By integrating Microsoft 365 products into the software company’s platform, Zendesk customers can access Agent 365 capabilities for intelligent productivity. 

In turn, Microsoft has implemented Zendesk Agent within 365, allowing its customers to access tools to enhance service productivity and workflow efficiency. 

Craig Flower, Chief Information Officer at Zendesk, highlighted how the partnership expansion would improve Zendesk’s ability to deliver a superior customer experience. 

“Our collaboration with Microsoft on Agent 365 and Zendesk Agent for Microsoft 365 Copilot is a pivotal moment for Zendesk,” he explained. 

“This collaboration not only solidifies our position as a leader in enterprise AI automation but also ensures that Zendesk remains at the forefront of the evolving digital worker landscape.  

“By integrating with Agent 365 and Microsoft 365 Copilot, we are empowering our customers with both autonomous and streamlined support capabilities, optimizing operations, and ultimately delivering a more efficient and reliable employee experience within Microsoft 365.” 

Improving Service Experience 

This partnership aims to upgrade small business experiences by implementing both tools to generate tailored needs. 

By establishing Microsoft Agent 365 within Zendesk’s platform, the AI offers autonomous ticket management support for Zendesk’s customers for reduced human intervention. 

These capabilities include ticket creation, handling, status monitoring, and communication management within Microsoft’s environment to ensure data governance requirements are met. 

This allows human service agents to shift away from constantly reviewing routine queries and return to high-demand, complex tasks. 

In return, Zendesk Agent has been integrated into Microsoft 365 Copilot to support its core apps with ticketing capabilities, such as ticket submissions, status monitoring, and following up tasks without the need to switch tools. 

Similar to the first integration, this capability is managed within Microsoft’s environment, resulting in limited friction for tool management and deployment.  

As a result of the integration, agents can experience direct AI-assisted support in several routine task areas, resulting in higher responsiveness, resolution, and reduced waiting times. 

This AI integration allows smaller businesses to elevate their service demands to the level of any well-established company, including delivering higher productivity and service levels. 

By implementing these tools directly within a business, teams can manage their workflows effectively without agent intervention. 

Furthermore, both tools offer customers secure and compliance management for handling adoption risk within a governed ecosystem. 

Targeting The Small Business Market 

The integration follows a similar trend in recent months of larger vendors trying to dominate the small enterprise customer corner by offering tailored products and services to fit their needs. 

Earlier in November, Zoom had secured its commitment to providing service capabilities to companies of various sizes with simple, straightforward tools to enhance their businesses. 

The communications giant notes how businesses with smaller teams require different demands than larger ones, forcing some to juggle various workloads across the board to keep up with demand. 

This means vendors will need to personalize their tools and approaches to cover more ground and advance these smaller businesses to the industry standard. 

This has been a well-documented issue in the CX industry, as various companies have recently eliminated support for enterprise customers that don’t meet their size standards. 

Unfortunately, some customer enterprises that are unable to provide businesses with desirable profit results may be asked to cancel their subscription if the company can no longer provide the services needed or intend to solely focus on its largest customers. 

However, companies such as Microsoft and Zendesk have offered support for this neglected market, supplying these customers with both tools to elevate their teams while prioritizing their unique requirements. 

Srini Raghavan, Corporate Vice President for Microsoft Copilot and Agent Ecosystem, explained how the tool collaboration will offer these enterprise customers support across a range of business needs, and allow them to elevate their issue resolutions even at their current capacity. 

He said, “AI is transforming how organizations deliver employee service, and Microsoft’s collaboration with Zendesk is leading that change by enabling a new era of intelligent support. 

“We’re combining the power of Microsoft 365 Copilot’s intelligence with Zendesk’s modern service platform, enabling employees to resolve IT, HR, and Finance issues seamlessly within the tools they use every day.” 

The cloud communications vendor revealed that it had taken significant measures to strengthen its service governance. 

This strategy will allow the company to expand its range of security and compliance frameworks, establishing itself as a trustworthy provider for customer enterprises. 

The implementation, better known as ISO/IEC 27018, is a well-established privacy standard used by enterprises worldwide to protect customer data in public cloud environments. 

And with security concerns now at an all-time high, vendors will need to consider how best to protect their customers’ data. 

Darren Remblence, Chief Information Security Officer at 8×8, highlighted how customer demand for security around data management is a bare minimum requirement. 

“Customers should never have to trade speed or innovation for security,” he explained.

“ISO/IEC 27018 gives organizations even stronger guarantees that their data is handled responsibly and transparently.  

“It means they can move faster, meet compliance requirements with confidence, and trust that privacy is built into every part of their communications experience.”

This privacy standard is a code of practice that protects personal data from public cloud providers and shields any private or personally identifiable information (PII) from falling into the hands of third parties. 

It contains core regulations for enterprises that choose to adopt this standard, such as data processing with customer consent, supporting customer data handling, transparency with data protection approaches, and implement strong security measures, including restrictions and encryption methods. 

This standard also includes controls for handling data access, use, transparency, and dealing with incident response. 

This assures customers that 8×8 is meeting the higher standards required for durable data handling. 

What This Means For 8×8 Customers

This implementation into 8×8’s security management system enhances privacy and security for 8×8 Platform for CX, a unified CX communications platform that includes multiple capabilities for customer-facing teams and customer interaction management. 

Customer enterprises can enhance their vendor onboarding routines with faster security evaluation, reduced data exposure risk, and transparency with data handling. 

It also enables 8×8 customers to feel secure in where they place their data, with constant review and improvement from the vendor’s security and compliance team to ensure these standards are kept, including privacy practices, data handling, and cloud architecture. 

