The real cost hiding in businesses isn’t on the balance sheet

South African businesses have gotten good at spotting cost pressures. Inflation, fuel, hiring freezes – none of it goes unnoticed.

What gets missed, according to Nic Laschinger, technology director at Euphoria Telecom, is the money quietly leaking out of a business through technology gaps: tools that don’t talk to each other, or tools that were never put in place at all.

“Every business owner can list their top cost pressures without blinking,” he says. “But very few have worked out how much time and money they’re losing because their technology either doesn’t talk to itself or was never put in place at all. That’s not some minor inefficiency. For most businesses it’s one of the biggest cost savers sitting right there, and it doesn’t touch a single job.”

Technology services incur a monthly fee, but the time lost to duplicated admin and slow customer response costs a lot more than that fee ever will. And unlike the fee, it’s avoidable.

Too many tools, not enough focus

Most people now move across a scattered handful of platforms in a single day: email, instant messaging, video calls, a project tool, a spreadsheet or two, plus whatever app one department picked up without telling anyone else.

“None of these tools are the problem on their own,” Laschinger says. “They were adopted at different times, for different reasons, and connecting them simply was never part of the original plan.”

The result is people re-entering the same information into different systems and losing their concentration every time they switch between them.

Fixing it rarely means adding more technology. It means being deliberate about how the tools a business already owns connect — and in some cases, connecting a single missing piece, like a phone system that can pull up a customer’s record automatically instead of leaving a person to search for it mid-call.

“Before adding anything new, most businesses would get more out of auditing what they already have and closing the gaps,” he says. “That alone saves hours every week. It’s efficiency a business gets to keep, not just time off a clock.”

The manual work nobody questions

There’s a second cost that’s harder to see and often bigger: the manual processes a business has quietly normalised because that’s simply how it’s always been done.

Approval chains stuck waiting on someone to check an inbox, reports stitched together by hand because two systems don’t share data, a customer’s details typed in twice because the first system and the second were never built to connect – none of it looks dramatic on any given day, which is exactly why it survives every cost-cutting review untouched. It’s not a line item. It’s just how things have always worked.

Automation, done properly, isn’t about replacing people, Laschinger argues. It’s about taking the copying, the chasing and the waiting off someone’s plate so that time goes toward work that actually grows the business. Even something as specific as call routing that directs a customer straight to the right department, instead of a receptionist manually transferring them, falls into this category: small enough to overlook, meaningful enough to add up.

Losing customers without realising it

The costliest blind spot is the one facing the customer. Slow internal processes don’t just waste time internally, they cost revenue that nobody notices is gone.

“A customer enquiry that takes three days to get signed off because it has to pass through four people by hand is a customer who’s already looked at your competitor,” Laschinger says.

He points to a related, common failure: a sales team working off a CRM that isn’t kept up to date, so a lead gets followed up twice by two different people, or not at all, because nobody was sure whose task it was. “Nobody puts a number on it. A lost deal doesn’t come with a reason attached, but it’s lost revenue all the same.”

The fix is rarely one single system. Sometimes it’s a CRM that updates itself the moment a call or meeting ends, instead of relying on someone to log it by hand. Sometimes it’s a support ticket that automatically pulls up a customer’s full history the moment they get in touch, instead of an agent starting from scratch. Small technical fix, in either case. Big impact on how the business actually functions.

Technology as a savings strategy, not an expense

Used properly, technology is one of the fastest ways a business can save money right now. It’s a reduction in expenses that doesn’t cost anyone their job.

“Businesses are freezing hiring and cutting travel budgets to get through in this economy, and those cuts matter,” he says. “But closing the technology gaps a business has been living with often delivers a bigger return, faster. It just takes an honest look at where the time and money are actually going.”

Concludes Laschinger: “Audit before you cut anything else. You can’t fix what you’ve never measured. For most businesses, that audit turns up one of two things – technology worth fixing, or technology that’s missing entirely.”

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