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We have a relatively small demographic and most of our customers are small businesses. Many of them have either a hard time understanding or a hard time accepting that computer related calls are billable.

I'm interested in what other companies policies are and what they're experiencing regarding this. We're not an IT company and do not intend to become one, but I think we do a good job supporting our products and we're happy to do so for our customers.

How can we make this more palatable to the customer without just giving it away? Is it going the route of the color click charge where you have to just give away all of your profit? Currently we have a conversation that this is outside of your "copier" agreement and it will be billable. However, I always get the feeling that the customer thinks we're taking advantage of them.

I appreciate your feedback.
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We just started an optional additional monthly charge to the maintenace agreement. For instance, with a segment 2 or 3 we charge $200 for connectivity at installation. However, they can choose instead to have $25 per month added to their maintenance agreement and not only get their equipment installed on the network but also be covered for on-going network related issues that effect the MFP. For instance, if they change operating systems, we'll clean up the resulting mess at no charge. They look at it as paying an extra $100 for a year's worth of extra support which is true but the contract auto renews with the $25/mo as well which provides a full $300/yr going forward. But what's even better is that if they check the decline box, we can later say that it was their decision to be billed for it, not ours. We just launched this so time will tell how well it flies both internally and externally.
We offer two contracts one for just the hardware and the other for the connectivity due to pc related items. We don't have a decline box, and I think that's an excellent idea.

BTW we have a full IT staff and resell IT services and professional services for dms, sharepoint, digidoc, nsi, etc..
quote:
Originally posted by jswinberlin:
Currently we have a conversation that this is outside of your "copier" agreement and it will be billable. However, I always get the feeling that the customer thinks we're taking advantage of them.


I know the feeling, I've had this conversation with many customers over the years.

First and foremost, get a piece of paper (we call ours the Connectivity Support agreement) saying what is included and what is not. As others have stated, it's best to have the customer actively decline ongoing connectivity support, then the conversation is quite simple: "Well, we do offer an agreement that covers that, but I see here that you declined that service".

My talk track when customers simply will NOT believe that loading drivers on new PCs isn't included is:

"The average computer is replaced every 5 years, so that means that every year 20% of computers are replaced. If we assume every one of our customers has ONE PC, we'd need to reload drivers at 10 customers a day, which would take two full time people. Since many of our customers actually have hundreds of PCs, I'd really need a dozen people doing nothing but reloading drivers."
We include up to 2 hours initial installation on all of our connected products (except for the very low end machines). Is anyone else charging for initial connectivity? We found that when we didn't connect our products most of the time they weren't installed properly and the customer didn't get the full functionality. For example, color systems were not defaulted to B&W for printing...Scanning was not set up, accessories were not configured properly and overall the customer was not as happy as if we did it for them. Most of the time when they say their "guy" will set it up we end up cleaning up behind them and it is never as clean as if we did it for them to begin with. Any thoughts or comments?
We do have an agreement that says that computer/network support is not included. At this time we do not offer contracts for these services, but I believe we may in the near future. However, some of the problems I see is that either the sales person glosses over this part of the "connected product agreement" or the person who needs the support isn't the one who signed the agreement. In the end, it just seems like this does nothing but prove the customer wrong which in turn makes them more angry. I believe that having a contract which they actively decline would be much better than just telling them it isn't included...actively opting out puts the blame on them.

Thanks for the input guys!

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