And with the customer playing a significant role in its activity, data processing can only happen under customer instruction and is kept informed consistently about its storage whereabouts and who can access it. 

This highlights 8×8’s commitment to its customers’ privacy and security, assuring that data handling is less likely to be compromised or misused. 

Growing 8×8’s Security Portfolio

The privacy standard also allows 8×8 the chance to build up its security and compliance portfolio to meet the growing demands from customer expectations. 

This portfolio has also included similar frameworks, including ISO/IEC 27001, ISO/IEC 27017, SOC 2, and HIPAA mapping, which involve building and assuring security controls and management within a system, as well as several other regulatory standards to assure 8×8’s commitment to security requirements. 

This decision also comes during a time when customer expectations have risen significantly in the last year, after a wave of cyberattacks that profoundly impacted the customer experience sector, including CX giants such as Salesforce, Zendesk, and Google. 

This places risk on data handling processes such as migration and storage methods, forcing vendors like 8×8 to stay ahead of cyberattack activities. 

X (formerly Twitter), ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Spotify and payment giant Square were among those caught up in the fallout.

The trouble began just before 11:48 GMT, when Cloudflare posted that it was dealing with an “internal service degradation” causing intermittent outages across its service network. Users saw error pages, stalled logins, broken APIs, and sites claiming connections were blocked. There were a few conflicting signals about the restoration progress, as at one stage the company reported that services were beginning to recover, but then around 15 minutes later reverted to “continuing to investigate this issue.”

By 13:04 GMT, Cloudflare admitted that one of its fixes involved disabling WARP access in London entirely, temporarily cutting off users from its WARP performance-boosting and VPN service that helps secure and accelerate internet connections:

“During our attempts to remediate, we have disabled WARP access in London. Users in London trying to access the Internet via WARP will see a failure to connect.”

Cloudflare announced a fix five minutes later, but continued to receive “reports of intermittent errors” until close to 17:00 GMT.

Untimely Outage Exposes Weak Spots in Online Payments

While the broken pages and error messages got the immediate attention, the real pain from such outages often comes from the disruption to payment flows. Failed transactions, repeated payment attempts, and unclear confirmations create a backlog of problems that merchants have to untangle later.

As Monica Eaton, Founder and CEO of Chargebacks911 and Fi911, said, “When major websites hiccup, users notice. When payment processors flicker, the ripple effects get messier—and much less visible.”

When customers are unable to complete payments, or worse, the system wobbles cause duplicate payments, the chaos continues beyond the initial outage.

“What actually happens during an outage like this is messy. Customers retry purchases, cards get hit twice, confirmation pages stall, and suddenly you have a wave of confusion that turns into disputes. By the time the dust settles, merchants are left cleaning up charges they never intended to send in the first place.”

And the timing of this particular outage, during the shopping days leading up to Black Friday, caused further headaches, as Charlie Jackson, Executive Director of Gumpo Digital Marketing, pointed out:

“This is not just a typical server blip, this is a multi-million pound algorithm disruption hitting the digital marketing world at the worst possible time. With major e-commerce brands down and around 80% of our clients relying on Cloudflare, we had no choice but to immediately hit the pause button on high-spending PPC and paid social campaigns.

That will not only affect revenue on the day, but will have a knock-on effect on retailers’ performance over the Black Friday period, Jackson said, because advertising platforms like Google and Meta use machine learning. “When you interrupt high-performing campaigns, you essentially disrupt the algorithms’ constant flow of data needed to optimize budgets and target audiences effectively.”

The hours-long outage could cost the retail sector millions in disrupted campaigns and lost momentum during the biggest shopping event of the year.

“We’re in the most critical 10-day scaling window before Black Friday and this outage has once again flagged the impact CDN outages can have and that though they bring benefits on the whole, they do leave sites vulnerable and at the mercy of Cloudflare to resolve these issues,” Jackson said.

Repeated Cloud Outages Are Exposing Systemic Weaknesses

Cloudflare’s stumble, coming shortly after massive outages in the past month at AWS and Microsoft Azure that caused their own waves of disruption, has given more fuel to warnings over the dependence on a small number of global infrastructure giants. As Eaton noted:

“Cloudflare going dark today should snap every merchant back to reality. We keep building bigger online businesses, yet so much of that growth depends on a few invisible services holding everything together. When one of them goes down, even for a moment, the internet feels like a house with loose wiring. Lights flicker everywhere. Payments included.”

Mike Hoy, CTO at Pulsant, has warned that the concentration of workloads in the hands of so few providers creates systemic risk. His concern is twofold: the technological fragility and the lack of practical recovery planning among businesses. “Encouragingly, many organizations are already moving away from dependence on a single public cloud provider. Recent research from Pulsant reveals that 87% of businesses plan to partially or fully repatriate workloads over the next two years—up from 43% in 2021, according to Barclays.”

But that shift isn’t simple, as regulatory constraints, data transfer costs and platform lock-in all slow the transition. These outages expose the vulnerabilities of the current model and why a more competitive and distributed cloud ecosystem is needed, Hoy said.

“True resilience requires workloads to span colocation, private infrastructure, and public cloud. Colocation sites provide critical support when primary facilities fail. They offer regional diversity, robust physical security, and the connectivity needed to bridge private systems with cloud platforms.”

But this only works if recovery strategies stay consistent and coordinated. Otherwise, the slowest backup system becomes the bottleneck, Hoy added. As enterprises plan for the year ahead and beyond, they need to build recovery into their digital architecture.

Eaton stressed that businesses shouldn’t view infrastructure faults as rare surprises that leave them scrambling. Instead they should account for them as operational realities that need structure and preparation.

“Treat outages like this as part of normal operations instead of strange one-offs.

