Making work work better: TeamViewer and the future of the digital workplace

The entire workplace is digital, but there are ways to make it work better, from mobile AR to coffee machines being serviced remotely

Sponsored feature Remember when the term 'digital workplace' sounded futuristic? With so many companies now automating some of their workflows it's the rule rather than the exception, but that doesn't mean that we're doing it properly. Now, TeamViewer is on a mission to change that by preventing what it sees as one of the biggest challenges in the modern workplace: digital friction..

What the digital workplace is and why it's important

The digital workplace was once a sexier proposition, points out Mark Banfield, chief commercial officer at TeamViewer. Today, after 20 years of digitization, the term describes almost everywhere that work gets done.

"It's hard to think of any job today that doesn't fundamentally rely upon technology," he says. The pandemic and hybrid work accelerated that trend still further.

This has also changed the employer-employee relationship, he adds. "Organizations have had to rethink not just how they enable a digital workplace with the right types of tools and technologies for employees to be able to be productive, but also the interaction and the relationship they have with employees," he says.

Challenges in building the ideal digital workplace environment

It isn't enough to replace manual work with technology if the technology is difficult to use. Employees' digital workplace experience must match the smooth, low-friction interactions that they have with, say, AirBnB or Amazon. Otherwise, employers will run into trouble retaining their people and keeping them productive.

Businesses must eliminate what Banfield calls 'digital friction' from the workplace. Unfortunately, that friction often stems from complex technology stacks incorporating outdated tools and poor endpoint visibility. The IT team bears the brunt of this as it struggles to serve the needs of a digital workplace.

"They're doing the work of looking after these digital workplaces, and there's a ton of frustration for them because they don't have the right kind of tools and technologies to predict and ensure a smooth running environment," says Banfield.

How TeamViewer helps

This is where TeamViewer comes into play. The company, which started out selling remote access and control software for IT professionals, has expanded its portfolio and its strategic direction over the years. Today, it positions itself as a provider of an end-to-end digital workplace management ecosystem.

"Our proposition goes from cradle to grave," Banfield says. It begins at the back end, with a product portfolio that supports customers in two ways.

The first stems from its roots in remote support. TeamViewer Remote targets IT support teams and help desks by enabling them to log into a remote device and see what's happening. This is what tech support might use if a hybrid worker's laptop was causing problems and they wanted help getting back up and running.

While it has continued to evolve TeamViewer Remote over the years, TeamViewer has also expanded into a full-spectrum infrastructure management offering with Tensor, its enterprise-grade remote connectivity system.  It has some cutting-edge use cases, due in part to how closely the company is willing to work with its clients on deployments. For example, the Mercedes-AMG PETRONAS F1 team uses Tensor to deliver competitive analysis, weather, and engineering data to drop-down screens for the drivers in its garages track side when the F1 cars come in between practice and qualifying laps.

Tensor includes one of three things that Banfield identifies as unique propositions for TeamViewer: scale. It supports thousands of devices across dispersed geographies. 

The second selling point that puts TeamViewer ahead of the competition in Banfield's view is breadth. Tensor goes far beyond the desktop to include pretty much any device you can think of, including embedded and industrial systems. Customers use it to support everything from boarding pass barcode scanners at airports through to medical equipment in hospitals.

"This all needs monitoring, and organizations need assurance that it's up and productive, reliable, patched, and secured," Banfield continues.

Working with customers, TeamViewer has developed some imaginative use cases for Tensor as it has the flexibility to deliver benefits across industries and applications. For example, Italian coffee machine manufacturer Cimbali Group uses it to remotely support its smart coffee machines, improving uptime and dramatically reducing service costs.

Technicians can remotely control coffee machine interfaces across 100 countries, often solving issues from a desk perhaps half a world away. Direct access to the interface means that the customer doesn't have to try and describe the problem to the technicians; they can see it for themselves.

In many cases, this solution saves Cimbali the cost of sending support technicians out to remote sites while also giving customers a much faster fix.

In environments like these, devices may be using different hardware, software, and communication protocols. They call for custom work ensuring that the remote access software can work with the specific components involved. Cimbali worked with TeamViewer to create the interface.

"Our last advantage is the reliability, security, and robustness of the product," says Banfield. The Mercedes-AMG PETRONAS F1 Team is a good example of this.

"Data security is hugely important to the team," says Steven Riley, the racing team's head of IT operations and service management. "TeamViewer's enterprise-grade security features are something that we highly value".

