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. 

For enterprises, that’s both a challenge and an opportunity. Handled properly, feedback reveals exactly where things are and aren’t working. It tells support teams which moments frustrate. It tells product teams what’s missing, and it tells the C-suite what customers value enough to fight for.

That’s the real job of customer feedback management, turning scattered input into structured insight, then routing it to the teams that can actually do something with it.

The best CFM systems don’t just capture data. They:

• Map feedback across the full journey, not just surveys
• Spot trends early, before they show up in churn
• Connect insight directly to actions: faster support, better products, clearer messaging

In short, modern customer feedback management platforms give enterprises a new kind of muscle: the ability to listen deeply, move early, and improve continuously

What is Customer Feedback Management?

Customer feedback management is the discipline of collecting, interpreting, and acting on customer sentiment – not just from surveys, but from every channel where customers leave a mark.

That might mean tracking a drop in CSAT after a product update, combing through live chat logs, or decoding a two-star review on Trustpilot. In most enterprise settings, it means building a feedback loop that crosses teams: product, marketing, service, and operations all relying on the same source of truth.

The best customer feedback management software doesn’t just store responses. It translates them into structured insight, surfacing trends, routing complaints, and pushing alerts to the right place, fast. It’s the glue between listening and resolution.

To work at scale, feedback systems typically include:

• Multichannel ingestion: Web forms, support tickets, NPS, app reviews, even social DMs. Every signal matters, even if it’s unstructured.
• Theme detection and prioritization: Tools flag repeat issues or keyword clusters before they become reputational risks.
• Workflow integration: A refund complaint can notify finance. A delivery bug can trigger a ticket in product ops.
• Dashboards and reporting: With the help of AI systems, leaders get a filtered view of real insights by product line, geography, or channel.

Leading companies aren’t collecting feedback in a vacuum. They’re wiring it directly into CRM systems, contact center tools frontline workflows, so the right people can act without delay. The tighter the integration, the faster teams can respond, fix what’s broken, and strengthen customer relationships that last.

Where Feedback Fits: Feedback Management, VoC, and EFM

Feedback is only useful if it leads somewhere. That’s where terminology starts to matter. Voice of the Customer (VoC), customer feedback management, and enterprise feedback management (EFM) are often used interchangeably. They shouldn’t be.

Customer feedback management is the engine room. It handles collection, sorting, tagging, and routing. Think of it as the operational layer that turns raw input from surveys, ratings, and comments into tasks and decisions. This is where data moves from inboxes and dashboards into action plans.

Voice of the Customer (VoC) goes broader. It doesn’t just listen to what customers say, it listens to how they feel, how they behave, and where they’re frustrated or delighted without necessarily saying it outright. A good VoC program blends direct feedback with behavioral signals and sentiment analysis. It’s about seeing the full picture.

Enterprise feedback management (EFM) stretches even further. It includes employee and partner insight, compliance triggers, internal process reviews, and often sits closer to risk management than CX. In highly regulated or distributed organizations, EFM is essential infrastructure.

At enterprise scale, feedback management isn’t just a support tool. It’s part of the system of record: connected to customer data platforms, CRMs, business intelligence tools, and employee engagement systems (WEM tools).

Each of these frameworks adds something. The most mature organizations use all three as parts of one loop: listen, understand, and act.

What is Customer Feedback Management? Feedback Types

Customer feedback isn’t always a form or a star rating. It’s often informal, unstructured, or buried in systems where no one’s looking. Recognizing the different types is the first step toward building something that works across departments and channels.

• Direct Feedback: The most visible kind. Surveys after support calls. CSAT and NPS prompts. Product reviews submitted through apps or portals. It’s usually structured, timestamped, and easy to analyze. But it’s also the most filtered. The people who answer tend to be at the emotional extremes, either thrilled or annoyed. Everyone else stays quiet.
• Indirect Feedback: This is what customers say when they’re not talking to you directly. Tweets. Public forum threads. Online reviews. Complaints posted to third-party sites. In many organizations, this insight slips through the cracks. But today’s customer feedback management platforms use NLP and sentiment tools to bring these comments into view before they become brand problems.
• Inferred Feedback: This is the feedback customers don’t say out loud, but show in what they do. Dropping out halfway through checkout. Asking the same question in three different places. Bouncing between help pages without finding what they need.

On their own, these signals can be easy to miss. But together, they reveal patterns of frustration that direct surveys might never surface.

Why Customer Feedback Management Matters

There’s no shortage of dashboards in a modern enterprise. But few of them speak with the voice of the customer. That’s what feedback management changes. It shifts insight from lagging reports to live reality, focusing on the real-time pulse of what customers need, want, and expect.

For enterprise leaders focused on customer experience, this isn’t a soft metric. It’s operational. According to Bain & Company, companies that excel at customer experience grow revenues 4%–8% above their market. But growth doesn’t come from tracking satisfaction scores alone. It comes from turning those scores into action.

Here’s where feedback becomes a business driver:

• Alignment Across Teams: Sales hears one thing. Support hears another. Product has a third backlog entirely. When feedback lives in separate systems, teams solve different problems. When it’s centralized, patterns emerge, and teams move in the same direction.
• Early Signal Detection: A broken link on a signup form. A billing process that’s confusing in one region. A surge in cancellation requests. Customer feedback management platforms surface these issues before they hit churn reports. The earlier the fix, the lower the cost.
• Smarter Roadmapping: Feedback isn’t just a support signal, it’s a product roadmap tool. Tracking customer insights, linking them to outcomes, and activating responses leads to strategic action. Teams can prioritize features that drive loyalty.
• Competitive Advantage: Every brand says it listens. Few can prove it. Companies that consistently close the loop visibly earn trust. In a market where switching costs are low, trust is often the only real moat.

The case for customer feedback management software isn’t just about efficiency. It’s about agility, spotting the next risk or opportunity while competitors are still guessing.

How to Build a Customer Feedback Management System That Works

Enterprises don’t lack feedback. They’re swimming in it. The challenge isn’t collection, but coordination. Scattered responses, siloed ownership, and no clear plan for what happens next. That’s where customer feedback management becomes a system, not just a task.

1. Start with What You Already Have

Before adding new tools or channels, map what’s in play. Most enterprise teams already gather feedback across:

• Post-interaction surveys
• Help desk conversations
• Social and review platforms
• Product feedback forms
• Sales and account notes

But it’s often fragmented, or locked in spreadsheets, CRM fields, and third-party platforms. Start by listing every touchpoint where customers leave a trace. Then identify who owns that data, how it’s reviewed, and whether it drives action.

