How Your Internet Speed Can Impact Your Business Productivity

When you’re running a business, it can be tempting to free up a little extra budget space by choosing a lower internet speed. That can big a big mistake though; when your employees and customers can’t get the information and programs they need in time, your business can suffer. Having a fast, efficient internet connection can enhance the work done on every level of a company.

How Your Internet Speed Can Impact Your Business Productivity

Not convinced that high-speed internet is an important staple of your business productivity? Read on to see the ways it can impact what your business gets done:

It Has a Snowball Effect

Internet speed has a sort of cumulative effect that you can see over time in your business. A slow, lagging connection can mean that employees spend several minutes doing nothing but waiting for information to load, or to be able to login, and that adds up quickly.

If employees have to wait a few minutes to login after each break, you can be losing a quarter hour of productivity each day. After even a week or two, that adds up to a significant loss of productive time and money.

E-Commerce Sales

If you’re in a sales or retail industry, you need to be able to get your customers the information and products they need. Customers don’t like to wait, and each delay decreases the probability of that customer completing the sale. Likewise, if your site starts crashing and lagging because your internet speed can’t handle the connection, your customers may not even have a way to make a purchase that they are really wanting to make.

It Can Make Collaboration Easy (or Very Hard)

If you’re in a large company, collaboration is especially important. To meet this need, there are tons of platforms and softwares out there that facilitate employee collaboration and sharing. To use the Cloud or other similar technology, a quick connection is preferable. However, when it comes to simultaneous project work with employees working remotely from one another, a fast internet speed is absolutely essential.

Attempting to effectively work on group projects like this without a speedy connection is a near futile endeavor. Without fast internet that allows everyone in the group to see changes and comments as they’re made, in real time, someone inevitably loses out on the latest input. Basically, it’s very difficult to keep the team on the same page.

It Affects Conferencing

Now, there are internet enhancements, and platforms, for just about every type of conferencing. If you’re using a VoIP connection to make a large conference call, you need fast and efficient internet speeds to ensure the call isn’t dropped or disconnected (especially if you’re speaking to prospective partners or investors).

Video conferencing is another highly popular option that leverages the internet to connect you and others (think Skype etc). Not only do many businesses use this mode of conferencing for larger upper management discussions, but many times employees at all levels also use this for everyday communication. To have a clear conversation, you’re going to need an internet connection with enough speed to handle the task.

Customer Service

Customers are the heart of your business, so you need to be able to provide great service, without delays. This is even more true when you’ve got employees in house for customer assistance (or if you provide third party customer assistance). Often customers call in and need a variety of information to be retrieved.

This can take the form of the customer profile an employee has to pull up to see the customer’s previous interactions, or it can be additional information and resources your employees need to find to help them. Either way, when a customer calls in they’re already taking time to call in, and they don’t want any extra delays.

Conclusion

High-speed internet is a huge asset to business owners, employees, and customers (when the business is using it to help them). Choosing a lower internet speed can reduce your overall productivity in every level of your business, while a high-speed internet can improve productivity (and reduce a lot of employee frustration).