Practical steps can prevent minor glitches from turning into major financial cleanups: “Track failed and duplicate transactions. Talk to customers before they start guessing what went wrong. Make a quick log of what happened today so you are not trying to piece it together weeks from now when chargebacks start landing.”

Financial services have been especially rattled by the repeated outages. After the recent AWS outage disrupted several major UK banks, the Financial Conduct Authority warned that the UK needs to “strengthen” its oversight of foreign tech providers.

“The FCA’s latest warning underlines how heavily the UK’s financial system now relies on a small number of foreign companies to deliver the core digital services it depends on,” Vivek Dodd, CEO at Skillcast, said.

“Such disruptions expose not just technical faults but broader challenges around operational resilience and business continuity in a hyperconnected economy.”

While many financial institutions have made progress in digital transformation, their contingency strategies often still assume the reliability of third-party partners, Dodd noted. But “even the most sophisticated global tech firms are not immune to outages or cyber-attacks, and the consequences for customers and markets can be significant.”

Enterprise continuity and recovery plans should map critical dependencies and identify single points of failure, Dodd said. They should include layered contingency measures such as multi-cloud or hybrid hosting strategies, and proactive communication.

“Ultimately, resilience isn’t just about protecting systems; it’s about preserving customer trust and safeguarding organizational reputation in an increasingly digital world,” Dodd said.

Indeed, the underlying concern is bigger than a single provider’s bad day. Between AWS, Azure, and now Cloudflare, outages are coming more often, and the consequences are hitting more critical services.

The goal is to stay grounded and tighten the parts of the process that businesses can actually influence, Eaton said.

“None of this is about panic. It is about owning the risks you can control. Cloudflare had an outage today. Another provider will have one tomorrow. What matters is whether businesses learn from these moments or keep hoping luck will cover the gaps.”

Businesses need to wake up to the fact that the internet’s backbone rests on fewer pillars than most customers realize, and those pillars are wobbling more often.

The AI startup will allow UJET to continue its AI roadmap for enhanced customer service solutions. 

This partnership will also address customer data analysis issues for UJET’s enterprise customers. 

This acquisition is set to further UJET’s AI roadmap vision by bolstering the company’s AI capabilities and addressing customer experience concerns. 

By highlighting these issues of visibility between customer and leader, organizations will be able to improve their customer issues before they reach escalation. 

In fact, UJET has reported that organizations that are unaware of these individual customer problems are losing approximately $5MN-$30MN in customer churn revenue. 

This can be linked to ignored or forgotten negative customer experience complaints, with organizations reportedly gathering only five percent of reported customer issues. 

According to UJET CEO, Vasili Triant, customer churn remains a blind spot for many enterprises, arguing that customer interaction analysis is not done effectively. 

He said: “Most companies can’t analyze interaction data at scale, leaving many common customer issues in the dark.” 

However, this acquisition provides enterprises the capabilities to view all customer conversations through unifying collected data. 

He added: 

“UJET’s acquisition of Spiral will provide businesses with a unified view of all customer conversations for more proactive, personalized service.”

This will also help enterprises locate blind spots in other areas of the business, such as product, other services, and the company itself. 

In conversation with CX Today, UJET VP Product Marketer, Matthew Clare, highlighted how other areas of companies can utilize this tool to understand their customers’ needs:

“This could be used by product teams to understand product and service issues – by marketing teams who want to understand what customers are saying about campaigns that are running.” 

Spiral’s AI Product 

Spiral is an AI startup specializing in conversational analytics to improve customer experience data. 

By leveraging AI, Spiral can be used to analyze customer interactions at scale to uncover pain points in customer experience, whilst also offering proactive recommendations to enterprises. 

The product can also be used to analyze various customer conversations across voice and chat channels, the internet, online reviews and surveys, and social media. 

Clare stated: “Anywhere customer conversations happen is a data source for this product.” 

Furthermore, this tool can be used to ask questions about customer churning and how enterprises can respond to these results through predictions to improve future customer experiences. 

“They are trying to solve the problems of customer conversations and customer feedback being spread across different teams and organizations,” he said. 

“How do you not only unify data but bring it together in a way that anyone in the organization can run deep research with a simple conversational AI agent?” 

This acquisition allows UJET to strengthen its status as a prominent CCaaS platform provider and offer customers an improved version of what is already available. 

Clare explained that the purchase will extend “UJET’s reach and gives us the ability to sell Conversational Analytics over the top of any Contact Center and CX software that may be in place, without having us need to position our end to end CCaaS platform.”

For Spiral, this acquisition will allow them to continue providing conversational intelligence alongside UJET’s AI service capabilities, rebranding as Spiral by UJET. 

Elena Zhizhimontova, Founder and CEO of Spiral, discussed how the acquisition will allow them to prioritize a customer-focused plan and continue to improve customer outcomes for a wider enterprise range. 

She said: “We built Spiral to take millions of customer conversations and turn them into clear, actionable insight,”  

“By combining Spiral’s AI with UJET’s cutting-edge CCaaS platform for modern-day customer service, Spiral by UJET will continue as the focused product our customers rely on, now with a more CX-driven roadmap and deeper integrations. 

“Together we can shine a brighter light on customer issues for more organizations worldwide, giving brands the clarity they need to spot issues sooner, address problems faster, and create better products, services, and experiences over the long term.”

Customer Feedback

This partnership will allow current and future customers of UJET to experience Spiral’s product integrally by improving its overall AI and product organization. 

Turo, a long-term customer of both UJET and Spiral, has reaped the benefits of both these companies’ approaches to solving customer issues, as well as having collaborated on a program with Spiral to improve its data collection method. 

