Skip to main content

It’s time for SMBs to take digital employee experience seriously

Practical frameworks and real-world benchmarks for IT leaders seeking cost savings, risk reduction, and productivity gains.

Connect and support people
Insights overview

For a long time, Digital Employee Experience (DEX) lived in the rarefied air of the enterprise world. Yes, it was powerful, but it was also complex. And frankly, too expensive for most small and medium sized companies.

When I worked as a Forrester analyst and wrote the first (and second … and third) evaluation of DEX providers in 2020, 2022, and 2024, respectively, I couldn’t help but notice: almost every single customer reference was a household name that might come up around the dinner table. Big banks, giant consulting companies, pharmaceutical conglomerates, insurance providers, airlines, global restaurant chains—if you had heard of the company, chances are they were starting to think about DEX.

In the early days of the market, when these pioneering companies were first making the jump into DEX, that made sense. Why? Because if you wanted to make DEX work back then, you needed three things:

  1. Deep technical expertise—because early use cases were all about mining large, complex data sets do things like rationalize your VDI environment or compare laptop specs across OEMs.
  2. Dedicated teams—to develop use cases, conduct interviews, run surveys, and keep the engine running. With something so new, you needed a dedicated team if you had any hope of achieving ROI. In some cases, these teams reached upwards of 30 individuals.
  3. Big budgets—because the business benefits scaled with company size, and so did the investment. DEX deals routinely surpassed $1 million in budget, but they also had the scale to quickly recoup hundreds of thousands of dollars in software licenses.

In the enterprise, these investments made sense. They could justify building a “DEX Center of Excellence” because the ROI was there. But for small and mid-sized businesses (SMB), DEX remained a pipedream.

The game-changer: AI levels the playing field  

Illustration showing two men sitting opposite each other at desks with an AI bubble between them

“At the beginning, just know that DEX illuminates more problems than it solves,” remarked one IT leader at a US-based utilities provider. I used to hear that that sentiment commonly during the early days of DEX, but these days, the notion has faded. That’s because something big has shifted, and it’s now allowing DEX to go downstream to SMBs: the rise of AI to speed time-to-value.

AI is taking what used to be the hardest parts of DEX and making them much easier:

  • No need to sift through vast quantities of data—AI is now capable of detecting anomalies in your data set and surfacing its likely root cause.
  • No more searching for the right fix—AI serves up recommendations that are most likely to fix the problem.
  • No more building everything from scratch—years of DEX experience have produced ready-to-run automations for the most common IT challenges.

I remember a conversation with an early DEX leader who told me, “we are the pioneers in this space, and we’re learning as we go. We’re not trying to serve up the Gordon Ramsey Dish of the Year of digital experience. We’re just trying to serve some palatable hamburgers.”

Lucky for SMB customers, much of the groundwork for DEX is already in place, so you can go right ahead and start serving a pretty tasty digital experience burger right away.

Why SMBs can’t afford to wait on AI and DEX

We live in a hypercompetitive world, and AI is only raising the bar. For SMBs, keeping pace with larger, better-resourced competitors has never been more challenging. According to our TeamViewer AI Opportunity Report, 97% of respondents agree there are serious consequences for organizations that fail to embrace AI.

When asked what those consequences are, the answers are clear:

  1. Falling behind the competition.
  2. Higher costs due to lack of automation.
  3. Inefficient processes and systems that slow everything down.

And the impact is even more pronounced in the SMB market. While 21% of enterprise respondents see higher costs from lack of automation as a serious risk, that number jumps to 30% for SMBs. In other words: smaller organizations feel the pain of inefficiency more acutely because they don’t have the resources to absorb it.

The message is simple. Without innovation in AI, SMBs risk falling behind. But as we discussed, AI is making DEX easier to implement than ever before. With automation, recommendations, and ready-to-use insights built in, SMBs now have the opportunity to leap forward and close the experience gap with their enterprise peers.

