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 <[email protected] > 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 <[email protected]> > 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 > >
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