Julie Weingardt, Chief Operations Officer at Turo, emphasized how both companies have enabled them to receive customer experience resolutions with reduced friction. 

She said: “Spiral’s AI transformed our approach and helped us build a Voice of the Customer program that is smart and strategic, by capturing structured feedback during the support journey.  

“Spiral AI’s platform allows us to analyze customer conversations and commentary, pinpointing areas where we can improve proactively. 

“We’ve used these insights to refine our self-service options, hone our knowledge base, and help better guide quality agent responses.”

Despite the acquisition, Spiral has confirmed that it will continue to work with its existing customers and products however with UJET integrations.

Spiral was acquired by UJET for an undisclosed amount.

In its quarterly report on Wednesday, the technology company revealed several high-value investments in its AI products. 

In the earnings call, Cisco emphasized that this rapid growth in AI product adoption indicates a rising demand for secure networking. 

Customer-Centric Strategy 

Over the past year, Cisco’s quarterly results have demonstrated high levels of growth after several previous declines, and it is now reaping the benefits of its increased customer spending and investment. 

This has included various AI products and suites, as well as investments in data centers to support the demands for AI-driven workloads and cloud networking. 

However, the attention has turned towards its customers and their willingness to adopt these products into their workflows. 

Despite this growth in demand, a Cisco study revealed that only a third of companies are certain that their IT infrastructure can safely integrate their AI projects, which Cisco views as favorable for them. 

With its extensive networking portfolio, the company believes it is on track to deliver the critical infrastructure to its customer enterprises, enabling them to adapt to the AI era. 

Modernizing Customer Experience 

In response to the study, Cisco has acknowledged that many companies are still far off from where they’ve been expected to be with AI. 

Charles Robbins, CEO and Chairman at Cisco, recognized the readiness gap between planning and execution when it came to adopting AI. 

He said:

“We know many customers still have a lot of work to do to ensure they have the modern, scalable, secure networking infrastructure to support their AI goals.” 

Cisco has already begun its move toward a modernized customer experience through various upgrades and expansions, allowing for simpler large-scale AI deployments. 

This has included its global network and infrastructure upgrades, allowing Cisco to enhance its enterprise switching, routing, and Wi-Fi to conduct large-scale AI and data-intensive workloads with fast, scalable, and secure performance. 

From this, Cisco expects its enterprise customers to switch from legacy networking equipment to its newer systems, collectively spending billions as part of its multiyear, multibillion-dollar refresh opportunity. 

With global data expansion, Cisco has established numerous regional data centers worldwide, as well as a European customer-based sovereign critical infrastructure portfolio, focusing on a global scale-up with region-focused deployments. 

By supplying software and cloud-native transformation, customer enterprises can also receive automated network surveillance and deliver secure, scalable customer experiences. 

In addition, Cisco offers end-to-end security integrated into the network, supporting modernized infrastructure for reliable and capable traffic pattern management. 

Workloads with Agentic AI 

Cisco’s earnings call reported a surge in agentic AI activity, with the number of queries through agentic AI measuring at 25x higher in network traffic than chatbots. 

And demand for AI has increased with it, with Cisco expecting AI infrastructure to generate $3BN in revenue for fiscal year 2026. 

A contributing factor is the AI workloads needing the necessary models and infrastructure to process locally. To support this, Cisco announced the release of its Unified Edge last week, as part of its strategy to process AI at a speedier and secure level. 

This platform offers integration for compute, networking, and storage into one system, enabling enterprises to receive real-time predictions and decisions for secure AI management. 

Another recent release is the Cisco Data Fabric architecture, which allows for the unification and management of various machine data sources, enabling companies to create more innovative AI models, adding to Cisco’s value when it comes to technology investments. 

Cisco Webex Winter 2025

Cisco has also published its Webex Winter 2025 press release, detailing its recent updates in CX technologies. 

Some key results from the season include: AI translation capabilities now expanding to 120 languages for meeting summaries; its regional cloud infrastructure locations such as the UK, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, and the UAE; a 3D workspace designer for visual blueprints; and AI Assistant for Calling for live and post-meeting summaries. 

These help to enable higher productivity levels, improve global coverage, and drive flexible working systems, with Webex allowing customers to use meeting rooms, calls, and contact center through one platform. 

However, not all these features are available for deployment as of yet. 

In conversation with CX Today, Tim Banting, Head of Research at Techtelligence, discussed Cisco’s decision to strengthen its overall CX stack across AI, global scale, and device flexibility. 

He said, “The move aligns with current Techtelligence buying-intent data showing a 19% rise in enterprise research around UC productivity and automation, involving more than 29,000 companies actively investigating process and workflow automation in communications suites. 

“However, Cisco faces an execution challenge. Several key AI and automation capabilities remain in the “coming soon” category, creating a perception gap in a market that rewards immediacy and credibility. 

“Techtelligence data shows that buyers are rewarding vendors delivering deployable automation and measurable risk controls now – not future roadmap promises. 

He added: “For CX buyers, the practical value lies in features that are globally available and compliance-ready today. The platform consolidation trend is undeniable.  

“Cisco’s success will hinge on whether it can deliver AI responsibly, at scale, and ahead of rivals who are already reshaping perception around “secure AI collaboration.” 

Cisco Key Earnings Results

After enterprise customers’ strong demand for its AI products, Cisco has risen above estimates for the quarter. 

• Cisco’s revenue is up to $14.9BN, increasing 8% year-over-year  
• Its product orders are up 13% year-over-year, with growth across all markets and geographies 
• AI infrastructures currently stand at $1.3BN 
• Service revenue increased by approximately 2% 
• Product revenue increased by approximately 10%

This new partnership will have both companies co-developing AI-focused strategies to market to global customers. 

