Do you offer printer service contracts as part of your computer repair, IT service or computer consulting business?
If so, you need to know how to structure these arrangements so you get paid appropriately for your time. When it comes to service contracts and particularly bundling in any type of hardware or peripheral repair, many new IT service providers lose their shirts when it comes to phone support. They want to offer high-quality service, so they make remote support via phone part of their printer service contracts… but often end up not charging enough and essentially giving away this valuable benefit free of charge to their clients.
The following 4 tips can help you structure printer service contracts so you’re not giving away too much free phone support.
1. Charge the Same for Phone Support as for On-Site Time. When you are billing at an hourly rate, make sure the hours you spend providing phone support are also billed at the same hourly rate. And when you are figuring phone support into your printer service contracts, do the math properly so your total cost per month is representative of the potential hours you will be spending with your clients both on-site and remotely. You can expect with remote support that your clients will be contacting you by phone, on your cell phone, and through e-mail. You can expect to be doing a lot of it, so you need to be compensated appropriately. If you aren’t correctly factoring in phone support, clients will take advantage of the convenience of instant advice and use phone support when it is not needed or in lieu of on-site time.
2. Remember that Phone Support Takes a Lot of Time. Phone support takes as much time as other types of support, even for something as simple as printer troubleshooting. If you don’t include phone support as part of your printer service contracts, your hourly rate for printer troubleshooting by phone will be $0.00. Profitable businesses don’t charge $0.00 for their services. And if you think, “I can just give away phone support to my good clients,” or “I can just give it away this one time and everything will work out fine,” you’re fooling yourself.
3. Giving Away Phone Support Hurts Your Overall Billable Service Revenue. When you give away free remote support with any type of service contracts, you take away your clients’ incentive to call you for billable on-site visits. Why would they pay you $100 on-site to handle printer problems when they can just call you up, get a few instructions and not have to pay anything? These clients will not stay good clients for long. Any person in their right mind will take advantage of and abuse the chance for free phone support. It’s just human nature to want to save money.
4. Value Yourself. The information you provide over the phone is just as valuable as any other type of work you do on-site through printer service contracts. Giving away phone support will not boost your business, nor will it make good clients more loyal. Even your best clients over-use free advice and you’ll start to hemorrhage money.
No comments:
Post a Comment