These days, an internet interruption is much more than an inconvenience for businesses. Your shop, office or salon is only part of your footprint—the real storefront is online. But that’s only the beginning of your online investment. Your POS system, credit card processing, VoIP phones, critical software and security components such as door alarms and video cameras all connect over the internet.
While some experts place the cost of an internet outage anywhere between $427 per minute for small shops and $9,000 per minute for large corporations, one thing is certain. You can’t afford it.
To truly understand the impact of downtime on your business, though, there are several internal and external points to consider—revenue loss, restoration time, customer experience and much more. Here are some factors to consider when assessing the cost of internet downtime.
Operational impact
The financial consequences of an outage can really stack up when you consider the operational expenses needed to recover and restore your services to customers, investigate what caused the outage, and implement preventative measures to curb future incidents. And hopefully your outage won’t cause your business to run into any legal or regulatory snares, like failure to meet service-level agreements or data protection requirements.
Lost revenue
Nothing in your business moves forward if the bottom line is not met, and any period of internet downtime threatens to derail those goals. Without internet, many POS systems can’t process payments from the 80 percent of consumers who choose to use debit or credit cards, apps or other non-cash forms of payment. And while some businesses may carry insurance policies to cover lost revenue, it likely won’t cover everything.
Productivity loss
When your internet gets interrupted, your team has to scramble to keep the business operating while trying to troubleshoot a fix. You can also factor in some labor waste due to employee downtime. It’s inevitable your productivity will dip during an internet outage.
Customer experience
Even under the best of circumstances—in this case, a minimal outage followed by a speedy restoration—all of this leads to a poor customer experience with potential damage to your brand reputation, the likelihood of some customer churn, and marketing costs to attract new customers.
While calculating the exact cost of internet downtime can be a challenge, having a trusted internet partner can protect you from outages. See why C Spire Business Internet powered by Plume is the right fit for your business.