This partnership will also allow both to expand AI productivity on their respective platforms. 

ServiceNow and NTT DATA have begun their joint plans to market AI-driven solutions, including developing and selling these products to transform how AI is used in the workplace. 

These are set to include various enterprises, commercial companies, and mid-market segments. 

This new strategy emphasizes the companies’ previous partnerships, focusing on their commitments to advise other enterprises to adopt and execute AI into their businesses. 

ServiceNow also intends to use the expanded partnership to place NTT DATA as a delivery partner in its services to guide customers in safely deploying AI-powered automations and enhance operational efficiency. 

Amit Zavery, President, COO, and CPO at ServiceNow, highlighted how this new partnership development will improve AI across businesses, stating:

“ServiceNow and NTT DATA are expanding access to AI-powered automation across any industry and any geography to achieve measurable business impact for organizations at every stage of the AI journey, 

“Together, we’re transforming how the world’s leading enterprises operate, making work simpler, smarter, and more resilient with the ServiceNow AI Platform.”

NTT DATA will be using the partnership to escalate the ServiceNow AI platform to its business to improve its levels of productivity, efficiency, and make improvements to its customer experience across the enterprise, by adopting its AI agents and Global Business Services. 

Abhijit Dubey, President, CEO, and Chief AI Officer at NTT DATA, emphasizes how the partnership can benefit both NTT DATA and other enterprises. He said:

“Expanding our partnership with ServiceNow is a key milestone in our mission to build the world’s leading AI-native services company,”  

“By combining ServiceNow’s agentic AI platform with NTT DATA’s global delivery scale and industry expertise, we’re enabling enterprises to accelerate innovation, enhance productivity, and achieve sustainable growth.” 

Who is NTT DATA?

The technology services company provides enterprises and governments with responsible innovations for cloud, AI, security, data centers, connectivity, and application services. 

This latest partnership allows NTT DATA to access ServiceNow’s generative AI and workflow automation, enabling it to supply improved offerings to its customers by integrating more complex solutions, positioning itself as a leader of enterprise AI transformation within the industry. 

NTT DATA can also use this opportunity to expand its market reach by co-developing AI tools with a well-established company, especially in the US and Europe, where ServiceNow holds strong brand recognition. 

What This Partnership Means

This partnership expansion reflects the increasing intensification of AI-led transformation investments amongst current major vendors. 

The collaboration allows both companies to become more central in their position as leaders in enterprise software strategy development, highlighting to other vendors where they stand to build better relationships instead of developing capabilities independently. 

By fully aligning operations such as products and delivery services, more companies can join the competition and adapt to trends cost-effectively. 

As the telecoms ecosystem shifts to IP and cloud-based systems, fraudsters are exploiting vulnerabilities that can hurt companies’ reputations as well as their finances.

The UK’s biggest mobile networks have responded by signing a new Telecommunications Fraud Charter with the government, ahead of the upcoming UK Government Fraud Strategy, to introduce various measures aimed at reducing telecoms fraud. The signatories include BT EE, Virgin Media, O2, VodafoneThree, Tesco Mobile, Talk Talk, Sky, and trade association Comms Council UK (CCUK).

The networks have committed to upgrading their systems within the next year to stop overseas call centers spoofing UK phone numbers, making it clear when calls impersonating legitimate organizations originate from other countries.

Around 96 percent of UK mobile users decide whether to pick up a call based on the number shown onscreen, and three-quarters are unlikely to answer calls from an unidentified international number.

The mobile networks will develop call tracing technology to track down the origin of suspicious or fraudulent calls across interconnected networks and give police the information they need to find scammers operating in the country and dismantle their operations.

They will also design scalable, collaborative data-sharing models between telecoms service providers as well as banking and technology firms to make it harder for scams to go on undetected.

The agreement includes a B2B voice and telephony sub-charter focused on assisting business customers. CCUK, which represents the UK’s IP communications and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) industry, will develop business victim support principles and best practice guidance to help members handle how to identify and respond to fraud.

Telecoms Fraud Increases Cost of Business Communications

Telephony fraud takes many forms, including spoofed numbers, call hijacking, PBX hacking, and toll fraud. And those threats are only increasing with the proliferation of AI tools. As fraudsters become more sophisticated, every interaction now carries a layer of doubt. Criminals use legitimate-looking numbers or brands to trick customers, or infiltrate business phone systems to route high-value calls overseas.

“The scammers are getting much more sophisticated. So although there’s great general awareness, I think it’s so easy to still get caught out,” Tracey Wright, Managing Director at Magrathea Telecoms and CCUK chair, told CX Today.

The immediate financial losses can be steep. A single incident of toll fraud can leave rack up thousands in unauthorized charges. But the broader damage—disrupted operations, lost productivity and compromised customer trust—is longer lasting.

Telecoms companies themselves take a hit because of the perception that they have failed to protect their customers or secure their networks.

“[T]he impact on telecoms businesses… is quite serious and quite considerable. Not only in the financial sense of losing money on bad payments, but the reputational risk is considerable,” Wright explained. “It doesn’t take long at all for consumers to pick up on what they perceive as a bad actor in the market.”

Companies are engaged in a constant battle against sophisticated and fast-moving schemes. While some forms of fraud are relatively easy to identify, others are far more subtle, using legitimate communications channels to trick unsuspecting customers.

“[T]he mass calling episodes, selling things that don’t exist… are quite easy to detect. We’re still seeing those, unfortunately; they slip through the net quite frequently,” Wright said. “It is constant whack-a-mole. These people move around the industry, blast these calls out, get caught, shut down, and move on.”

