You might assume that an average business internet connection is perfectly acceptable for a small to medium-sized business, particularly in retail, because customers are there to shop, not browse the web, right? Not necessarily.
Whilst the might have been true even a few years ago, today’s tech-savvy consumer demands lightning fast internet access at all times. If you think your slow internet might be harming your business, here are a few signs to keep a look out for.
Customers Are Not Using the WiFi
With the speed and availability of 4G, many customers might prefer to switch off their WiFi and instead cut into their data plans for high-speed internet access if your connection isn’t up to scratch. Fast free WiFi was once a perk that certain businesses offered to entice customers, but it’s now a necessity if you want to complete.
Sluggish Employees
Remember that whilst you might have a strong connection, your bandwidth will be split amongst everyone using it. So, even if you have a 100 Mbps connection, if there are 20 people in your store or office they will only get around 5 Mbps each.
So, if you have a number of employees sharing the same connection, make sure your bandwidth is fast enough, otherwise, they might find their performance being hamstrung by sluggish connections.
Lagging
Particularly if your business works with clients and partners around the world, you will undoubtedly be using a fair amount of conferencing, either via audio or video. With a slow connection, lagging is common and this can lead to potentially devastating misunderstandings.
To be safe, make sure your ADSL business broadband is strong enough to support multiple video and audio feeds. Lagging is also a major problem if your business uses online payments and e-commerce. If your slow connection is causing payments to be processed more slowly, you’re losing profits every second.
Customer Service
If your business relies on a connected service or you’re trying to help a customer solve a problem and the internet is crawling along at a snail’s pace, it can lead to poor customer experience. Ultimately, faster business internet will make your business more visible and will improve customer satisfaction, especially in a small business where every little thing counts and there’s so much competition.
Top Tips
- When shopping for business broadband deals, don’t just consider the download speed. The upload speed is just as important.
- Slow connections lead to lost profits. Indeed, it’s been reported that if Amazon experienced a one-second delay in its loading time between pages, it would lose around £1.6 billion in sales!
- The bigger your business gets the more data it will need to deal with and the faster the internet connection will need to be as a result.
