Research Reveals What’s Holding Back Your Productivity

New research from 8×8 reveals that, on average, UK employees waste two hours every week trying to track down the right information internally.

This in turn impacts on the quality of customer service they deliver.

The survey, based on 2,000 responses from individuals working in mid-market and enterprise organizations, takes a deep-dive into how work is done today and uncovers the communications challenges that fast-growing organizations face.

The main reason productivity suffers is because:

• 29% of people can’t find the information they need to do their jobs effectively on the systems they use
• 14% aren’t able to locate the right expert internally
• 17% are held back by information not being shared in a central place

Employees also say that a few experts within their organization hold most of the information about the company (63%) but they can’t always contact them.

This is impacting customer service teams in particular, with at least two different people required internally to get the right information to answer a single query. This means it takes them longer to answer customer queries (50%) and the quality of service falls (52%).

Not being able to access the right information has impacted businesses in a variety of ways:

• Employees working longer hours to complete work – 34%
• Slow resolution of problems – 34%
• Inaccurate information used – 24%

The data was also analysed by age group and organization size. When asked what channel they would respond most quickly to, millennial workers said email (39%), followed by phone (35%) and online chat such as Slack (9%), but baby boomers preferred phone (50%) followed by email (31%).

Those in large organizations say the problem has grown worse as they’ve grown. Almost half of employees (43%) say that it has become more difficult to reach the right experts internally as the business has scaled.

Collaboration technology makes it possible for expert knowledge to be open to all staff at any time – 71% say that this type of tech would help them do their job more efficiently. With these types of tools in place, large organizations can ensure everyone has access to the right information exactly when they need it and that they can contact the right subject matter expert on any channel.

Lisa Clark

Lisa Clark, VP Product Management, Contact Centre at 8×8, said: “Typically, a small proportion of a company’s staff holds the majority of the expertise. This isn’t an issue when these employees are available, but when this isn’t the case, staff and customers face potentially difficult situations.”

“We can see that employees across organizations are struggling to complete everyday tasks and answer queries because they aren’t able to get the information they need.”

“This is impacting productivity on a massive scale, as time is being wasted scrambling around for answers on systems that aren’t connected across a business.”

“By using one cloud communications platform, teams and individuals can collaborate much more efficiently and all employees can access information faster – no matter what channel they use.”

Author: Robyn Coppell