Stopping problems before they happen

Remote and Tensor focus on high touch manual interventions, or as Banfield describes them, "concierge support experiences". Last December, TeamViewer expanded this proposition to go beyond reactive, remediation-based support.

To do so, it acquired 1E, a company that focuses on digital employee experience (DEX) management. Its product offers preventative monitoring to spot problems with devices early, enabling technicians to fix them so the device doesn't fail.

"It uses automation to intercept friction and fix things automatically without the need for an IT person to remote into the device," he says. "So it's all done seamlessly by self-healing on the device."

DEX operates in real-time. Instead of the polling approach that many systems make, where they'll check systems on schedules of 20 seconds or more, it uses on-device code to spot problems. That enables it to identify issues in sub-second time and report it back to the central platform.

DEX goes one step further than spotting problems with a specific piece of equipment. It also uses analytics to spot emerging wider-scale issues that are upsetting users.

TeamViewer integrates its own remote support products with DEX in TeamViewer One, a solution that combines remediation capabilities with preventative and on-demand support to close the circle.

Help at the sharp end

While TeamViewer Remote, Tensor, and DEX help IT teams provide a better digital workplace from the support desk, TeamViewer Frontline comes at the issue from the other direction. It's a platform for frontline employees, enabling them to access the data and expertise they need to do their job more efficiently when and where they need it, no matter how mobile they are.

The product includes an augmented reality component that pulls information from a company's infrastructure and displays it in a way that works for the user, whether on a handheld tablet, smartphone or right before their eyes in smart glasses. This brings the digital and real world together to deliver big productivity gains to employees in a range of applications.

One of the AR use cases is field maintenance. BOBST, a company that provides services for the packaging industry and makes machines to process, print and convert substrates, already used remote support services that logged into equipment, but sometimes that wasn't enough. Older machines didn't have that connectivity, and in any case someone on-site might need to make a physical change.

The company introduced TeamViewer's AR solution running on a field technician's phone. This makes it easier for customers or technicians to communicate the problem visually back to the service center, and for staff there to send back visual markers or share diagrams that make on-site maintenance processes clearer. It even transcribes and translates sessions to overcome linguistic barriers.

Operators in warehouses also benefit from this technology. At DHL, workers use Frontline Pick, one of several application-specific variants of the Frontline product, to help improve the product picking process. Worn on smart glasses and wrist-wearables, it tells them exactly how many of what product to pick and where. It increased productivity by 15 percent across 1,500 US employees while saving up to 70 percent in onboarding time and reducing error rates to 0.1 percent.

AR also unlocks some powerful possibilities in healthcare. Nurses at Australian health and aging care provider Uniting use smart glasses with Frontline Assist, another application-specific variety of the product, to get help from medical experts.

The glasses include thermal sensors that relay valuable information to the remote experts such as physicians, who have already used them to avoid amputations in elderly people. Hospital referrals dropped 62 percent after Uniting trialed just four headsets.

Digital workplace, real-world impacts

Case studies like these highlight some of the real-world benefits that TeamViewer delivers. These include cost savings at the service desk due to faster ticket resolutions or eliminating tickets altogether. Banfield estimates an average 30% reduction in service tickets.

The savings extend beyond the traditional office environment. They also extend out to field service operations and those in frontline operations. Faster problem resolutions no matter the digital work environment means more efficiency.

Another benefit on the DEX side is hardware refresh, Banfield adds. "Most organizations refresh hardware every three years or so, but you're often replacing someone's device where they don't need it replaced," he points out. "You could sweat the asset longer if you had good visibility to understand whether their device was running perfectly for them or not."

Conversely, sometimes you should be replacing the device earlier. Either way, having that intelligence optimizes cost and IT operations.

The same applies to software licenses, he says. TeamViewer's platform can identify shelfware, when people aren't using software products, allowing organizations to reclaim those licenses and save on expenditure.

The biggest benefit of all is increased productivity, he concludes. "With DEX, you're able to look at where digital friction occurs and the extent of the impact, such as how much downtime a user experiences," he explains. "Then you can translate that into the impact on overall business performance."

With most of us now mandated to use software and devices of one kind or other, there's no choice about whether the workplace is digital. If you're going to be swept up in the matrix, you might as well be comfortable there.

With TeamViewer watching your back, Banfield vows that you'll be able to get your job done properly, leaving you with peace of mind when you do finally get to shut down at the end of the day. The company invites readers to visit its site, "Make work work better" , to find out more about its approach to modernizing workflows.

Sponsored by Teamviewer.