Agreed. Just to be clear, we *do* charge when it's someone else's fault. Company X was billed for all the time we spent fixing after the VoIP provider rolled through. -A On Mon, Mar 28, 2016 at 1:51 PM, Daniel-Constantin Mierla <miconda at gmail.com
wrote:
On 28/03/16 21:24, Rafael Possamai wrote:
I learned this the hard way, but now I only continue to service customers if they actually understand the value brought by a secure and reliable service. As soon as they want to cut corners, for one reason or another, and that becomes a huge issue (like in your case), I make use of a "termination for convenience" clause that I have in all my contracts and within 90 days I no longer have to service this customer, they can find some other provider to make their lives hell.
No more servicing every customer with insane expectations of cost vs benefit.
[...]
On Fri, Mar 25, 2016 at 6:55 PM, Aaron C. de Bruyn <aaron at heyaaron.com> wrote:
I'll try to make this short: I am an IT contractor for "Company X" that has ~26 offices around the western US. We are paid a flat fee to manage every office, keep things secure, train and assist users, etc...
A lot of my business consists on designing and deploying custom VoIP platform, with that we include free support for a while and then a flat fee. Given that our systems are at the core of the network, every time there is an issue with a call, we are hit first for support, even in many of cases is so obvious the fault is somewhere else. Also, working with open source, we deliver everything to customers and sometimes they do changes, coming back to our support when something no longer works.
To handle such cases, we added more clauses to restrict when the free/flat fee support applies:
- if someone changes the system without informing us and getting our approval, then the free support is lost and it is charged extra per incident - if reported issues are not related to out systems or the fault is not our system, then we also charge extra per incident (while we are sort of quite flexible here, it gives the tools to stop when the other side is abusing or the work is consistent given the actual agreement)
So I agree with Rafael -- it is not worth it with customers that expect you fix for free (at no additional cost) what others broke, under an agreement that you asserted a different environment, which was changed without any consultation with you.
Daniel
-- Daniel-Constantin Mierla Co-Founder Kamailio SIP Server Projecthttp://www.asipto.comhttp://twitter.com/#!/miconda - http://www.linkedin.com/in/miconda Kamailio World Conference, Berlin, May 18-20, 2016 - http://www.kamailioworld.com