2. Build a Shared System, Not Just a Repository

A true customer feedback management system isn’t just a bucket. It’s a hub. One place where cross-functional teams can view, analyze, and act on insights. That requires more than storage. It needs structure. Look for tools that:

• Integrate with your CRM system and CDP
• Tag feedback by source, product line, sentiment, urgency
• Offer role-specific dashboards for ops, product, CX, compliance
• Allow for routing, escalation, and response tracking

Consider other integrations that might be helpful too, such as connections to your ERP and business intelligence platforms, or workforce management tools.

3. Design a Feedback-to-Action Pathway

Without clear ownership, feedback dies in the backlog. Teams need to agree on what gets prioritized, who responds, and how it loops back into service design, training, or product fixes.

The strongest systems:

• Flag urgent or high-impact issues automatically
• Route insights to the right teams (with deadlines)
• Track outcomes, not just volume
• Communicate resolution back to the customer

When that loop works, feedback becomes part of how the business runs.

How to Use Feedback to Improve Business Results

Most companies collect feedback. Fewer actually do something meaningful with it. In mature organizations, feedback isn’t just a sentiment report, it’s a driver of change. Done right, it informs strategy, sharpens execution, and reduces churn.

• Prioritize patterns over outliers: It’s easy to get caught up in the latest complaint or viral review. But high-performing teams step back. They look for volume, frequency, and trends, not just anecdotes. That could mean mapping repeat issues to product features, or tracking common service pain points over time.
• Feed insight to the right systems: Don’t keep customer feedback on a CX dashboard. Use it to inform product roadmaps, workforce planning, pricing models, training strategies, and anything else that impacts the customer experience.
• Expand your metrics: Go beyond NPS and CSAT. Think about customer effort scores, overall retention rates and churn. Determine the KPIs you want to keep track of in advance, and make sure everyone is watching them, including the C-Suite.

Choosing Customer Feedback Management Software

Customer feedback is everywhere. What separates good companies from great ones is what they do with it. That’s where the right customer feedback management software comes in, to make insights actionable, accountable, and accessible across the enterprise.

Start With the Business, Not the Tool

Software selection should begin with the problems it’s meant to solve. Are customers dropping off after onboarding? Or are service complaints slipping through the cracks? Are product teams getting insight too late to act?

Clear goals tend to point to the right tool:

• Real-time alerts for contact center agents?
• Text analytics for unstructured NPS comments?
• Trend reporting to inform product roadmaps?

Once those use cases are clear, it becomes easier to separate the platforms built for scale from those that just tick boxes.

Integration Over Isolation

In a modern tech stack, no system should sit alone, especially not feedback.

Customer insights gain power when connected to:

• CRM platforms, where individual records tell a full customer story
• Contact center solutions, where timing and channel matter
• CDPs, which consolidate behavioral and transactional data
• BI tools, for deeper cross-functional reporting
• Broader ERP, WEM, and business management tools

Make sure your platforms feed the systems powering decisions.

Think Long-Term: Governance, Scalability, and Fit

Even the most powerful platform will struggle without strong foundations. For enterprise buyers, that means focusing on operational readiness:

• Can the system support multiple teams and regions with clear permissions?
• Are escalation workflows and approvals built in?
• Does the vendor offer strong uptime guarantees and compliance controls?
• Is the reporting flexible enough to satisfy both executive leadership and front-line teams?

Ease of use matters too. If agents, analysts, and leaders can’t find value in it quickly, feedback won’t flow where it’s needed most.

Discover the best customer feedback management solutions:

Customer Feedback Management Best Practices

Technology may capture customer sentiment, but it’s what companies do next that separates good intentions from real improvement. At the enterprise level, feedback shapes products, and defines brand reputation, retention, and revenue.

Here’s what the most effective teams get right.

• Track consistently: Feedback isn’t a file to review later. It’s a feed that’s active and ongoing. Companies need to review regularly, discuss in depth, and build around it.
• Make feedback cross functional: Operations needs visibility into service complaints, marketing needs to know where messaging misses, and HR should see how poor feedback is affecting teams. Get everyone involved.
• Close the loop: Replying to feedback, or acting on it, is crucial. Customers want to know their input mattered, and teams want confirmation their fix was felt. Ensure that your action is clear, powerful, and visible.
• Read between the lines: Surveys are useful, but raw behavior can say more. Combine behavioral insights, structured survey data, and conversational analytics for a comprehensive view of what customers really feel, not just what they say.
• Make it easy to act: Help teams fix issues quickly. Check if workflows are in place for feedback routing, and whether CX agents can escalate recurring problems. Give people the tools they need to act.

Customer Feedback Management Trends

Customer expectations haven’t just shifted, they’ve splintered. Channels have multiplied. Responses move faster. The tools used to manage it all are catching up. Here’s what’s defining feedback management right now:

The Rise of AI-Powered Analysis

Enterprise teams spent years circling AI as a concept. Now it’s operational. The strongest feedback systems today don’t just categorize responses, they break them down by tone, urgency, and underlying cause.

Platforms like Medallia, NICE, and Sprinklr are using natural language processing and conversational analytics to surface issues before they mutate. Instead of waiting for quarterly survey analysis, teams can spot sentiment drops and recurring themes as they happen.

Feedback Is Becoming Embedded

Feedback used to live in standalone forms: a survey here, a rating box there. That’s changing. Leading platforms now capture signals from everyday interactions: chat logs, call transcripts, even app usage.

Feedback is moving closer to the moment. A delivery delay triggers a quick prompt. A cancelled subscription opens the door to ask why. Systems are listening all the time, and they’re getting smarter about what to listen for.

Structured Feedback Loses Traction

It’s not just about ticking boxes. The most valuable insights often show up in open comments, social threads, or long-form email replies. That unstructured data used to be hard to sort. Now, it’s where the action is.

Enterprises are investing in platforms that can handle nuance: that can understand sarcasm, spot emotion, and cluster feedback without a human reading every line. Forrester calls this shift “human insight at scale”, and it’s showing up as a core capability in nearly every customer feedback management platform leader.

Everything Connects Or It Doesn’t Work

Feedback is most valuable when it flows. Into support platforms, product roadmaps, agent scripts, and CX dashboards. But that only happens when systems talk to each other.

Leading tools now integrate out-of-the-box with CRMs, contact center systems, VoC platforms, and enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions. That allows customer concerns to influence decision-making across the business, not just in service.

Privacy Remains Crucial

The line between “listening” and “surveilling” is thin, and enterprise buyers know it. In a post-GDPR, opt-out-default world, customer feedback strategies need to include transparency.

That means clear consent prompts. Data handling disclosures. Anonymization features. Especially in regulated sectors, ethics now sit beside analytics in the buyer’s checklist.