The more insidious threat comes from fraud that crosses multiple communication platforms.

“[T]he more challenging one to properly understand is where the telecoms network is used as part of social engineering. So you’ve already had an email or WhatsApp, or someone’s been sent a phone number in a text message… It’s much harder to detect because it might just be one or two phone calls and not look like anything suspicious.”

While the industry is improving its ability to identify and block fraudulent traffic, many cases still slip through.

“As a service provider, we collect a lot of information from customers on those things. And unfortunately, it is almost a daily occurrence that we get reports,” Wright said.

Many companies underestimate how fraud can ripple through the customer experience. When customers start doubting the authenticity of incoming calls, legitimate outreach can suffer. That erosion of trust can quickly translate into fewer answered calls, slower issue resolution and increased customer frustration.

Still, striking the right balance between robust security and a frictionless customer experience isn’t easy. Too much verification can frustrate users, but too little invites risk. The goal for most companies is to integrate protective measures without customers even noticing.

Breaking Down Barriers to Cross-Industry Data Sharing

The biggest challenge for telecoms service providers in thwarting fraud is sharing intelligence quickly and securely. There are significant barriers to creating an effective data-sharing framework across providers and industries.

“It has been the focus of our attention for most of this year,” Wright said. The trade association held a summit earlier this year that brought stakeholders together to address the problem.

“Not only is there the technical challenge of how to share data in a safe, secure way… The bigger issue is around creating a system that all types of service provider—telecoms company, banking, everyone—can use, and the law that goes behind that to allow us to do so.”

Without the proper mechanisms, vital information can remain siloed within individual networks, allowing fraudulent activity to spill across industries unchecked.

“We’re pushing on both sides of that to have the cover of the legal and regulatory side to allow us to proactively share information. For example, if in the telecoms industry we have access to a potential scam, we’d like to be able to share that with the banking sector to say ‘you might find all these people are victims’. And at the moment, we neither have the route to do it or the legal position in which to do it.”

“So those are our big asks. And one of our commitments under the Charter is to keep working on those. We’ve had a commitment in return from the Home Office and others that are going to work with us on that.”

That ongoing dialogue between industry, regulators, and government will be the key to unlocking progress. For now, CCUK and its members are developing their own models to test what secure, compliant data sharing could look like in practice.

“We don’t have the specifics at the moment on exactly what it looks like. We’re working on our own proof of concept as a membership that, if it works, we will roll out to the wider industry.”

“It is the hardest part, but we are determined because it really does unlock so much of the rest of the things we want to do if we can just find the magic key. And there are lots of steps going forward. We can learn a lot from the finance sector; they’ve already achieved quite a lot in that space. So we’re hoping to work quite closely with them and take all the best bits of the schemes that are already out there.”

This is where the traceback technology that the phone networks are developing—to verify that callers are who they appear to be—is essential.

“That ties in with the data sharing, because at the moment, there is no method for doing this—unless you are providing a call, it’s your vertical market and you own the customer and the whole network—we’ve got otherwise no way of knowing that a caller is who they say they are,” Wright said. “If we can figure that out as an industry, then we’ll be halfway there.”

From AI-driven analytics to automated monitoring systems, new tools are helping providers detect unusual activity faster and respond before customers are affected. But for CCUK, the focus is on solutions that can help providers of all sizes strengthen their defences without adding unnecessary complexity.

“We’re certainly committed to promoting any technology; it doesn’t necessarily have to be AI,” Wright said. “We are… keeping an open mind that it’s not necessarily the kind of silver bullet to fix all this… We’re not going to put all our eggs in one basket to try and overcome this problem. We need to be looking at different solutions.”

For many of its members—who are often smaller and more agile service providers—the emphasis is on accessibility. “Whatever we do has to be simple and accessible to the smaller provider. So one of the proof of concepts we’re looking at is a much more simple API-driven data sharing tool, which any one of our members could just use at very low cost,” Wright said.

Educating Businesses to Strengthen Defenses

Technology alone won’t solve the problem. Businesses need to raise their awareness of how telephony fraud works and how to protect themselves. Clear internal policies, staff training and customer communication all play a role.

Customers, too, need to understand what legitimate contact from a business looks like. When companies proactively explain how they communicate, detailing what numbers they use and what information they’ll never ask for, they help close the information gap that fraudsters rely on.

Under the Charter, the phone networks and CCUK will work together to help improve public awareness, and enhance the protection and support that victims of fraud receive. The networks aim to reduce the time it takes for victims to receive support to two weeks.

Telecoms fraud tactics evolve constantly, so timely information is crucial. By ensuring members have access to the latest intelligence and resources, CCUK UK aims to help providers recognise emerging threats and communicate those risks clearly to their customers.

“There are existing schemes out there that we will support and promote… on our website to our members,” Wright said. “But we’re also developing some awareness specifically for telecoms companies to give their staff the skills to talk to their customers. That’s going to be evolving over the next few months.”

Navigating Legal Grey Areas to Battle Telecoms Fraud

While there’s widespread agreement that better data sharing is vital to combating telecoms fraud, the legal framework that governs it remains an obstacle. On paper, UK data protection and law enforcement rules appear to offer clear guidance on when information can be exchanged, but in practice, the reality is far more complicated.

There are loopholes and ambiguities that can make compliance difficult, particularly for smaller providers without in-house legal teams. “If you’re not on the law enforcement list, for example, you can’t be shared certain data,” Wright said. “We’ve got some great guidance from the ICO on data sharing. But when you actually start digging into the laws and look at the exceptions that are in there, you keep getting tripped up.”

