How does technology impact workplace productivity issues?

If you want to know the most common factors behind reduced workplace productivity, get ready ‘cuz it’s a journey. Let’s focus on technology and systems the employee uses to get work done.

Of course, there are tons of people problems that could be contributing to low productivity, such as low morale, call center burnout, time loss, and employee turnover, but what if your technology is also slowing people down?

Technology is a direct contributor to productivity and has the ability to positively affect operations, internal collaboration, and workplace efficiencies.

To assess how your technology is impacting productivity, ask yourself these questions:

• Do the technologies you use reduce effort or create friction?
• Can you easily share info and knowledge about customers across teams?
• Is it easy to collaborate on projects and issues with teammates?
• How much of the day is filled with repetitive, manual tasks?
• When a problem arises, do you just find another app to address it?
• Does your team have to switch between apps to accomplish a single task?

Often you’ll find a long list of tech and systems that don’t talk to each other. This shortcoming forces you to train employees on each individual app, and also locks critical customer data to just one of the 15 apps you use.

And don’t even get started on the time you spend procuring plugins and fees for integrations just to make it all work together.

How can I increase workplace productivity for my business?

Nextiva has studied business productivity and determined that businesses use an average of 10-15 applications to communicate with customers. By 2025, it’s expected to expand to 20-25 applications due to adoption of social media applications (source: Gartner 2019). Not only are teams overloaded, but technology is overwhelming and getting in the way of productivity.

We believe that the right technology is key to solving how to increase productivity.

The right technology can help increase productivity in the following ways:

• A collaboration platform makes it easy to do work as a team, even when employees work remotely.
• Task and process automation frees you up from routine, mundane tasks.
• A simplified, unified workspace can consolidate 80% of the app features needed to get work done.

A deeper dive into the impact of employee experience and work productivity shows that businesses need to:

• Improve employee experiences by providing a simultaneously productive, empowering and easy work experience
• Reduce or remove low quality or inconsistent data by making data sharable and consistent across groups
• Streamline inconsistent workflows by reducing the need to jump between apps and systems to collaborate and serve customers
• Use automation to reduce manual tasks that distract from value-added work
• Make technology easier to use by design

Nextivity’s productivity software solution is designed to increase productivity by improving the employee experience and giving them next gen tools designed to automate repetitive tasks.

Nextiva reduces the number of apps needed to run a business, provides a scalable cloud solution, and minimizes operating costs through simple management and administration, enhancing overall profitability.

How does Productivity Software work?

Nextiva’s business software solution helps you run everything, from a single workhub. With this innovative tool you can improve your team’s productivity, operate more efficiently, and reduce your operating costs.

Nextiva’s productivity software gives you access to the following productivity features:

• Automation
• Collaboration, including video meetings and desktop text messaging
• File and document sharing
• Data sharing and syncing
• Shared interaction history
• Interaction insights

All features are available through one interface, eliminating the need to jump between apps. And, of course, it keeps your data and information safe, so you never have to search for missing data.

How is business productivity measured?

Business productivity, at its most simple form, is measured by dividing units of output by units of input. For example, you could measure the number of products produced (output) by your total cost of labor and cost of materials (input).

But ultimately, your productivity is measured by what’s important to your business. Your central goal should be to determine how much of your business’ products or services your team can handle in a given period of time, striving to be better than your competitor’s performance.

Let’s say you run a call center or contact center, there are many call center metrics you could use to track performance and productivity, such as:

• Call volume & peak hour traffic
• Cost per call
• Average handle time
• First contact resolution
• Net promoter score

Of course, don't forget to factor customer experience and customer satisfaction into your productivity goals. Your top goal shouldn’t be only about speed to completion. After all, solving a problem fast, but leaving a customer with more questions might cause you to lose a customer in the long run.

Customer satisfaction can be a bit trickier to measure, but you might choose to keep an eye on customer retention rate or customer churn rate.

Nextiva’s productivity software comes with embedded analytics included so you can keep up with the metrics that are most important to your business. Let’s say you want to track customer satisfaction. Nextiva’s built-in Sentiment Analysis scans communications for words that indicate a positive or negative experience, and then automatically flags and escalates the account, as appropriate.

The result? Your entire team can access customer feedback and context in real time. How’s that for data that gives you actionable information to gain a competitive advantage?