Monday Morning Impact – December 20

Will People Call Your Contact Center Because of Loneliness?

Gartner Predicts That By 2026, 75% of customers will call contact centers because they are lonely.

Yes, you read that correctly.

By 2026, 75% of customers who call customer service and support organizations will do so out of loneliness, not because they have a customer service issue, according to Gartner, Inc. This will affect service and support leaders’ priority of migrating customers to self-service and ensuring representative well-being.

“Lonely customers looking to fulfill their interpersonal needs through service organizations are unlikely to use self-service to resolve their issues, regardless of how well-designed the functionality is,” said Emily Potosky, senior research principal in the Gartner Customer Service & Support practice. “To ensure they are not investing in suboptimal solutions, leaders must account for customer loneliness when attempting to diagnose why customers are still choosing assisted-service channels over self-service.”

Gartner research shows this trend will also impact customer service reps. For example, reps may experience longer handle times because of customers trying to socialize, impacting organizations’ coaching and performance management efforts. Additionally, dealing with emotional customers is challenging and could lead to reduced rep well-being.

Gartner predicts that by 2024 the top cited reason customer service reps leave the service organization will be the unofficial emotional effort they need to perform with customers outside their official job duties. Service and support leaders looking to mitigate the effect of lonely customers should consider using speech analytics and sentiment analysis to identify customers who are calling because they are lonely. It’s also recommended that representatives be given training on how to identify and deal with customers who are using the service interaction for emotional support and socialization rather than true issue resolution.

Gartner customers can find more details in a report entitled, “Predicts 2022: Customer Service and Support Strategy and Leadership.”

Channel Impact^®
Emotional intelligence has long been an important skill for service and support personnel. If customer loneliness begins to impact contact center traffic, those skills will become even more important.

CompTIA: Tech Hiring Momentum and Job Gains Continue

Employment in the U.S technology sector increased for the 12th consecutive month in November. According to an analysis by CompTIA, a suburban Chicago-based industry trade association, tech employment at the industry level increased by 9,400 new positions for the month, based on the CompTIA analysis combined with data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).

CompTIA’s “Tech Jobs Report” shows a continuation of strong demand for new hiring to fill core and emerging technology positions. Employer job postings for open positions surpassed 316,000 for the month. Industries with the largest number of openings included professional, scientific, and technical services (54,972), finance and insurance (33,680), manufacturing (25,138) and information (18,812).

“Even facing a number of new and unsettling headwinds, the tech jobs market remains red hot,” said Tim Herbert, executive vice president for research and market intelligence at CompTIA. “Despite the frenzied pace, it’s a great a time for both technology professionals and employers to explore new opportunities, reinvest in skills and career development, and prepare to embrace the latest innovations.”

Job openings for technology workers are available in almost every region of the country. The New York, Washington, Dallas, Los Angeles, and Chicago metropolitan areas had the most open positions in November, while the strongest month-over-month increases in job postings were recorded in the San Francisco, Orlando, Phoenix and Chicago markets.

Remote work and work from home opportunities continue to be an option for many open tech positions, including software and application developers, user support specialists, web developers, systems engineers and architects, systems analysts, and project managers.

A third of November’s open positions were for jobs requiring skills in emerging technologies. The most in demand emerging skills include data science, dev-ops, and artificial intelligence.

a positive sign amidst in an otherwise slightly disappointing report on the nation’s labor market growth, according to an analysis by CompTIA, the nonprofit association for the information technology (IT) industry and workforce.

Tech employment at the occupation level increased by 193,000 across the economy, a reversal of the negative growth from the previous month

Channel Impact^®
The tech industry continues to be a positive stimulus on the overall U.S. economy.

TD Synnex Launches New Offerings for Security, Data and IoT

TD Synnex has launched a set of security, data and IoT market-ready solutions available on the StreamOne platform.

“These new security, data and IoT offerings are the result of great business and technical collaboration with our customers and vendors,” said Sergio Farache, chief strategy officer, TD Synnex. “The result is a rich and relevant library of partner capabilities that provide repeatable, outcome-based solutions customers can activate at the click of a button.”

The initial launch includes configurations from Microsoft (Azure Sentinel, Cloud Backup on Azure), Veeam (Veeam Backup and Replication), VMware (VMware Carbon Black), and IoT and Data Click-to-Run solutions. The initial launch will include TD Synnex IoT smart device, On Ramp, and Azure Data Lake Essentials.

The security solutions are composed of core capabilities that include endpoint security, backup and recovery, log aggregation, and correlation. The global data and IoT market-ready solutions are designed to lower the complexity, risks and time associated with implementation, while providing additional cloud services opportunities for channel partners.

“The addition of these next-generation Click-to-Run solutions will create new opportunities for our partners to accelerate business growth across data, analytics, IoT and security technologies,” said Rodney Clark, Microsoft’s CVP of Channel Sales. Partners can leverage these solutions to expand on their current services capabilities, shorten service delivery times and accelerate digital transformation projects.”

Channel Impact^®
The strategy is designed to help customers increase speed to market and reduce the complexity of implementing next-generation technology solutions consumed through the cloud.