Graph showing why SMBs can't afford to wait on AI and DEX

DEX Essentials: The only DEX solution built for SMBs on the market

Last month, we achieved general availability with our new SMB offering: DEX Essentials.

DEX Essentials is designed from the ground up to be simple, powerful, and ready on day one. Instead of requiring specialized teams, months of setup, or big budgets, it delivers four critical DEX capabilities out of the box:

  • Insights: Out-of-the-box visibility into devices, operating systems, client apps, network, and security, all with built-in drill downs and prioritization.
  • Remediation: Easy, one-click actions to fix issues with any element of the digital experience along with explanations for why the remediation works.
  • Automation: Prebuilt workflows that solve the most common IT issues—from disk space management, to Office 365 crashes, to Windows Firewall status, all managed and tracked centrally so you can gauge progress.
  • Validate: Business impact metrics that show exactly how many hours and dollars you’re saving as well as tickets reduced.

The best part? DEX Essentials leverages the same edge-based architecture that TeamViewer’s fully fledged DEX product offers, enabling automation to run instantly with minimal impact on the network, even in offline scenarios.

For SMBs that have been running on reactive IT and stretched-thin resources, this is a game changer. DEX Essentials brings clarity, speed, and measurable value to endpoint management without the enterprise overhead.  

Start preventing problems before they impact work

DEX Essentials helps you stay ahead of disruption with proactive detection, automation, and validation—all from one friendly interface.

Learn more

Customer impact: Early wins with DEX Essentials

Illustration showing a woman working successfully with a DEX solution

While we’re still in the early stages of rolling out DEX Essentials, the results so far have been incredibly promising. What we’re seeing validates exactly why we built this product for SMBs, because the impact is both immediate and measurable.

Adoption is accelerating

We’re seeing strong uptake across SMB customers in multiple industries. These organizations are deploying DEX Essentials in days, not months, which means they start seeing value almost immediately.

What we’re seeing with DEX Essentials is exactly the opposite of what we heard from enterprise customers in the early days. Instead of creating more work by exposing issues, one early DEX Essentials customer remarked, “What I like is that it doesn’t just show me the issues, it actually fixes them, and even automates the fix if the problem comes up again.’’

Common use cases are driving quick wins

The two most popular early use cases have been:

  • Ensuring system time is in sync, helping to improve accuracy of logging, maintaining uptime of authentication methods, and improving compliance.
  • Checking that all critical services are running, ensuring high availability and uptime, maintaining business critical services, and enabling early detection of failures.

The benefits are tangible 

So far, customers have run over 50K automations, saving thousands of hours of IT time. This means:

  • Fewer manual interventions by IT staff.
  • Reduced downtime for employees, meaning less lost productivity.
  • Clear financial savings tied to automation and time saved per ticket.

The bigger vision

For us, DEX Essentials isn’t just a product release. It’s a critical step in our broader TeamViewer ONE vision: democratizing DEX so every organization, regardless of size, can deliver great digital employee experiences with a unified digital workplace management platform.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from my career, it’s this: technology only changes the game when it’s accessible. DEX Essentials is more than a product launch, it’s a step toward making enterprise-grade DEX tools available to everyone, from the Fortune 50 to the five-person startup.

For years, I’ve believed that great IT experiences should be a given, not a privilege. Now, we have the tools to make that happen, and I can’t wait to see what SMBs will do with them.

As I mentioned in my first blog post, my goal is to bring DEX to every organization worldwide. This is the first step in that direction.  

What’s coming next

Stay tuned for my next blog post, which covers how AI is impacting the DEX market.

Andrew Hewitt
Andrew Hewitt

Vice-President Strategic Technology at TeamViewer

—

Andrew Hewitt is VP Strategic Technology at TeamViewer and former Forrester Analyst. An industry veteran, he brings over a decade of experience in digital workplace and DEX thought leadership, market research, CIO consulting, and competitive intelligence to his role.