[VoiceOps] Looking for a good defense for a bad VoIP provider

[Daniel-Constantin Mierla]

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
> <mailto: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 Project
http://www.asipto.com
http://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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