Can slow internet affect business growth?

For many businesses, growth signals success. It creates new opportunities, increases customers and generates greater profits.

Some companies may not consider internet speed as a factor in business growth. In fact, the speed of a company’s internet can have a substantial impact on its operations and overall success. Your internet connection has never been more important with the surge in new technologies and ways of working.

Without the right infrastructure in place, new products will struggle to work efficiently.

But with a dependable, super-fast broadband connection a business can take full advantage of cloud-based tools to boost productivity, improve service quality and increase company growth.

We take a look at aspects to consider when assessing your internet speed.

Multi-sites

As a business grows, teams will increase, with the possibility of opening additional sites and using hosted services.

For multi-site businesses, streamlined communications between offices are essential to all users working off a single, easy to manage hosted cloud platform.

However, slow internet could affect collaboration between sites, whether it’s sharing important files between offices, conference calling or providing essential access to centrally located information in a cloud service provider.

Productivity

During peak business hours, users may experience data slowdowns, which affect how productive your employees are. Time becomes wasteful whilst waiting for pages to load and servers to respond.

Cloud computing can provide your business with access to a network of remote servers hosted on the internet, enabling you to store and manage your business’ data seamlessly. Employees can collaborate on the same files especially when away from the office.

Storing and protecting this data, especially if you’re working in the cloud, can really slow your business. Fast internet allows employees to utilise cloud applications quickly, a key area of productivity growth for companies across the world.

It is also essential to identify all devices requiring connectivity including smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices as these will have an impact on your usage. The more data used the larger bandwidth you require, which is essential to support productivity.

VoIP phone systems

KloudPBX phone system from DatKom. VoIP

Business growth is the result of many factors including continued high levels of service – which is likely to attract new customers.

VoIP offers a lot of opportunities for enhancing the service you provide such as call forwarding, auto-attendant and unified communications. You are able to take calls on your mobile routed from your office handset while working remotely or listen to your voicemail messages from Outlook.

Team collaboration can be maximised with an easy conference call set up across video, voice and mobile devices with a powerful screen and document sharing. Workers are contactable regardless of their location, ensuring a business still runs efficiently.

But with a slow internet connection, these features can struggle to work efficiently. Your business requires the appropriate infrastructure in place to support your company as it expands.

Type of internet connections to consider:

Fibre broadband

Fibre optic cables transmit data which is extremely fast, especially compared to traditional ADSL broadband and is a much more reliable connection.

Leased line

A private internet connection reserved solely for one premise meaning no competing for bandwidth.

No matter the business size, utilising modern technology such as online payments, video conferencing and phone systems will require a higher bandwidth connection.

Finally, and most importantly, improving bandwidth means customer wait times are kept to a minimum, a vital key performance indicator in a customer-facing environment.

Contact us for more information regarding your business internet connection and we will discuss your options to help maximise speed.