SPONSORED FEATURE Most IT teams know how quickly they can fix things when they break. This means they can usually tell you their mean time to resolution (MTTR) for helpdesk tickets down to the minute.

But MTTR is only part of the picture in complex modern workplace environments. Organizations are more distributed than ever due to hybrid working and ongoing cloud adoption. Compliance frameworks can change almost quarterly, and system complexity continues to mount.

IT support teams must shift focus to deal with these situations.

"Tickets only provide part of the story and are lagging indicators of performance, addressing issues only after disruption occurs," explains Mark Banfield, chief revenue officer at digital workplace platform provider TeamViewer. "This means there's only limited end-to-end [network] visibility, making it difficult to detect early signals or connect problems across more complex environments."

IT support operations have traditionally been reactive, but agentic AI enables them to flip the switch, reducing one of the biggest barriers to productive work: digital friction. This occurs when technology doesn’t work as it should. Every failed authorization or connectivity hiccup reduces productivity and degrades the user experience. A support operation that spots the causes of digital friction and fixes them before them become a problem helps to keep productivity high.

No human IT support team can physically keep their eye on thousands of endpoints, including laptops or servers, on a continuous basis. This is where agentic AI can help, monitoring these thousands of endpoints in order to  identify patterns that point to emerging issues that might affect users, and intervene early. This means the tech support reporting model can move from reactive to proactive, Banfield says.

The impact of digital friction

TeamViewer's research report, The Impact of Digital Friction, surveyed 4,200 managers and employees worldwide to reveal the implications. It showed that four out of five respondents had lost valuable time to dysfunctional IT, representing an average of 1.3 workdays per month.

Just under half (48 percent) indicated the scenario had led to delays in critical operations or projects over the last year. Forty-two percent said such circumstances directly hit revenues, while a further 37 percent said their organization had lost customers over it.

To make matters worse, employee experience suffers too. Some 47 percent of those questioned stated that digital friction left them frustrated and less satisfied with their job. A further 42 percent linked it to burnout, while 28 percent said they had considered leaving the organization as a direct outcome.

"The result is a growing gap between perceived and actual performance, where unresolved digital friction silently erodes productivity, employee satisfaction, and even revenue," Banfield says. "As environments become more complex and hybrid work scales, reactive models create mounting operational strain and inconsistent experiences."

This situation is no longer sustainable, he believes. It's time for organizations to embrace proactive, experience-led IT. Those that don't risk falling behind in both efficiency and competitiveness, he adds.

The shift toward autonomous remediation systems

Real-time insights into what is happening on the network is becoming essential to serve this need, and that makes always-on monitoring systems an imperative. These systems can spot early signs of underlying problems and remediate them autonomously, resolving issues before employees feel the impact.

But moving to a truly autonomous system requires a phased approach. It entails moving from reactive support to proactive monitoring, and from there to autonomous remediation. Doing it in phases enables you to regain control of your infrastructure before you move on to more advanced steps, as TeamViewer explains in its playbook on the process.

The first stage involves stabilizing your operations by introducing proactive monitoring based on pre-defined policies. This puts you in a better position to understand what has been causing the business problems in the first place so you can fix them. It also makes it possible to see any common patterns of activity so you can automate the response.

"Organizations often get stuck between visibility and action, where insights exist but aren't operationalized due to siloed teams or fragmented tools," says Banfield, explaining the importance of this step. "The breakthrough comes when monitoring, automation, and accountability are unified into a closed-loop model that continuously detects, resolves, and improves performance at scale."

Proactive monitoring is a great first step. It automates responses to known problems. But it can't prevent issues that haven't been tracked or that support teams are unaware of.

This is where agentic AI-based systems like TeamViewer ONE come in. They are not restricted to monitoring the network based on pre-defined parameters or responding to alerts. Instead, these platforms learn from what is happening day-to-day with your most-used devices and apps, such as Microsoft Connect or SAP.

They do this by scrutinizing how the environment behaves in real-time, how problems evolve over time, and how support teams intervene. This enables them to recognize which conditions lead to system failure. They also get to understand evolving risks and use this information to automate troubleshooting activities.

The benefits of a continuous feedback loop

"TeamViewer ONE continuously detects issues, prioritizes the ones that matter, and remediates them before users can be impacted," says Banfield. It identifies early signals of digital friction and resolves problems autonomously in real-time before they develop into major issues.

In fact, it is the only platform on the market that combines AI with endpoint management, remote access, and digital employee experience (DEX) functionality. The DEX technology, which came from its acquisition of 1E, uses an agent to scan endpoints proactively and also gathers user sentiment about their experience.

"Having intelligence on the endpoint is critical because it's the closest point to where issues originate and where employee experience is directly felt," Banfield says. "By embedding visibility, analytics, and autonomous remediation directly at the endpoint, organizations can detect and resolve issues in real time."

The result is a continuous feedback loop where known problems are automated out, ensuring they do not happen again. This reduces both ticket volumes and manual effort. The system also documents problems automatically, saving support teams a further step.

IT support teams move from reacting to incidents after they occur to resolving problems before users are even aware there were any. This frees up their time to focus on more strategic work, including optimization, and innovation. It also cuts administration costs while supporting security and compliance.

A secure, stable environment for employees helps to create a better customer experience, Banfield says.

"You can't create a Michelin-star customer experience unless you internally have a Michelin-star employee experience," he explains. "When your employees are benefiting from a proactive IT approach, it will be felt externally by customers as it helps free up time for employees to build a better customer experience strategy."

Enhancing the digital employee experience

TeamViewer points to a US-based home, auto, and life insurance provider as an example of this transition from reactive to automated proactive support. Its IT team had been unaware of just how problematic recurrent issues such as software crashes were becoming for the wider workforce. While many employees just put up with the situation, it was eating into productivity and user satisfaction levels.

The team wanted to stop the rot, increasing operational efficiency and enhancing incident resolution times. It rolled out TeamViewer's DEX Intelligence module, which includes an Intelligent Insights AI analytics solution to map trends in IT operations and recommend actionable steps for improvement. This identifies how many devices and employees were being affected by problems, and crystallized a clear picture of end-user frustration for the IT team.

With the help of TeamViewer DEX, the tech team found that power management device drivers had been given an "unsigned" status in the company's Windows applications. This made them unstable, causing crashes. It also opened the company up to potential security risks further down the line.

Intelligent Insights diagnosed and remediated the issue quickly. Its recommendations and remediation guidance have also helped the IT team make better data-driven decisions to address other red flags before they impact either users or business operations.

Improving customer experience

Another organization that has transformed its endpoint management using TeamViewer's platform is a UK-based global quality food, homewares and clothing retailer. It implemented TeamViewer DEX in 2020 to monitor and manage its complex point-of-sale (POS) systems, plus other endpoint devices, of which there are more than 26,000.

Ensuring uptime was a particularly pressing priority for the retailer's POS systems. This is because if they are slow or fail to work, customers are likely to abandon their purchase, which directly impacts sales.

But by introducing TeamViewer's DEX platform, the retailer can now pinpoint where problems occur. This has boosted uptime from 92 percent to 98 percent.

It has also enabled engineering teams to better monitor, respond to, and predict issues across the estate. This has improved both the employee and customer experience.

"Without the disruption of daily friction, employees have a clear pathway to work at their most efficient and productive," concludes Banfield. "There's no lag. It's about fixing issues before they're felt across the organization, ensuring a more consistent, seamless digital experience at scale."

Sponsored by TeamViewer.