In a crowded landscape of customer experience (CX) solutions, Local Measure carved a unique path, one that began not in the traditional contact centre but on the bustling front lines of the hospitality industry. Unlike many CX startups born from within BPOs or the structured environments of large banks, Local Measure’s origins lie in empowering those directly interacting with customers – the hotel concierge, the restaurant server, the frontline staff.
For roughly six years, Local Measure initially operated as a B2B application tailored for the hospitality sector. Their early clients were familiar names: major hotel chains like Merivale and Accor, and various food and beverage establishments. Due to COVID, however, Local Measure needed to pivot its strategy.
Jonathon Barouch, CEO and founder of Local Measure, comments, “In roughly six years, our journey evolved significantly. Local Measure began as a B2B customer service app, primarily for hospitality giants like Merivale and Accor. The 2020 pandemic hit our hospitality focus hard. This forced a pivot, giving birth to the current Local Measure. We integrated voice through Amazon Connect, embarking on our AWS journey and gaining global telco capabilities we lacked before. This unlocked the entire contact centre market for us, moving beyond just the physical locations”.
“Our key differentiator was being born omnichannel – seamlessly integrating messaging, chat, WhatsApp, and Facebook with voice. Many competitors relied on bolt-ons or separate platforms”.
Initially focused on hospitality, the company has expanded its clientele to include travel, telco, healthcare, government, utilities, and financial services. Built for complex, high-volume service needs, Local Measure provides businesses with advanced call routing, AI automation, integrated service and sales, and real-time insights.
The success and consistent growth trajectory of Local Measure, among a thriving startup community in Australia, has culminated in its acquisition by Zendesk. This acquisition does not mark an endpoint in Local Measure’s journey but potentially a new chapter: integrating its proven capabilities and innovative spirit into a major customer service platform.
Empowering frontline agents through customer focused innovation
From a product development standpoint, Local Measure’s guiding principle is to create efficient and effective customer service tools for frontline employees. Barouch says, “This involves developing tools that automate low-value, repetitive tasks to free up agents for more human and meaningful interactions, emphasising intuitive and user-friendly design. The presence of a design UX leader on our leadership team underscores this commitment”.
From a company perspective, “We operate from the principle of ‘Think like a customer’. This principle emphasises understanding the needs of the end-user and designing solutions that improve their daily work”. Barouch emphasises how so many software tools given to frontline agents are clunky and poorly designed. “Our core mission is to develop software that agents genuinely enjoy using, a principle deeply ingrained in our product development, design ethos, and the unwavering commitment of their engineering team”, he says.
Local Measure is leveraging AI to make the tools frontline agents use for customer interactions even simpler and more intuitive. Barouch explains, “Generative AI has unlocked possibilities for real-time translation, summarisation, next best action, and automatic note-taking. Their approach has been to implement small, practical AI use cases and iterate. The goal is for the AI to be “invisible,” focusing on specific use cases that improve agent productivity by automating actions, shortening handle times, reducing costs, and automating follow-up tasks”.
“One of our more advanced capabilities is entity extraction. In a scenario like an insurance call with a lengthy 50-question form, instead of manually recording answers, the agent can simply converse with the customer. Our AI then intelligently extracts the relevant information and populates the form in real time – it’s almost seamless. This allows agents to focus on the human interaction while the AI handles the data entry”.
Acquisition by Zendesk
Zendesk is set to acquire Local Measure for approximately AUD 100 million to bolster its AI voice capabilities and expand into more complex service environments. The acquisition by Zendesk is seen as an opportunity for Local Measure to scale their technology to a much larger customer base.
Barouch comments, “Zendesk presents a significant leap in scale and opportunity. This is what excites us – the opportunity to leverage our capabilities to impact the vast user base Zendesk serves. Beyond the upcoming integration, which will accelerate our product delivery at scale, we’re also scaling our team. We’ve extended offers to all team members to join Zendesk, and we anticipate further growth through hiring”.
“The contact centre market’s size and adjacency to Zendesk’s current offerings create a powerful synergy, positioning Zendesk to lead the convergence of case management, CRM, and contact centre technologies”.
Conversely, Zendesk views the acquisition as an opportunity to expand its customer base and the capabilities of its solutions. Jason Maynard, CTO for Zendesk APAC, comments, “The Local Measure acquisition is key to our product portfolio’s evolution and its market impact. We’ve been adjacent to the contact centre space for years, evidenced by our partnerships with major players like Genesys and AWS Connect. While our Talk product served SMBs well, it wasn’t a full contact centre solution”.
“To fully leverage our new AI capabilities—like live transcription, copilot integration, and next-best-action—across the enterprise, supporting a diverse ecosystem of contact centre partners became challenging. The Local Measure acquisition is exciting because it allows us to concentrate our efforts and deeply integrate with AWS Connect, a best-in-class infrastructure partner. This acquisition provides us with an out-of-the-box contact centre offering that tightly integrates with Zendesk, is easy to manage and scale, and will be the foundation for incorporating our advanced AI features like copilot voice agents”.