What is Customer Feedback Management? The Voice of CX

Customer feedback management It affects product decisions, shapes brand reputation, and drives loyalty at scale.

Done well, it connects dots across departments, from support and sales to marketing and operations. It puts real-time customer truth in front of the people who can do something about it.

But it only works when the systems are connected, the insights are trusted, and the loop is truly closed. That’s why enterprise teams are investing in modern customer feedback management platforms to operationalize input.

For companies focused on loyalty, innovation, and experience, the question isn’t whether to invest in customer feedback tools. The only real question is: which one will help you act faster, and smarter? CX Today is here to help:

• Join the Community: Be part of a dynamic CX-focused network. Swap ideas with thought leaders and elevate your feedback strategy.
• Test the Tech: Discover the top-rated platforms, meet vendors, and explore trends at live and virtual events.
• Plan Your Next Investment: Use our CX Marketplace to explore top vendors in feedback, VoC, CDP, and contact center tech.

Or visit the ultimate CX guide for enterprise experience leaders, for insights into how to build a better CX strategy, one step at a time.

This comes after its annual report revealed that AI implementation had increased by 282% since 2024. 

These tools enable enterprises to deploy AI agents without worrying about the reliability and safety of their performance within a system. 

Salesforce’s observability tools provide AI agents with the capabilities to analyze performance, optimize interactions, and monetize stability. 

Agent Analytics

This capability allows enterprises to view how well an AI agent is operating through monitoring its movements, how it’s improving/declining, and where these pain points are coming from. 

This can be turned into performance data, trends, and insights to understand how efficiently these agents are performing and take actionable steps to improve their usage. 

This can also be done across all implemented agents, allowing enterprises to view their agents’ overall effectiveness on customer interaction and support their continuous improvement. 

Agent Optimization

As a key observable capability, Optimization offers customer enterprises full transparency with each agent interaction. 

Customers can uncover how agents make decisions and what led them to make those choices, highlighting performance gaps and session flows to diagnose any issues and deduce the steps needed to improve its performance. 

This can include prompt, rule, or data source adjustments to solve misinterpreted information, inconsistent results or agent hesitation. 

Salesforce provides access to end-to-end visibility for customers to view each agent’s response and action, even with larger, complicated action chains. 

For less varied issues, similar requests can be accumulated to uncover larger problems in patterns or trends. 

Customers can also identify an agent’s configuration issues to pinpoint how an agent’s behaviour is affecting its operation and uncover which areas need to be retrained or personalized further for improved performance. 

Agent Health Monitoring 

This capability can monitor an AI agent’s reliability and safety level to ensure that it is running as expected. 

It provides almost real-time visibility and alerts when the agent is performing unpredictably, notifying the company before any significant damage takes hold. 

It measures an agent’s ability to handle requests, time taken to respond, and tracks incidents such as failures, breaks in activity, or invalid responses. 

By leveraging the capability, teams can speedily detect and resolve issues to minimize agent downtime and continue productivity. 

This tool is formed by two of Agentforce’s components, acting as the foundation for the observability tool by supplying the data and governance structure needed to monitor agents: 

• Session Tracing Data Model: By logging every agent interaction, the data model can store all its data in Data 360 and provide the observability tool the means to generate reliable analytics, error identifiers, and support optimization for unified visibility.
• MuleSoft Agent Fabric: This enables enterprises to control, register, and review agents to justify how they function and interact. 

AI Implementation Report 

In a report published in November, Salesforce announced that AI implementations had increased to 282% since last year. 

This data reveals that companies are now at a far better position to deploy pilot projects at scale rather than risk the threat of experimentation. 

Despite this, data governance, security, and trust remain high priorities, requiring risk management across workflows. 

This means that more companies are going to require higher visibility and control across large-scale AI deployments, which is where Salesforce’s observability tools come in. 

By supporting enterprises with agent interactions, Salesforce’s observability tools can decrease operational risk by allowing teams to keep up to date with agent visibility and analytics to keep agent deployments stable. 

Reddit, a customer of Salesforce, highlighted how Salesforce has allowed the customer enterprise to scale agents securely through consistent visibility. 

John Thompson, VP of Sales Strategy and Operations at Reddit, stated: “By observing every Agentforce interaction, we can understand exactly how our AI navigates advertisers through even the most complex tools.  

“This insight helps us understand not just whether issues are resolved, but how decisions are made along the way. 

“Observability gives us the confidence to scale these agents, continuously monitor performance, and make improvements as we learn from their interactions.”

At Microsoft Ignite 2025, the tech giant announced its plans to transform how it implements AI and how to improve general productivity. 

Microsoft has offered various AI agents for specific systems and companies for personalized success. 

Microsoft Copilot 365 

Within Office 365, Copilot acts as an assistant to support teams in preparing and managing their communications smoothly, working separately across each application to reduce overall preparation times. 

In Outlook, Copilot can organize a user’s inbox from high volumes of emails to summarized and highlighted information that needs immediate attention, as well as gather any information relevant to the user’s current task for quick response times and correct information gathered. 

In Word, customers can utilize Copilot’s assistance with drafting and refining content, providing summarized notes of material, and lengthening notes into documents, allowing teams to prepare for meetings and reports with limited information. 

In PowerPoint, users can create highly efficient presentations through Copilot’s capabilities to develop slides, draft content, and reposition information to fit their audience’s needs, allowing for clearer presentations with effective outcomes. 

In Excel, Copilot can break down data information through summaries and identify common trends within the spreadsheet, allowing for quick turnarounds in analysis explanations for other customers or employees. 

Copilot Studio

Within Copilot studio, teams can design personalized agents to fit their needs to work inside Microsoft 365. 

This tool can be used support connections between Microsoft’s own content as well as external systems through APIs, meaning customers can utilize the agent outside of Microsoft’s products for quicker results. 

It offers natural language when advising users on tasks, queries, or support with internal workflows and repeatable tasks, minimizing the need for human agent automation. 

For additional security, Copilot studio allows users to manage their custom agents to reassign roles to fit company policies, permissions, and security maintenance, obtaining an Entra Agent ID to verify an agent to operate under secure governance. 

Copilot Mode with Edge 

Copilot Mode can now be used on Microsoft Edge to analyze open tabs to summarize content and research within a browser. 

This reduces time spent tab switching and helps users stay on task by feeding them the relevant information. 

Information can be obtained from articles, texts, and videos, summarizing key points and explanations by interpreting knowledge from different sources at the same time, which can be useful for reviewing widespread customer experiences of products or services. 

Copilot Mode is only entitled to utilize information the user gives it access to, allowing the tool to work within company guidelines and provides the user with the relevant information it receives. 

