Monday Morning Impact – January 13

Gartner Identifies the Top Three Priorities for Service and Support Leaders in 2020

Digital channels and infrastructure, customer service representatives, and data, voice of the customer (VoC) and customer service metrics make up the top three priorities for customer service and support leaders and their organizations’ success going into 2020, according to Gartner, Inc., which conducted a poll of service/support leaders.

“Customer service and support leaders face increased pressure from leadership on the role of the service function in improving operational excellence and growing the business,” says Lauren Villeneuve, senior principal at Gartner. “Given this environment, it’s unsurprising that customer service and support leaders’ top 2020 priorities are rooted in customer experience, service reps and data. These priorities, overall, are very similar to what we’ve seen in the past — but looking into 2020, we also see subtle, but very important, differences.”

Priority 1: Digital channels and infrastructure

To keep up with customer expectations and competitors, many service organizations add and integrate more digital self-service offerings into their portfolios, hoping these new investments will displace costlier live contacts and improve customer experience (CX). However, Gartner research shows these strategies aren’t paying off.

“The add-and-integrate strategy ends up costing organizations more money and doesn’t bring any improvement across customer experience metrics, either,” said Villeneuve. “To truly tackle this issue, service leaders must progress beyond adding new channels and capabilities to making the functional transformation into a self-service-dominant organization.”

Priority 2: Customer service representatives

Self-service channels are now resolving simple issues that reps traditionally answered, leaving reps with the more complex issues to resolve. As a result, service leaders are left wondering whom they should be hiring in this new, more complex era of customer service.

Gartner research shows that there are seven types of frontline reps currently across the customer contact function. Of these seven types, “Controller” reps outperform all other types of reps in delivering a low-effort service experience. This profile succeeds because they naturally provide what customers want in today’s complex and information-rich world — an easy and proactive resolution to their issue.

Priority 3: Data, VoC and customer service metrics

Many service organizations struggle to capture, share and generate value from VoC data. As a result, 67% of service leaders said that it is important for them to address the difficulty of capturing, sharing and generating value from VoC data in 2020. To gather and analyze VoC data to identify actionable insights and improvement opportunities for service and other functions, Gartner recommends a three-step guide:

Set clear, narrowly focused VoC objectives, and gather targeted data to generate actionable insights.

Evaluate customer data gathered from various sources to identify the root causes of customer feedback and determine corresponding improvement opportunities for service, as well as other functions.

Communicate the VoC findings with business partners and customers, and build transparency into the initiatives planned for addressing the areas of concern.

Channel Impact^®
The data provide insights into key imperatives that channel partners should seek to address.

Lifesize Introduces Rooms-as-a-Service to Bring Video Collaboration to More Meeting Spaces

Lifesize, an Austin-based video collaboration company, has rolled out its new Rooms-as-a-Service offering, enabling the purchase of Lifesize’s video meeting room devices, video conferencing service and support at lower upfront costs.  Now available in the U.S. and Europe, organizations can deploy end-to-end video collaboration solutions in meeting rooms for $99 per room per month.

“The most successful modern enterprises embrace video collaboration as a primary method of communication across the business. However, organizations have historically taken an incremental approach to video investments due to upfront cost,” said Michael Helmbrecht, chief operating officer for Lifesize. “With Lifesize Rooms-as-a-Service, we’re responding to customers’ desire to accelerate video initiatives by making it significantly easier to predict and scale costs as they improve meeting spaces and experiences with video collaboration technology.”

Customers can get started with a subscription offering that covers meeting room hardware, cloud service, maintenance and support provided for a fixed price. The company claims that customers who opt for the program enjoy 20 to 30 percent lower total cost of ownership in their first two years of service while also preserving budget to invest in other innovation and business growth initiatives.

Customers will have a choice of multiple room system configurations and payment options based on contract length.

Channel Impact^®
The initiative will likely stimulate further sales into the midmarket by engaging the OPEX model as a means of reducing upfront costs.

CrowdStrike and eSentire Partner to Bring Cloud-delivered Detection and Response Solutions to Mid-market

eSentire, Inc., a Canadian-based company that develops cloud-delivered Managed Detection and Response (MDR) has announced a partnership with endpoint protection specialist CrowdStrike to drive better detection and response for customers by extending visibility across endpoint, network, log and cloud environments.

In addition to the partnership, the two organizations have announced the expansion of eSentire’s MDR portfolio to include CrowdStrike’s Overwatch, which will be made available as part of the esENDPOINT offering. This offering will protect an organization’s assets 24x7x365 by combining threat hunting functionalities with next-gen antivirus and endpoint detection and response under a single agent to eliminate blind spots.

eSentire has a 24×7 Security Operations Center (SOC), staffed by security analysts who  hunt, investigate, and respond in real-time to known and unknown threats. The company claims more than $6 trillion in assets-under-management in the financial sector.

Channel Impact^®
Digital transformation within modern businesses has outpaced the evolution of traditional security approaches, requiring organizations to adopt cloud-native security solutions that advance and adapt at the speed of their businesses. Combining the managed threat hunting capabilities of eSentire with CrowdStrike’s endpoint protection solution will likely provide a formidable value.