A lot of things can result in business losses and not all of them are within your control. But infrastructure like your WiFi or ethernet connection are. How much is slow connectivity costing your business? Are you frustrating your staff and customers? How much of your IT team’s time are you wasting with internet support calls? It’s possible to recoup these losses by speeding up your connection and we’ll explain why you should in this blog.

Loading time is lost wages

When your team is waiting for a page or app to load, they’re not working. And every minute they are not productive represents a financial loss or opportunity cost to your business. Let’s do the maths. Say you have 50 employees, and their blended average wage is £27,000. If investing in faster broadband gives you just a 1% lift to productivity in reduced time wastage, that’s £13,500 every single year. Saving 45 minutes a day gives you the equivalent of a 13th working month a year. For free. And that works out to having nearly an extra five members of staff. What could you do with that additional headcount in working hours? In most cases, the productivity increase outweighs the cost of broadband already. But there are more gains to be had…

Slow internet provides bad customer service

If your employees are waiting, your customers are waiting too. And that could translate to a real loss in sales profits. When it comes to suppliers or business customers, slow Internet stifles collaboration. Video conferencing, screen sharing, and remote access are near impossible with slower connections. This might mean employees need to travel to accomplish simple tasks, another cost in time and money you can’t get back. Worse still, it could cost you when you’re trying to win new business. If you work in the hospitality industry, slow guest Wi-Fi (especially if they’re paying for it) may cause complaints, and loss of repeat business especially among corporate clients who need a fast connection to do business for themselves. So, it’s clear nearly every business with slow internet speed is suffering some sort of resultant profit loss.

Wasted effort from the IT team

Although many businesses try to persevere through periods of slow internet, others often find themselves on the phone to their IT service provider begging for help. Constantly calling your IT support company can get frustrating after a while especially if their attempts to fix your internet result in very little change. And that’s not to mention the wasted effort of your IT team when they could be doing literally anything else in the business. What could your company achieve if all that support holding time was applied to updating critical business systems or onboarding employees? Every unnecessary task reduces the effectiveness of your IT department and inevitably lead to frustration.

Slow speeds create unhappy employees

During the Great Resignation, millions of people quit their jobs. And one of the reasons they left was due to bad tech. Computer World explain that frustration with laptops, desktops, networks, and systems that don’t work well, a trend exacerbated during the pandemic when many remote employees were literally left to their own devices. There’s also widespread confusion about how to proceed when technology doesn’t work.  And this is a huge problem. Good talent is hard to come by and employers shouldn’t be losing workers over something as easily solvable as internet speed. This poor retention rate has a financial cost too. Organisations spend £3,000 on average and nearly a month looking for replacement workers.

A patch is not a fix

When your business expands, it’s possible to outgrow your connectivity solutions. An expert internet connectivity partner can help you scope what your company needs now. If you work in a small office with up to 20 employees, superfast fibre broadband gives you a low-latency, high-speed connection. The solution is ideal if you use a hosted voice (VoIP) system, conduct video conferencing, upload files to the cloud or use bandwidth-hungry applications. With download speeds of up to 76 Mbps and uploads of up to 19 Mbps, fibre broadband can help you if you’re looking for extra speed that real-time applications demand. But that’s probably not going to be the right solution if you’re a larger business or huge multinational. And just trying to expand the number of users on a system that’s not up to the challenge will just drag everyone down.

If you’re ready to stop wasting money, losing employees, and missing out on sales because of your slow connection, let’s talk about how we can help.