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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 28/03/16 21:24, Rafael Possamai
wrote:<br>
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<div dir="ltr">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.
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<div>No more servicing every customer with insane expectations
of cost vs benefit. <br>
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<div style="font-size:12.8000001907349px">[...]<br>
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<div class="gmail_quote">On Fri, Mar 25, 2016 at 6:55 PM, Aaron
C. de Bruyn <span dir="ltr"><<a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="mailto:aaron@heyaaron.com" target="_blank">aaron@heyaaron.com</a>></span>
wrote:<br>
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<div dir="ltr">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...</div>
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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.<br>
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To handle such cases, we added more clauses to restrict when the
free/flat fee support applies:<br>
<br>
- 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<br>
- 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)<br>
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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.<br>
<br>
Daniel<br>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
Daniel-Constantin Mierla
Co-Founder Kamailio SIP Server Project
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.asipto.com">http://www.asipto.com</a>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://twitter.com/#!/miconda">http://twitter.com/#!/miconda</a> - <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.linkedin.com/in/miconda">http://www.linkedin.com/in/miconda</a>
Kamailio World Conference, Berlin, May 18-20, 2016 - <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.kamailioworld.com">http://www.kamailioworld.com</a></pre>
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