Companies want to do the right thing but fear falling foul of privacy laws in the process. “That’s what we’re trying to overcome. It’s trying to find someone give us the law or the cover from the law to say, if you follow these guidelines, you can’t get in trouble. And that probably needs some kind of regulatory or legal shift,” Wright said.

By creating a framework for ongoing education, CCUK aims to build awareness across the industry, so that telecoms providers can secure their own networks against fraud and empower their customers to stay safe.

Between 15:45 UTC on October 29 and 00:05 UTC on October 30, configuration change caused node failures in Azure Front Door (AFD), Microsoft’s global, cloud-based service that handles content delivery and routing, according to Azure’s status page.

A whole host of Azure services experienced latencies, timeouts and errors, including Azure Communication Services (ACS). The voice and SMS messaging channels in Dynamics 365 Contact Center are built on top of ACS, which enables organizations to provision phone numbers, enable voice calls and manage SMS capabilities through ACS directly.

The outage disrupted customer services across multiple industries, including airlines, retail and gaming, all of which use Azure for their backend operations including point-of-sale systems, customer portals, and mobile apps.

Alaska and Hawaiian Airlines, which have recently merged, reported that the Azure hosts several of their key services, including their websites, which meant that customers were unable to book or check in for flights online.

Travelers who were unable to check in were advised to see an airport agent for their boarding pass and plan for additional time in the terminal, as there were long lines.

“Our teams worked quickly to stand up our backup infrastructure to allow our guests to book and check-in for their flights online while minimizing operational disruptions,” Alaska Airlines stated. The airline added that it would bring the affected systems back online “once Microsoft resolves the issue from its end.”

Heathrow Airport also reported problems with its website, while retailers like Starbucks, Costco, and Kroger experienced interruptions to their websites and mobile apps, indicated by spikes in reports on outage monitoring site DownDetector.

Microsoft’s own services were not immune, as its customers were unable to log in to Xbox Live, Minecraft, and other Microsoft gaming platforms, and access to 365 productivity tools like Outlook, Teams and SharePoint went offline for enterprise users as well as consumers.

The timing of the outage was ironic, given that Microsoft reported its quarterly earnings with its investor relations website down ahead of the analyst call.

The company reported 40 percent year-on-year growth in its Azure revenues, indicating how deeply entrenched the cloud infrastructure is across industries.

The outage served as a reminder of the critical role cloud infrastructure plays in modern customer service delivery and the risks of centralized dependencies.

Successive Outages Expose Systemic Dependence on Cloud Giants

While the AWS outage originated from Amazon’s servers in Northern Virginia, affecting the US East Coast and parts of Western Europe, the Azure outage spread further, with Downdetector indicating disruptions from parts of Asia as well as the U.S. and Europe.

Initial reports had suggested the outage was global. Vivek Dodd, CEO at Skillcast, told CX Today:

“Another outage following so closely after the recent disruption at AWS highlights just how dependent the economy has become on major technology providers.”

“When these big platforms experience downtime, the ripple effects are immediate and widespread across industries—disrupting financial systems, logistics networks, and retail operations.”

As digital transformation brings more enterprise systems into the cloud, many companies are struggling to establish resilience plans to keep up with the growing risks.

“The assumption that leading cloud platforms will always be available has left some enterprises exposed when outages occur,” Dodd said.

Enterprises need to proactively embed operational resilience and third-party risk management as core priorities to mitigate the risk, rather than being reactive and treating them as afterthoughts.

“Building true resilience requires more than technological redundancy; it demands foresight, planning and training,” Dodd said.

One way to do this is by avoiding full reliance on cloud infrastructure, by using hybrid approaches so that their systems have redundancies.

“Organizations should implement hybrid or multi-cloud models, such as diversifying across providers to avoid overreliance on a single vendor, establish clear crisis-response protocols and invest in company-wide compliance and resilience to handle these situations efficiently,” Dodd explained.

Because when third-party infrastructure goes down, it is the enterprise that suffers the impact on its customer experience.

“Incidents like this serve as a powerful reminder that resilience isn’t just about technology, it’s about protecting trust, productivity, and customer confidence in a digital-first economy.”

CX Today’s Charlie Mitchell hosts Darren Rushworth, President of NiCE International.

The two recap on NiCE’s release of Mpower Agents, with Rushworth underscoring what sets NiCE’s latest big innovation apart.

The conversation then pivots, with the pair discussing:

NiCE’s Latest Big CCaaS Win with TalkTalk

NiCE has secured its latest big deal with the prominent broadband provider TalkTalk. Rushmore explains how the company will leverage the NiCE CXone MPower platform to push its service experiences forward

The Spike in Sovereign Cloud Contact Center Deployments

As global enterprise rethink their security posture, sovereign cloud contact center deployments are becoming all the rage. The conversation unpacks this trend and its key drivers.

A Top Takeaway from NiCE Interactions International 2025

After a busy couple of days running around the event, Rushworth shares his top takeaway from the event. To find out what that is, you’ll have to watch the video .

If you’re looking for more information about NiCE’s contact center solutions, visit: www.nice.com

As such, figuring out how best to leverage that ecosystem and drive specific business outcomes can be complex.

That’s why the tech giant’s extensive network of partners is so valuable. It gives companies access to the expertise, guidance, and support they need to master Salesforce.

But how can a business isolate the best companion for its Salesforce journey? Here’s a simple guide to making the right choice.

Best Salesforce Partner 2025: The 3 Types of Partners

The first step to choosing the best-placed Salesforce partner is understanding the different types of partners available.

Generally, these partners fall into the following three buckets.

1. Consulting Partners

Consulting partners are essentially “guides” to the Salesforce landscape. These are the companies businesses turn to for assistance with the design, implementation, and optimization of Salesforce technologies.

