If you’ve ever had one of those days where you’ve been busy non-stop but at the end of the day couldn’t tell anyone what you’ve actually accomplished, you might be suffering from a new malady: digital debt. 

No, digital debt doesn’t come with 27.7% APR or rewards points for hotels. What it does do, however, is overwhelm you with the sheer volume of digital information and communication you’re required to consume and respond to on a daily basis. In short, digital debt occurs when the constant need to coordinate and communicate at work takes away from thinking, creating, and oh yes, actually working. 

What Is Digital Debt?

While employees are suffering from digital debt, their organizations are regularly researching and implementing leading-edge software and tech to help them keep up with and ideally outpace their competitors. This in turn leads to a technical debt, or: software aspects such as ill-designed code and out-of-date technology that all accumulate over time and result in adverse effects on system maintenance, enhancement, and scalability. 

Sound familiar? Your organization isn’t alone in facing technical debt, either. A recent report estimates that fixing technical debt in the US would cost $1.52 trillion. Technical debt currently boasts a $2.41 trillion annual price tag in cybersecurity and operational failures, failed development projects, and maintenance for outdated systems. 

Is It Possible to Eliminate Digital Debt?

We’re constantly bombarded with digital distractions that negatively impact both our productivity and our well-being. In fact, according to the Microsoft 2023 Work Trend Index, as many as 68% of employees report that they lack uninterrupted focus time during the workday. But when effective and timely communications play a critical role in your job—say, for sales, marketing, or finance—that continued pressure to deliver quickly piled on top of a lack of communication, having to rely on legacy systems, and a lack of good documentation will all simply deepen both your digital and technological debt. 

Like credit card debt, digital debt may feel like something you’ll never get out of. You’ll never stop receiving emails or chat alerts or calendar reminders, or any of the other number of digital communications and alerts you need to respond to in a day. 

But what if you could make responding to some of those things just a little easier? What if you could automate tasks, streamline processes, even enhance decision-making, all to help resolve some of the digital and technical debt you and your organization are facing? 

Finding Efficiencies through Integration

It’s true that digital distractions and technological burdens will never 100% disappear. But some technology can actually make your life a lot easier and pay off that debt some. 

Take for instance the plight of the accounting team at TECO Technologies. Despite the many benefits of moving to NetSuite, the team was still struggling to operate as efficiently as possible for the needs of the business. “There was so much missing information that we couldn’t access,” said customer service manager Arzee Norwood. “The biggest problem was for our accounting team. Let’s say customer service enters an order, but the customer is over their credit limit. The order would fail and go on to accounting review, but the controller wouldn’t have all of the necessary information.” 

Let’s look at the digital debt: First, there’s time spent entering the order. Then the order fails and alerts accounting to review the order. Without easy access to all the relevant information needed to make a judgment call, the controller is forced to spend valuable time hunting down details, sending and responding to emails or chats to gather insight before eventually gathering enough information to know how to process the order. All that effort only further contributed to the team’s digital debt, creating more communication to spend time responding to in order to complete a task. 

But rather than dig themselves deeper into debt, TECO Technologies instead found ExtendSync Google Workspace for NetSuite, which automatically syncs emails from Gmail inboxes by address and by thread to NetSuite records. Moving forward, the controller had access to all the relevant information needed to make a decision on the order, all without having to spend valuable time emailing and chatting to chase down the necessary information. “Now when I associate an email thread with a sales order, my controller can review it right away. She doesn’t have to bother me at all,” Norwood observed. “That makes my time more efficient, makes her time more efficient.” 

Pay Off Some Digital Debt with CloudExtend

We’re not saying we can solve all your digital debt, but CloudExtend can certainly make a sizable dent in it. After all, TECO Technologies estimated that ExtendSync email syncing has saved as much as 25% of people’s time just by ensuring information is available at the right place at the right time. 

That sounds like a pretty good chunk of time back in your day, doesn’t it? 

So what are you waiting for? Find out how you can start paying off some of your digital debt with the help of CloudExtend email integrations that automatically link important communications to your NetSuite CRM records with a single click. No muss, no fuss, just more productivity and efficiency, and a little less digital debt. 

Try our email integration FREE for two weeks with zero obligation.