Agent 365 – provides security and governance for copilot (link back to previous article) (100) 

Working as Copilot’s governance layer, Agent 365 provides organizations with the ability to control AI agents and how they interact within the business. 

Agent 365 utilizes Entra ID to identify each agent within an ecosystem and aligns it with company policies, allowing organizations to set limits and permissions when needed to stop agents from working outside company expectations. 

These tools also allow companies to track AI activity to apply compliance rules to avoid data loss on behalf of the agent, allowing organizations to maintain control while the AI agents continue to complete their tasks.  

Copilot Business 

Working as a slightly different version of Microsoft 365 Copilot, Copilot Business is designed to support small to mid-sized organizations using AI tools. 

Similarly to the 365 Copilot tool, this feature allows businesses to summarize their material, advise on email management, and create presentations using the provided Microsoft 365 apps to reduce time spent on administrative tasks. 

This tool, however, does not require a complex setup as the needs required for SMB don’t necessarily demand the amount of compliance and data needs to function. 

Copilot Business can but used to work at a basic level, whilst continuing to provide analysis and reports of data and communications to increase productivity within smaller businesses. 

Microsoft Ignite 2025 

Microsoft Ignite will run from Tuesday 18th November to Friday 21st November in San Francisco. 

The company has emphasized its commitment to agentic AI and is set to showcase this message throughout the conference, as well as further touch on issues such as Security and Governance, and Identity and Access. 

At Microsoft Ignite 2025, the company announced that its innovations for AI transformation were being introduced to Microsoft’s Frontier – its preview program for customers to gain early access to newer products. 

This agent is just one of several products Microsoft has announced to address security and compliance issues in AI agents. 

Sales Development Agent 

The Sales Development Agent is designed to advise sales teams in increasing their selling capacity. 

As a fully automated agent, this tool can be used to research, authorize, and handle outreach even after business hours, supporting steady revenue growth. 

This tool can work independently of a human agent, utilizing personalization for seller outreach with automated follow-ups to maintain client-seller relationships that extend beyond a company’s working time zone, as well as hand off leads to human sellers when needed. 

The agent operates through Microsoft’s security and compliance rules, ensuring that the tool can be utilized safely and efficiently in Microsoft 365 without security gaps. 

Microsoft has launched further security and compliance-focused tools to address frequent concerns around AI agents and how they operate around sensitive data. 

These tools are designed to be manageable and to monitor any suspicious activity, risky behavior, or possible threat to data exposure or accidental leaks, helping enterprises to govern their agents reliably. 

Other Security and Compliance Tools 

Entra ID 

Microsoft has announced that Entra ID has expanded its secure identity and access to adapt to the AI era. 

The tool allows users to manage accounts and resources securely, including multi-factor authentication for extra security checks, activity monitoring, and secure cloud workloads. 

It can also help guide at-risk users away from data threats, detect unauthorized AI usage, and prevent overprivileged agents from accessing controls. 

Defender 

One core component of the tool is to govern and protect AI agents across Microsoft’s ecosystem. 

As a unified platform for governance and threat protection, Microsoft Defender can offer protection across all environments where AI agents are active, deploying AI-powered security bots to monitor newer zones to forecast potential criminal activity. 

This includes safeguarding against any potential threats and vulnerabilities to an agent, as well as resolving and investigating incidents where necessary. 

Microsoft Purview

Alongside Entra and Defender, Microsoft Purview is included in Microsoft Agent 365 to ensure compliance across Microsoft. 

It is an AI-enhanced control plane component, in charge of handling recently deployed AI agents to prevent agent-specific risks, rather than being focused on human data. 

The tool also allows customer enterprises to view an agent’s status, their typical tasks and interactions, as well as their current risk level to prevent data loss.  

Foundry Agent Service

This tool includes built-in features to support security, oversight, and policy alignment, such as agent controls that limit the amount of data an AI agent can access. 

Foundry also provides security and compliance teams with real-time tracing and full insight visibility to investigate and review activity. 

It also works with other Agent 365 tools to handle threat detection and prevent data loss, ensuring that all agents are screened properly. 

Edge for Business Security Features 

The browser environment allows companies to hide information with a watermark overlay and set boundaries on web apps to stop data from being copied. 

These features can be used by organizations to secure sensitive information and prevent data leakage by aligning company policies to the tool. 

This can be monitored from within the Microsoft 365 admin center across various devices. 

Microsoft Ignite 2025

Microsoft Ignite will run from Tuesday 18th November to Friday 21st November in San Francisco. 

The company has emphasized its commitment to agentic AI and is set to showcase this message throughout the conference, as well as further touching on issues such as Security and Governance, and Identity and Access. 

You can find out more about the biggest CX announcements from Ignite 2025 here.

Whether through phone, chat, SMS, or social media, the assumption is simple: if you’re not available, a competitor will be.  

For modern contact centers, that expectation is both a challenge and an opportunity. Omnichannel engagement, intelligent IVR, real-time customer satisfaction surveys, and seamless CRM integration are no longer optional; they are now the tools that define competitive service.  

The cost of failing to meet these expectations is tangible. Missed calls aren’t just lost opportunities; they erode trust.  

“If you’re reachable, you’re in the game,” says James Scott, Senior Solutions Engineer for North America at Diabolocom.  

“You miss 100 percent of the calls you don’t answer. That’s not just about revenue; it’s about long-term trust.” 

“If a call doesn’t reach the right person quickly, it erodes the relationship.”  

Defining Reachability  

But what does reachability actually mean?  

For Scott, reachability is the ability of an agent or a client to connect quickly and meaningfully.  

It’s not as simple as just getting someone on a call; it’s about enabling them to achieve the purpose of that interaction.  

“For a sales call, that might be initiating the sales process efficiently. For customer service, it delivers the high-quality care the client expects,” he explained.   

For the modern agent, reachability means no longer being tied to a desk. Customers expect real-time service, and organizations must meet these expectations.  

This is where tools like Diabolocom Mobile – the industry’s first app-free mobile CX solution – are crucial, as they allow agents and field service staff to handle calls from anywhere.  

“The shift from on-prem to cloud-based contact centers was the first step,” says Scott.   

“Mobile takes it further: what if agents could leave the contact center entirely and still be reachable, still be able to connect with clients effectively?” 

And the solution isn’t limited to improving pick-up rates. With Diabolocom Mobile, mobile phones become complete CX tools, allowing agents to log interactions, update CRMs, and automate follow-ups.  

Indeed, Diabolocom’s mantra is that mobility doesn’t compromise quality, rather it enhances it.  

