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

[Aaron C. de Bruyn]

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 <miconda at gmail.com
> 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 <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 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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