Organizations like Accenture, Deloitte Digital, KPMG, and PWC provide end-to-end solutions for your Salesforce strategy, helping businesses at every stage of their Salesforce transformation.

These partners have extensive knowledge of the Salesforce ecosystem and deep industry-specific expertise, which allows them to tailor solutions to companies across various sectors.

Choosing a consulting partner is sensible when undertaking a digital transformation project spanning multiple departments or business lines.

After all, they offer strategic advisory support, change management, ongoing program management, and assist with complex IT configuration.

2. System Integrators (SIs) and Resellers

System integrators and resellers focus on integrating and deploying Salesforce solutions.

Companies like Plus91Labs, Ingram, and Persistent specialize in helping businesses adopt Salesforce quickly and effectively.

Resellers often have strong local market expertise, making them ideal for smaller organizations or those looking to scale incrementally.

Moreover, they can offer industry-specific guidance and an accelerated path into the Salesforce ecosystem.

SMBs looking for a cost-effective way to adopt Salesforce or organizations in search of quick deployment with minimal complexity may benefit from working with SIs and resellers.

3. Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) on the Salesforce AppExchange

Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) develop innovative apps – hosted on the Salesforce AppExchange – that extend Salesforce’s functionality.

These apps address specific business challenges across industries, helping companies bridge the gaps in their technology stack and get more value from their Salesforce investment.

Countless companies work with Salesforce AppExchange partners to unlock functionality in their ecosystems beyond Salesforce core offerings.

Businesses looking for pre-configured solutions that easily integrate into the Salesforce environment will seek out an ISV.

How to Choose the Best Salesforce Partner in 2025

Ultimately, the process for choosing the best Salesforce partner will vary depending on which type of partner the business wants to work with.

Nevertheless, here are five ubiquitous steps to success.

Step 1: Identify Critical Needs and Goals

Is the sales team looking to migrate to Salesforce? Is marketing testing new customer engagement strategies? Or is customer service trying to automate much more of its operations?

To choose the best Salesforce partner in 2025, a business must have a good idea of what it wants to accomplish.

From there, identify critical outcomes and consider: what specific problems might we encounter that a partner could support us with?

Also, think about what kind of internal capabilities and resources the business already has, including access to Salesforce-certified experts.

Finally, after identifying those goals and internal resources, think about how to measure the outcome of a successful partnership.

Step 2: Narrow Down the Options

The Salesforce partner ecosystem is huge – and it’s constantly growing. Narrowing down the options is going to require a little research.

For those looking for a great ISV, the best place to start is on the AppExchange. There, they can sort through options based on the use case and check out the reviews left by other customers.

Alternatively – for System Integrator, Reseller, or Consulting partners – leverage network recommendations.

The best recommendations come from those who attend Salesforce events and webinars. Connecting with these businesses – which might have faced similar challenges – and asking for their advice is best practice.

In doing so, ask in-depth questions about the level of support the partner offers and the key results they’ve achieved.

Step 3: Isolate Key Candidates

For organizations seeking a consulting partner or system integrator, the goal is not simply to find someone who will follow instructions.

Instead, identify an individual or team capable of providing insight into not just the CRM app the business wants to deploy but the broader Salesforce ecosystem, too.

Alongside that, look for industry-specific knowledge. Consider how well they understand critical, sector-specific CX workflows.

Also, look out for whether a partner provides reference customers who have undertaken similar projects.

Lastly, consider evaluating multiple partners side-by-side, issuing a “Request for Proposal” to compare proposed solutions, timelines, costs, and customer support options.

Step 4: Ask the Right Questions

After creating a shortlist and researching the candidates, the next step is getting in touch and asking the right questions. Key things to ask include:

• What’s your experience with my industry? Do they have in-depth experience working with companies in your niche, and can they prove it with case studies?
• Would Salesforce recommend you? Have they earned certifications from Salesforce or been approved to list an app on the AppExchange?
• What do your customers say about you? Does the partner have reviews, customer success stories, and testimonials they can share?
• How will you approach this partnership? Will the partner act as a pilot, co-pilot, or navigator throughout your project?
• How do you manage implementation? If you’re working with a system integrator or reseller, how do they handle implementation?
• What are your values, mission, and vision? Is the partner compatible with your overall vision as a company – do they share the same values and focus areas?
• Who are your partners? Do they work with any other companies in the Salesforce ecosystem to deliver comprehensive custom solutions?
• Where are you based? Is the company local? This can be particularly important if you’re looking for a reseller or system integrator.
• What are your fees? How much does it cost to work with the partner, and are there any additional fees you may need to be aware of?
• What happens after implementation? Will your partner offer ongoing support or assistance after a project is complete?

Step 5: Consider Long-Term Needs

Not all projects that require the support of a Salesforce partner will be long-term. Some companies specifically seek out resellers and SIs for the quick initial deployment of new tools.

However, it’s worth thinking about long-term needs, too.

For example, when working with a reseller, consider: can they provide additional support if we want to upgrade and expand our Salesforce ecosystem in the future? Also, what are their options for ongoing maintenance and technical assistance?

Even if the business is only leveraging an app from an ISV on the Salesforce AppExchange, it’s worth assessing their approach to future software development, app updates, technical support, and training.

Choosing the Best Salesforce Partner in 2025

Salesforce is far from the cheapest customer experience ecosystem on the market. So, when investing in it, it’s critical to select a partner capable of doing that investment justice.

That partner can help execute the vision or  – more simply – provide ongoing expert guidance. There are partners to suit every business need.

Want to learn more about the latest Salesforce solutions to implement into your business’s workflows? Check out our extensive guide to the Agentforce for 2025.