analyzing past tickets.
  • AI Reasoning Controls – Real-time insights into why an AI agent made a decision (transparency FTW).
  • App Builder – A no-code tool to create apps across the Zendesk stack.
  • QA & Insights Hub – Monitor AI performance and track resolution metrics. 

Eggemeier summed it up with a strong statement:

“The only metric that matters in customer service is resolution… The Zendesk Resolution Platform is not just making service faster; it’s making Agentic AI actually work for service.”

 

Bottom Line: Zendesk Isn’t Just Releasing a New Tool. It’s Rewriting Its Role in CX.

This isn’t a half-step into the CCaaS world—it’s a strategic leap. With the contact center now fully inside its ecosystem, Zendesk has created a vertically integrated service platform built on AI, automation, and customer context.

It’s going head-to-head with the likes of Genesys, NICE, and Five9. And it's betting that customers will choose the platform where all their data already lives.

Zendesk didn’t just launch a new product. It lit the fuse on the next big CCaaS battleground.