The tool integrates with all major CRM systems, giving agents the context they need to respond effectively. 

Improving Reachability  

In addition to Diabolocom Mobile, there are plenty of other solutions that can be deployed to improve reachability.  

Diabolocom’s Engage platform, for example, uses Automatic Call Distribution (ACD) to direct calls to the right agent immediately. 

The benefits of this feature can be seen in practice with its implementation for Cordon Group, one of Europe’s leading players in the electronics sector. 

The firm operates a call center that receives over 100,000 calls per year. In 2023, Cordon Group introduced Diabolocom’s ACD solution to route incoming calls according to the agent’s skill level. 

This proved to be a great success, with the company’s Quality of Service (the rate at which incoming calls are picked up) averaging 91% for 2023. 

Cordon Group also achieved a reachability rate of 98%, well above expected averages, for outgoing calls made manually from the Diabolocom platform. 

As well as ACD, the CCaaS provider also delivers actionable insights via real-time dashboards, which highlight queue statuses, waiting times, and service levels, with alerts that flag issues before they escalate.   

“These live insights aren’t just metrics; they’re actionable intelligence,” Scott says.  

“They help companies protect the customer experience and maintain high standards, even during peak periods.” 

Brink’s France is a good example of how that feature can benefit a business: 

“We use all the possibilities offered by Diabolocom – from the voice server to post-call satisfaction surveys and real-time indicators – to automate what can be automated and provide supervisors with a complete view of activity,” explained François-Xavier Schepereel, Customer Relations Director for Brink’s France. 

Virtual numbers also play a key role. By offering local, national, or international numbers, businesses gain a sense of presence where it matters most, improving pickup rates and ensuring consistent reachability.  

Frédéric Durand, CEO of Diabolocom, notes:  

“Virtual numbers let your teams operate independently of physical locations. You can centralize management, track performance, and maintain service continuity seamlessly.”  

AI and the Future of Reachability  

Looking ahead, AI is unsurprisingly key to shaping the next level of reachability.  

Intelligent virtual agents can handle first-line interactions 24/7 across multiple channels, freeing humans for complex or high-value conversations.  

Scott detailed how reachability is evolving from just getting a human on the line to ensuring intelligent agents deliver high-quality service at scale.  

“The challenge is to keep humans in the loop where they matter most, but leverage AI where it can act effectively,” he said.   

Why Reachability Matters  

For enterprises, reachability cannot be ignored. It has the potential to drive revenue, build trust, and strengthen loyalty.  

“In a saturated market, your technology has to do what it says it does,” Scott explains.  

“If it delivers on its promise, it separates the wheat from the chaff – and that’s what gives businesses an edge.” 

By combining mobility, intelligent routing, AI, real-time monitoring, and virtual numbers, contact centers can build a system that never misses a customer.  

You can find out more about Diabolocom’s Mobile solution and how it is helping organizations master reachability by checking out this article.

You can also discover Diabolocom’s full suite of services and solutions by visiting the website today.   

In its third-quarter earnings call, the software company announced that its total number of customers had increased to almost 300,000.

These tactics reveal how enterprises are willing to adopt AI with the correct tools given.

HubSpot CEO Yamini Rangan, remains confident in HubSpot’s continuing strategy to improve its customer tool adoption and outreach. 

She said: “We are uncovering new ways to drive efficiency and finding signals to show our customers what’s possible with AI.  

“I’m more confident than ever in our strategy and our ability to deliver value for customers in this new era.”

Rangan recognised that the result of this was down to three different factors: 

1. Multi-hub adoption
2. Answer Engine Optimization strategy
3. Platform consolidation

Multi-Hub Adoption  

HubSpot has adopted the multi-hub strategy to encourage consumers to involve their enterprises in more than one hub. 

This solution addresses the current trending issue of tool fatigue by supporting its enterprise customers to meet these AI innovations head-on. 

In fact, this has become the model standard for a large number of customers, with 43% of customers who subscribe to HubSpot’s Pro Plus also subscribing to all three primary hubs. 

Along with this strategy, the company has continued to enhance its agents across the board, as well as launching a new data agent towards the end of the quarter. 

This approach has seen higher results and activity across all hubs and agents. 

In one example, customers who used the Marketing Hub saw improvements in results and click-through rates thanks to its embedded AI features, such as the AI-powered email. 

Its Prospecting agent saw a total of 6,400 customers during the quarter, with an increase rate of 94% and high rates of engagement with over 1,000,000 recipients. 

Data agent, which launched recently at INBOUND in September, has already collected 700 customers. 

HubSpot’s digital assistant ‘Brief’ has more than doubled in weekly usage for record summarizing and finding performance engagement insights. 

Its Data Hub can be beneficial to this process, by helping customers to unify data from across an enterprise into one location. 

Along with its standardized bots, HubSpot has also introduced its Breeze studio, allowing customers to create and design their own agents to fit their enterprise’s needs. 

AEO

HubSpot’s Content Hub has also launched its Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) strategy to improve its customers’ visibility online and in AI-generated answers, allowing them to measure and refine their tactics. 

This has included the launch of its AEO-focused tool, such as the Loop, a clear guide for how companies can drive traffic growth from both human and machine intelligence. 

The tool has received strong responses from customers, with a total of 270 million viewers and 100,000 on the Playbook experience. 

HubSpot’s Data and Marketing hubs have also been beneficial to the launch of Loop, helping to create personalized customer profiles and content targeted towards buyer objectives. 

The second AEO product launch was the AEO Grader, which allows companies to grasp their popularity levels and image when they’re searched on AI engines. 

Platform Consolidation

From strong results in the third quarter, HubSpot has seen substantial benefits for its customers from its unified, platform-first customer solution. 

A primary justification for this upwind in the platform’s customer growth is its cost-efficiency method, with more companies choosing to go for unified operations to avoid integration expenses, as well as to view their marketing, sales, and customer services all in one place to simplify their AI innovation process. 

This result has also benefited from HubSpot’s LLM connector approach, allowing its platform to connect with large-language-model (LLM) providers, such as ChatGPT and Gemini. 

This approach has seen an upsurge in consumer reach across its LLM providers, with ChatGPT reporting more than 47,000 customers activating its connector, with over half of them being Pro Plus users. 

Its cloud connector has also seen high levels of traffic, having been accessed by over 6,000 users. 

HubSpot refers to this approach as a “key part of [its] AI strategy”, with the LLMs using public available data to create the insights, HubSpot can offer context to the insights and make them ready for market teams to use. 

The company have also shown great success in its CRM, becoming the first to connect with all three – ChatGPT, Quad, and Gemini – for successful customer outcomes. 

