The dealer service desk in 2026, from the public numbers

I wanted to open this with one number, how many calls a typical office technology dealer’s help desk takes in a month and which way that moved this year, and I couldn’t find it. We went through the trade press, analyst figures that have been reported publicly, and the federal labor data, and we didn’t turn up a single published help desk number for dealers. What we did find on office technology industry trends was mostly about hardware, plus some decent labor data.

Fewer pages, older machines

Keypoint Intelligence estimates that office page volumes shrink 2% to 3% a year, and Jamie Bsales, reporting those figures in The Cannata Report on September 9, points out that this is the number for a good year. The same article cites Keypoint’s North American forecast for a drop of roughly 22% in A3 placements between 2025 and 2030, and says customers are holding on to devices for five or even seven years before they replace them.

That last part is the one I’d watch from the service side. My guess, and it is a guess because nobody publishes the call data, is that service calls don’t fall anywhere near as fast as pages do. If service demand falls more slowly than page volume, dealer economics may come under pressure, but the public data does not show the effect per call. (I’d also guess older machines break more often, but I haven’t seen a public number that shows that either.)

Most ENX Elite Dealers reported being busier than ever

When ENX Magazine announced its 2025 Elite Dealers list in October 2025, it said the 116 dealers on it ran from below $5 million in revenue to $400 million-plus, and that a lion’s share of them had reported being busier than ever.

The ENX statement is self-reported rather than a measured industry trend, though it’s consistent with what dealers tell us: more work is coming through the service desk and the team handling it isn’t getting bigger.

Technicians are scarce, while BLS projects substantial replacement hiring in customer service nationally

Copier Careers, a recruiting firm in Golden Valley, Minnesota, has been placing people in this channel since 1980. Its founder, Paul Schwartz, started it not long before dealers began moving away from typewriters. It works with about 450 dealerships now, mostly independents, and in March its managing director, Jessica Crowley, told ENX that the technician shortage has been going on the whole time she’s been there, since 2010, and that each year techs seem to get scarcer. Dealers are opening up to candidates from HVAC, point of sale, ATM repair, even auto techs. She described it as a candidate’s market.

Bsales makes the same point from the money side. A shrinking pool of service techs is pushing personnel costs up and eating into service margins.

The BLS numbers for customer service representatives are odd. The Bureau of Labor Statistics counted 2,666,000 customer service representative jobs in the US in 2025, at a median wage of $21.53 an hour, and expects that number to fall 5% by 2035, about 141,800 jobs. It expects less demand for the role, especially in retail, as self-service systems, social media and mobile apps let customers do simple tasks without a representative. But BLS still projects about 289,500 openings a year over the decade, all of them from workers transferring to other occupations or leaving the workforce. Those numbers cover the whole occupation nationally, not dealers, but if they hold for your desk it means you keep training new people on your contracts and your ERP, over and over.

Where dealers are drawing the line on AI

In July ENX polled a set of dealer executives on which parts of the business, if any, are off limits for AI, and the answers were more careful than I expected. Nate Schaf, the CTO at Eakes Office Solutions in Grand Island, Nebraska, said his company keeps looking for repetitive, low-value work where AI can take the friction out, and then added the condition:

“AI is a decision support tool, not a replacement for accountability.”

Erik Braden, CEO of Braden Business Systems in Fishers, Indiana, named sensitive client conversations as one of three areas where he wants a person, and his example was a service issue that hurt a client’s business.

I think that’s about the right split, and it’s close to how we built Auralis. A meter read that comes into a shared inbox overnight gets read, and if it’s inside the threshold the dealer sets, it’s written into e-automate. A read outside that threshold doesn’t post and goes to one of their people.

Where to go from here

The public data won’t tell you what your own desk handles. The Service Desk ROI Calculator starts from two numbers: inbound calls per month and the size of your dispatch and service team.

If ownership has asked whether IT could just build this, Build vs buy: how to add AI agents to your team sets the two paths side by side: how long each takes to go live, what it costs, who maintains the e-automate connection, and who owns it afterwards.

If you’re already looking at AI for the desk, The e-automate AI help desk checklist gives you twenty questions on meter reads, dispatch, toner orders and who runs it after go-live, to take into any vendor demo, ours included.

Book a 30-minute walkthrough on your own workflow: auralis.ai/demo/

Sources

• U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook, Customer Service Representatives, last modified Aug 27, 2026.
• Jamie Bsales, Wide Format Printing Expands the Office Technology Channel, The Cannata Report, Sep 9, 2026. Page volume and A3 placement figures are Keypoint Intelligence estimates as reported there.
• ENX Magazine, 2025 Elite Dealers list announcement, Oct 16, 2025.
• Erik Cagle, Copier Careers Enjoys Bird’s-Eye View of Evolved Industry Employment Landscape, ENX Magazine, Mar 30, 2026.
• Erik Cagle, No Fences? Dealers Examine Philosophical Limits for AI Usage, ENX Magazine, Jul 2, 2026.