Driving UK businesses’ productivity with innovative technologies
Overview
Productivity remains a challenge for UK businesses, but new technology is presenting opportunities to regain momentum.
Productivity-focused innovations like Unified Communications, AI chatbots and 5G Standalone have a vital role to play in helping businesses make productivity gains and drive future growth.
The increased availability and accessibility of these technologies mean that business of all sizes can now take advantage of the productivity gains they have to offer.
Productivity challenges for UK businesses
A simple equation defines what productivity really means for businesses: divide goods produced, or services provided, by the hours worked in a set period. For example, 10,000 units divided by 1,000 hours equals 10 units per hour.
The UK lags behind the United States by 18%1 and has fallen to 4th in the G7 productivity index.2 Productivity-focused innovation now presents an opportunity to not only regain momentum but to take outputs to a new level.
Capabilities such as Unified Communications (UC), strategically applied AI chatbots, and 5G Standalone are helping businesses make transformational productivity gains. Vodafone Business is enabling organisations to adopt these technologies and understand the vital role they have to play.
Unified Communications
UC platforms combine people’s go-to collaboration, messaging and calling tools into a single app or service that’s consistent across all the user’s devices. With everything in one place, people spend less time hopping from app to app just to complete simple tasks – as well as having all their contacts at their fingertips.
Constant switching between apps has a profoundly negative impact on productivity, with the average worker spending nearly four hours a week3 reorientating themselves after toggling between applications. Eliminating application-switching has been found to significantly reduce burnout rates.4
We’ve combined Vodafone Business Unified Communications with RingCentral to create a cloud-based landline telephony system that enables seamless communication and collaboration at any time and place.
“Every second is a deadline, so we need to know that we can be contactable anytime, anywhere.”
Thanks to the flexible new UC platform, National World’s teams can now work anywhere, instead of being tied to the office. This means the business is now much more agile and ready to respond faster to breaking news stories.
AI chatbots
Able to handle repetitive manual tasks and free up capacity for human experts, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is ushering in a productivity paradigm shift. The effects are already being felt, with 81%5 of employees who use AI stating that it’s improved their performance.
Chatbots enabled by Generative AI (Gen AI) offer a major productivity advantage for UK businesses. The benefits range from collecting customer information upfront to accelerating response times, saving agents time while improving customer experience.
VOXI mobile, in collaboration with Accenture, is using Gen AI to power a first of its kind large language model (LLM) AI chatbot in the UK, aimed at making customer service more engaging, useful and fun. With advanced conversational capabilities and inbuilt safety protocols, the chatbot helps agents maintain faster response times. The solution can also be easily implemented across an entire organisation.
“The customer experience is only the start of how this technology can be adopted at scale across the organisation.”
According to research from 2023, customer support agents using Gen AI tools experienced a 14%6 increase in overall productivity. With the sophistication and availability of AI chatbots increasing at pace, we can expect to see the technology have an increasingly significant impact on business performance in the near future.
5G Standalone
Slow broadband and poor connectivity limit productivity for many UK companies, but over 1 million more customers can now connect to Vodafone Business’s 5G network. Offering 10 times faster speeds than 4G, 5G Ultra presents a major opportunity.
With 5G Standalone speeds of over 1Gbps now accessible in the UK, businesses can enhance their productivity with stable, real-time communications, faster data transfers, and more seamless digital capabilities. 5G Ultra also helps to improve device battery performance by up to 25%, supporting remote working and borderless business.
Businesses that adopt 5G Standalone will be equipped to benefit from emerging capabilities like network slicing, an innovative way to manage network traffic and ensure high performance.
Commenting on Vodafone’s use of 5G-enabled network slicing to improve productivity at Glastonbury 2024, Ryan Kingsley, Stock Manager, EBC said: “The Vodafone slice ensured a stable data connection and helped us serve our customers faster than ever before.”
Demonstrating the scale of the productivity opportunity associated with 5G Standalone, a recent Vodafone report pointed out that UK SMEs have been missing out on £8.6 billion7 a year due to the technology’s slow rollout. Improved connectivity impacts every aspect of business operations, making it another fundamental pillar of productivity.
81%
Percentage of employees who say that using AI has improved their performance
4th
The UK’s position in the G7 productivity index
8.6bn
Annual amount UK SMEs have missed out on due to the slow rollout of 5G Standalone
Innovating together
Productivity has been a challenge for UK businesses since 2008, but we’re now entering an era of unprecedented technological progress.
Today’s affordable and accessible digital technologies have the power to deliver significant productivity gains in businesses of all sizes and are ready to take advantage of right now. As well as promising an immediate short term productivity uplift, they’ll give you an efficient foundation for driving future growth.
Learn more about the role of technology in powering up productivity.