HubSpot also outlined the success of its shift towards a universal usage-based pricing model during the quarter, set to extend across the entire platform. 

The system focuses on its AI agents’ actions, data hub syncs, and automation all under one operational framework. 

To track and monitor customer usage, HubSpot uses credits to measure customer value growth and their use of AI and data inside the system. 

By using more HubSpot tools, AI features, and data capabilities, customers can scale their value effectively without having to change their system environment. 

Rangan said:

“Our vision is to make the core seat essential with AI and data value for every go-to-market employee. Credits are another powerful emerging lever.” 

Key Q3 Financial Results

• HubSpot has revealed a global customer base increase of nearly 297,000, its total number of customers had increased by 10,900 
• Its total revenue saw a strong increase at $810MN, up by 18.4% year-over-year 
• The percentage of customer revenue retained above 80%, with customer net revenue retention at 103%
• Subscription revenue went up at almost $792MN, up 21% on an as-reported basis compared to Q3 2024 
• Other professional services and revenue had risen to almost $18MN, up by 19% on an as-reported basis compared to Q3 2024 

With trends and product forecasts rapidly changing, businesses can showcase and seek out the latest technology innovations and strategies at this year’s expo. 

Through various seminars, booths, panel debates, and live technology demonstrations, visitors will receive an invaluable insight into the latest era of customer experience technology. 

And with thousands of CX leaders and professionals from across the continent in attendance, visitors can gain practical insights and guidance from well-recognised experts at industry-leading enterprises. 

Check out the upcoming, cannot-miss exhibitors, speakers, themes, and more below. 

Exhibitors and Speakers

With 116 company exhibitors expecting to be in attendance, some of the top CX companies are scheduled to attend, with a list of where to find them, who will be speaking, and at which seminar. 

Five9 – Stand CC-L20 

Speakers: 

Steve Blood, VP of Market Intelligence & Evangelism: Rise of the Machines: The Dawn of Agentic CX 

Ty Stephens, Director of Channel Sales, EMEA: CX is Still Human – Agentic AI Just Makes it Smarter 

Microsoft – CC-J60 

Speaker: 

Sebastian Reeve, Director of Strategy, Customer Experience Applications: Become an Agent Boss: Human + AI Collaboration with Microsoft 

AWS – CC-J30 

Speakers: 

Shameem Smillie, GTM Specialist Leader at Amazon Connect: Transforming Customer Experience with Amazon Connect 

Soumya Unni, Solution Architecture Leader at Amazon Connect: Transforming Customer Experience with Amazon Connect 

Salesforce – CC-H20 

Speaker: 

David Brown, SVP & Chief Customer Officer: The Agentic Contact Center: A Salesforce Vision for AI & Confident Agents 

8×8 – CC-F40 

Speakers: 

Chris Angus, VP CPaaS & CX Expansion: Frictionless by Design: Modernising Customer Experience with CPaaS 

Maxine Eunson, Head of Public Sector: Transforming Public Sector CX with Purpose-Driven Communications 

Cisco Webex – CC-G30 

Speakers: 

Joseph Pratten, CX Sales Specialist: See It, Test It, Trust It: AI Agents in the Contact Center 

Keith Griffin, Cisco Fellow VP: Agentic AI: From Hype to Reality 

Vonage – CC-F20 

Speaker: 

Tara Aldridge, Head of Product Enablement: Inclusive CX: Designing Journeys That Leave No Customer Behind 

Dialpad – CC-L10 

Speaker: 

Michele Sama, Director of Engineering: Future-Proof Your CX: The Practical Agentic AI Roadmap 

Genesys – VIP Lounge 

Speaker: 

Keith Fulford, Director of Business Value Engagement at Genesys: CX Trends 2026: Agentic AI and the Future of Orchestrated Experiences 

NiCE – CC-M30 

Speakers: 

Andrew Tucker, Solution Engineer: Cut Through the Complexity: Turning Your Data Chaos into Clarity 

Natalee Wiggins, Solution Sales Executive: Cut Through the Complexity: Turning Your Data Chaos into Clarity 

Talkdesk – CC-K40 

Speaker: 

Gary Ovenall, Regional Vice President, EMEA Solution Engineering: Beyond CCaaS: Enter the Era of Customer Experience Automation 

Verint – CC-N20 

Speakers: 

Huw Jones, Director, Solutions Consulting: Turning Strategy into ROI: What High-Performing Contact Centres Do Differently 

Keith Barrow, Director, Solutions Consulting: Turning Strategy into ROI: What High-Performing Contact Centres Do Differently 

Zendesk – CC-G50 

Speaker:

Kathryn Simons Porter, Principal Contact Center Sales Specialist: CCaaS, CEC, or CRM? AI-powered Resolutions for Every Call and Channel 

Content Guru – CC-M10

Speakers:

Sean Taylor, CEO: AI Winners and Losers – Building a Winning CX Strategy with AI

Martin Taylor, Deputy CEO: From Talk to Action: Real-World AI Transformation Today

Themes

Contact Center Expo has provided a list of content themes in CX, Tech, and Business for visitors to look forward to hearing about this year: 

Customer Experience 

• Supporting vulnerable customers 
• Issue resolution 
• Fostering trust 
• Personalisation 
• Creating efficiency for the customer 
• The ideal customer journey 

Tech Innovation 

• AI 
• Omnichannel integration 
• Data Analytics 
• VR 
• Cloud-based solutions 
• Workforce management 

Business Strategies 

• Leadership and Culture 
• Workforce Management 
• Recruitment & Training 
• Employee engagement 
• Operational efficiency 
• Agent support 

Agenda 

Contact Center Expo is expected to run from 9.30am – 4.30pm GMT Wednesday November 19th to 9.30am – 4pm GMT Thursday November 20th, located at London’s ExCel venue. 

You can obtain the full two-day seminar agenda list here. 

Sales and marketing departments have entered a new era. One defined by rising customer expectations, fierce digital competition, and intense pressure on revenue performance.  

As growth slows and investor scrutiny increases, commercial leaders must deliver more profitable and customer-centric outcomes. Technology now sits at the heart of that mission. 

Long gone are the days of the salesperson with only charm in their utility belt. Modern sales teams are harnessing digital tools to personalize their message, deeply understand their target buyers, and streamline their own workflows. 

When it comes to marketing, the modern buyer wants more than catchy slogans and tech demos. More independent than ever, buyers respond to marketers who can provide real data and relevant content. 

This guide explores the capabilities, considerations, and opportunities within the evolving sales & marketing technology landscape. Its goal is to equip leaders with clarity, structure, and direction. To help them find the right tools to keep up – or dominate – in a competitive enterprise landscape. 

