How Does Poor WiFi Affect Your Business?
When you’re having WiFi issues at your business, it can affect not only your employees but also people outside your organization, from clients and vendors to potential customers.
“When your WiFi fails, so does staff and customers’ ability to use all dependent services – negatively impacting the customer experience,” writes Mit Patel, managing director of Netstar, a London-based IT support company. “This in turn hits productivity, profitability and can potentially cause reputational damage.”
Poor WiFi can affect businesses in different ways, and may vary depending on your industry, but here are four ways your organization could be impacted by poor WiFi.
Employee Productivity
Because so many work tasks involve internet connectivity, such as software apps, cloud-based telephone services and conferencing and collaboration tools, poor WiFi networks can certainly impact your employee productivity.
Poor WiFi in the workplace interferes with your employees’ ability to do their jobs, writes Patel in the post on Netstar.
And in some cases, the impact could be greater than just slowed work, particularly in industries where employees are using more complicated cloud-based tools that are vital to quality outcomes, such as healthcare systems -- where a reliable connection is crucial.
A study by digital storage brand SanDisk found that slow WiFi connections cost employees one week per year of productivity, which means about 2 percent of inactivity.
Employee Morale
In addition to lost productivity that directly results from the lack of decent WiFi, businesses also will see declining employee morale.
The inability to do your job due to slow-moving connectivity can lead to growing frustration and resentment, resulting in morale issues in the workplace. This can have an effect on your bottom line because disengaged employees translate into further reduced productivity.
“Disengaged employees lead to disengaged customers and loss of sales,” says a post by Accucode, a technology disruption platform company based in Colorado.
Customer Experience
“Things in life are more annoying than a slow or unreliable WiFi connection,” the Accucode blog points out.
Another example of the impact on customer experience might be at a hotel, dealership or other retail setting, when slow connectivity delays IP terminal processing time and the payment process for the customer. This creates frustration for both parties.
In contrast, high speed and reliable connectivity can increase your upload speed and can reduce IP terminal processing time, which translates into valuable time saved by your employees and your customers.
Customer Service
Slow connectivity can also impact your company’s customer service, particularly if your reps are using digital programs or internet-based service tools, such as video calls, screen sharing or a live chat tool.
If your customer service team is unable to communicate effectively, small issues can evolve into larger issues overnight. Customers expect to be answered quickly and have their problems resolved just as quickly, and when those expectations aren’t met the results are not usually positive for anyone.
It may be time to ask yourself – what is a poor WiFi connection costing our business?
