At 09:39 PM 01/12/2005, Chris Shaw wrote:
Has anyone offered something special to drum up new work, such as free AV &/or spyware scan on first visit?? If you have, what was the offer & how well did it work??
Thinking about this a bit further, I do recommend taking the risk away from the customer. So offering a guarantee like "If I can't fix it, it's free" is worthwhile. But remember that there is a difference between "I can't fix it" and "You decided not to fix it." For instance, a computer came into my shop with bad capacitors. Every other shop in town doesn't know a bad cap if it mugged them, so the customer had been told that the entire computer had to be replaced. I took a look, saw the bad caps, tested the system, found that it was unstable (but that the hard drive, RAM and CPU were fine) and told them that they needed to replace the caps, and gave them my price ($59.) They didn't want to pay to fix the machine, so decided to take it broken. I charged them $39 (my base checkup rate) and when they said "but you didn't fix anything" I told them, "That's true, but my guarantee is, if I can't fix it, it's free - and in this case, I can fix it, but you don't want me to. So my base charge applies."
Some customers don't like this approach, but they are the ones who were trying to take you for a ride anyway, and who needs them? Occasionally I get burned on this, but I try to avoid taking jobs that I know I'm not going to fix - dead inkjet printers, for instance - who in their right mind is going to pay $120 for system board for an inkjet when a new printer is $80?
T