This comprehensive guide will help you understand: 

• What is Sales & Marketing Technology?
• The Key Trends Defining This Sector 
• The Different Categories Within Sales & Marketing Tech 
• What is in the Sales & Marketing Tech Stack?
• Why Enterprises are Struggling with New Tech Adoption
• Vendor Selection: How Do I Do It? 
• 2030 and Beyond: The Future Trends Defining Sales & Marketing 
• Where Do I Go to Find Out More? 

Sales & Marketing Technology, Explained: The Engine Behind Modern Growth

Sales and Marketing Technology refers to a connected ecosystem of tools and platforms. Their aim is to help organizations attract, engage, convert, and retain customers across the full buyer journey. 

Its purpose is to unite data, digital channels, and revenue teams so businesses can strengthen customer lifetime value.  

In today’s competitive climate, technology has become the backbone of modern commercial strategy.  

The New Rules of Revenue: Trends Reshaping Sales & Marketing

Analysts have identified three key areas where sales & marketing leaders are looking to improve – driving interest in new technology:

“CSOs must balance revenue generation with operational efficiency as investor demands rise.” – Gartner

 

“Leaders must prioritize improving revenue processes and customer-centric strategies.” – Forrester  

 

“The 2025 trend to watch for is the Personalization Renaissance.” – Mintel  

In other words, three capabilities have now become competitive differentiators. Better revenue generation, better personalization, and better processes among sales and marketing teams.  

Forward-thinking enterprises have responded to these challenges in a similar way – harnessing artificial intelligence. Here are three recent case studies where these areas were addressed with new AI products. 

• Better revenue generation:
  • PWC identified one key differentiator enabling some marketing teams to deliver nearly 80% more shareholder value than competitors. Their trick? Harnessing and investing in AI.
  • “Used narrowly, AI can make marketing less expensive – faster content, smaller budgets, leaner teams. Used strategically, it can make marketing indispensable – unlocking new growth, higher profitability, greater enterprise value”, it concluded.
  • Top performing marketing teams were found to regularly invest in new AI-powered capabilities. This in turn generates revenue, and funds marketing teams to invest in more tools – creating a cycle of enterprise success. 

• Better personalization:
  • A European telecom company found that customers receiving personalized messages took action 10 percent more than those who received generic advertising materials.
  • According to a 2025 McKinsey report, the company used GenAI to personalize messaging based on age, gender, and data usage.
  • McKinsey reported that it has “seen some marketers deploy gen AI to personalize content development 50 times faster than a more manual approach”. 

• Better processes:
  • Enterprise IT platform Workday saw 3,500% ROI after adopting an automation solution for client contracts. 
  • By connecting data across platforms, the Workday team saved hundreds of thousands of hours in its global projects. 

The Four Categories of the Sales & Marketing Technology Landscape

Whether you’re an inbound marketing expert, a sales team leader, or a CIO, you have an important role to play in harnessing and optimizing these technologies.  

The team at CX Today have distilled this wide-range of products into 4 core categories. 

1. Building Awareness (Acquisition)
   Tools that help organizations attract attention, generate demand, and capture leads through content, campaigns, and data-driven targeting.
2. Sales Enablement (Closing Deals)
   Platforms that empower sales teams with insights, automation, messaging, and training to shorten sales cycles and increase conversion.
3. Retaining Customers (Client Success)
   Technology that strengthens onboarding, engagement, renewal, and advocacy – protecting recurring revenue and reducing opportunities for churn. 
4. Omnichannel Connection (Linking Everything Together)
   Integration and automation technologies that unify data to deliver consistent experiences end-to-end. 

Your Tech Arsenal: Understanding the Tools That Fuel Revenue

Vendors are looking to support a broad spectrum of job titles within sales & marketing, with an aim to automate, optimize, and manage workloads. With the four categories as a dividing structure, here are some of the typical solutions that are found in the modern sales & marketing tech stack: 

Building Awareness 

This is the front door of the enterprise growth engine. Awareness tools help brands capture attention, generate qualified leads, and convert insights into pipeline opportunities.  

• Social media and content sharing: These platforms look to generate leads through inbound marketing where interested readers are prompted to engage further with the brand. This is particularly valuable for industries that rely on thought-leadership to grow brand awareness, such as professional & business services (consulting, legal, accounting). 

• Lead capture: This can include strategic forms where brands can gather intent data and contact details to set priority accounts for further marketing. It may also include web deanonymization, where brands can reach out to visitors to its site for sourcing potential leads. 

• Smart webpages & content journeys: Modern customers want more independence and feel more confident doing their own research. These platforms can help personalize and enhance how customers reach the decision stage, providing relevant content without being overbearing. 

• Related vendors: HubSpot, Hootsuite, 6sense, Uberflip 

Sales Enablement 

Once awareness is established, sales enablement technology equips revenue teams to engage prospects intelligently and close business deals efficiently. This leads to shorter sales cycles and higher conversation rates. 

• CRM systems: A strategic approach to converting sales relies on a centralized database which highlights opportunities, past interactions – in sync with the awareness-building marketing teams. 

• Smarter sales pitches: Salespeople are in a stronger position to increase conversions when they have personalised decks, playbooks, and pitches. These solutions help manage and track these sales content pieces. 

• Training and Coaching: These solutions put salespeople in a meeting with AI avatars, letting them practice their pitch in a risk-free environment. And after a genuine sales meeting, they can analyse transcripts to find areas for improvement. 

• Related vendors: Highspot, Seismic, Showell, Microsoft Dynamics 365 

Retaining Customers 

Retention and expansion are now as critical as acquisition. Customer success technology ensures that value delivery continues beyond the sale, and helps Chief Revenue Officers to better predict financial forecasts. 

• Customer Success Platforms: With data analytics and dashboards, these solutions can help client teams to understand the health of the accounts they manage. From there, they can upsell promising accounts or prevent churn. 

• Product Usage Analytics: One of the core ways to retaining customers is to ensure their onboarding and usage is going smoothly. These tools track this information and enhance the work of support teams who address problems. 

• Post-purchase communication tools: Once customers are onboarded, client teams can use a lifecycle communication tool to keep customers engaged and prime them for upsell pitches. 

• Related vendors: Qualtrics, Amplitude, Totango, Braze. 

Omnichannel Connection 

The final layer – and the most transformative – focuses on unifying data and experience across the organization. These platforms make marketing, sales, and service work as a single, insight-driven system. 

• Customer data & identity management: With these intuitive systems, client teams have a top-down 360° view of all customer touchpoints. This enables personalized content and predictive insights across the client journey. 

