Around half of small businesses (48 per cent) in Australia have reported a struggle to reach and bring in new customers as a result of poor phone or internet connection. Not only does poor internet limit the ability of a small business to connect to customers, but it also limits the capacity to provide services.
Most business grade Internet Service Providers (ISPs) will commonly offer customers a service level agreement with their telecommunication and data services, either a Service Level Agreement (SLA) or Service Level Guarantees (SLG).
When choosing an ISP for your business, it’s important to understand the difference between SLAs and SLG because although both are contracts between a provider and a customer, one allows the provider to wipe their hands clean from responsibility.
An SLA outlines what level of performance is expected from the service provider, however, more often than not, providers are unable to meet their SLAs due to servicing such a large amount of customers that span vast and complex networks. The downside to this is that consumers are expected to accept poor-quality services, although it may be detrimental to their business operations.
On the other hand, providers with an SLG will take responsibility for any downtime and the lack of productivity experienced as a result. Typically, ISP’s that offer SLGs do so only for larger enterprise customers. However, there are providers which are more boutique in size which may offer SLGs to their small-medium business customers also.
More businesses are relying on the cloud
The most recent study into how businesses use Information Technology found that almost one third (31%) of all Australian businesses opt to use cloud services, which means a strong connection is critical in order to access business information.
But if Australian businesses don’t have access to sufficient and more importantly, reliable internet they are not able to truly harness the power of cloud services, leading them to potentially use outdated on-premise server technology. This, in turn, affects productivity as businesses are unable to function at full capacity, turning simple tasks into a laborious and slow process.
The hidden cost of poor service and internet downtime
SLA’s are based on an estimate of service conditions and levels, but what if the providers are unable to provide these services?
Employee productivity relies heavily on good internet connectivity and loss of productivity leads to loss of income, which may not always be easily identifiable. Employees may be at their computers and it may look like they’re working at an ideal pace but in reality, they’re waiting to upload/download content.
Working out how much a poor connection is costing your business is easy enough, simply work out on average how much time your employees spend waiting for things to load and correlate this with their hourly rate.
If particular employees are responsible for generating revenue, this is even a larger cost to the business if they struggle to access the cloud and/or send emails efficiently.
Too often, businesses are focused on the best or cheapest deal which in turn, can sometimes work out to be a more expensive process than doing your due diligence. An SLA might agree to all the bells and whistles but whether you experience this is a different story. On the other hand, if an SLG is in place, you can rest assured knowing productivity is guaranteed and compensation will be there should you experience any downtime.
Dev Oza, CEO and Sales Director, FG Telecom