• Smarter digital engagement: When clients communicate with a company’s AI bots or human agents, omnichannel systems enable seamless conversations across sessions and channels. 

• Integration & automation layers: Acting as the connective tissue itself, these tools enable information to automatically flow to the right places and at the right times, feeding the 360° vision. 

• Related vendors: Salesforce, Zeta Global, Sprinklr, Zapier. 

Mind the Gaps: Adoption Pitfalls That Can Stall Your Tech ROI

While these solutions can open new doors for marketing & sales teams, adoption is not always a straightforward path. And the stakes are high.  

Putting aside financial consequences for the business, members of a buying committee may lose credibility if they support a purchasing decision that later fails to bear fruit. 

Going one step further, an unsuitable adoption journey can spark a negative reaction from customers, regulators, and investors.  

Vendors often pitch that their tools are simply ‘plug and play’. The reality is that enterprises must consider these adoption challenges: 

Privacy and first-party data:

Concerns around user privacy have been growing steadily, and this has resulted in a clamp down on legacy forms of data collection, such as third-party cookies. 

• Marketing teams today are expected to comply with all new privacy regulations. They should aim to responsibly collect consented data while fostering valuable personalization.
• Enterprise buyers must consider GDPR, CCPA, and other AI regulations – or risk the resulting backlash. 

Preventing underutilization:

A 2022 study from Gartner found that marketers were only utilizing 42% of their martech stack, a 16% drop from two years prior. The most common reason for this was an overlap of tech solutions, rendering part of the stack obsolete.

• With this in mind, sales and marketing teams can first consider how legacy solutions can be upgraded. Implementing a whole new solution may result in waste and underutilization. 

Employee satisfaction and skills:

One of the most common adoption challenges across every aspect of tech is ensuring the satisfaction of the humans that will be interacting with it day in and day out. 

• Adoption can be stalled when teams don’t have the skills or motivation to complete the onboarding. In relationship-driven industries such as sales, hesitancy about handing over the reins to AI is understandable.
• Secondly, if vendors can’t provide comprehensive support post-purchase, this will also extend the adoption process unnecessarily.  

Proving value:

“It’s not what you know, it’s what you can prove”. This isn’t just a stereotypical line from a legal drama, it’s also a key consideration when purchasing a new sales & marketing tool. 

• Due to the nature of outbound marketing, for example, it can be difficult for CMOs to prove that their department is truly delivering ROI. 
• More page views? More likes on a LinkedIn post? An increased email open rate? Consider which metrics are strong enough to justify a purchasing decision and whether a new solution will complement them. 
• For sales leaders, one common target is maximizing time with potential clients. This means they must prove that any new tech solution adopted is truly optimizing their time and workflow to open up their calendars for more calls. 

Rather than looking at the new features of an AI tool, tech buyers can start by looking at their own KPIs. Considering how a new solution will integrate and enhance existing processes of success measurement is key.

Cutting Through the Noise: A Buyer’s Guide to Selection Criteria

15,384.  

In kilometres, it’s roughly the distance between Guatemala City and Hyderabad. To count to from one, it would take you around four hours. But it’s also the number of Martech solutions that exist in 2025, according to a recent report. 

There isn’t even a recognised number of Salestech solutions out there, depending how wide one wants to cast their net, but it’s estimated to be over 1000. 

Rather than cause a serious bout of decision paralysis, these statistics are meant to illustrate how critical it is for enterprise buyers to have effective selection criteria. 

Here are some starting points to help you get from thousands to just one. The right one. 

Identifying your pain point:

Enterprise buyers will likely know what their primary growth constraint is, whether it’s more leads, more conversions, or a more comprehensive view of the entire customer experience. 

• Using the four categories system, buyers should ensure that there is a strategic fit with the relevant buying stage.  
• Keep in mind however, how processes upstream and downstream will impact your KPIs and growth. If you’re a sales leader struggling to convert meetings into successful deals, it could be that the marketing team is not generating targeted enough leads, for example. 

Data unification costs:

While it’s been established that AI can be a major differentiator in sales & marketing, but it is very much the ‘cherry on top’, as opposed to the solid foundation to build upon.  

• Without unifying new tools with existing data systems, creating a single, reliable source of truth becomes difficult.
• Without that, AI can expose more problems than it solves according to Tim Banting of Techtelligence. 
• Therefore, enterprise buyers should not expect a flashy new AI solution to be a ‘do-it-all’ tool. Instead, selection criteria should evaluate the integration costs that will create a fertile soil for AI to grow from. 

Success-centric vendors:

Vendors will already be thinking about how to prove their solution is right for you. Consider whether a vendor can provide a measurable realistic forecast of productivity gains that you can take to the buying committee.

• This mindset signals a shift away from promises, and more towards tying programs to results. 

The Future Trends Defining Sales & Marketing Technology

As we look toward 2030 and beyond, the sales & marketing technology landscape will undergo deeper transformation driven by greater automation, personalization, and data management.  

These teams can expect to see transformation in the content they produce, but also the workflows that define their workplace experience.  

Here are some future capabilities and trends to consider: 

The human and the machine:

While automation and AI will be embedded deeply, the differentiator will shift to how humans play a strategic role. Can they use technology to amplify creativity, judgement and empathy – not replace it?

• More than 50% of the internet is estimated to be AI-generated content. That trend has no signs of slowing. Companies that utilize AI, while amplifying their humanness, could capitalize on AI-fatigue among customers. 

Outcome-driven models:

As pressure mounts to prove ROI among sales & marketing teams, vendors may change how they frame their products.  

• The time of features, capabilities and upgrades, could be no more. 
• The future could vendors and buyers more oriented around business outcomes (e.g., increased net revenue retention, shorter sales cycles), rather than flashy products. 

Convergence of martech-adtech-servicetech:

The segmentation between “marketing tools”, “sales tools” and “customer service tools” will blur. This comes as omnichannel data connects everything and intelligence is found everywhere. 

• The future could see enterprises normalize an integrated revenue ecosystem with real-time feedback loops across the customer journey.

Final Takeaway: Building a Smarter, More Human Sales & Marketing Engine

Over the coming years, AI-driven orchestration, unified customer data, and outcome-based measurement will redefine what effective go-to-market execution looks like.  

Leaders who invest in scalable, ethical, and modular platforms today will find themselves better equipped to navigate tomorrow’s volatility. A future where buyer journeys are self-directed, expectations are personal, and attention is fleeting. 

Stay up to date on the latest sales & technology news by following CX Today on LinkedIn and keeping an eye on our new website category: Sales & Marketing Technology.

To hear from fellow buyers and tech decision makers, join the CX Today community group on LinkedIn where over 40,000 industry professionals are inspiring change.