Mike, Recently grappled with this issue, and decided to offer a discount to customers who maintain year to year continuity, which amounts to a surcharge to re-instate support if it's let to lapse. Argument is that there are costs associated with bringing a customer up to speed and back into the maintenance plan.
In doc for customers, I try to be up front in that we're not selling a word processor, game or utility, that it's a database management system, which really has a life of it's own and depends upon ongoing relationships among many related files, and even the best coded DBMS applications will sometimes break and need ongoing care and feeding. Bottom line is that our customers are effectively buying subscriptions, and we can be up front about it or not, but it makes for better customer relations to be up front about everything. BTW, just to mention because it's such a support heavyweight - using UltraVNC for remote connections is an amazing advantage we have. Customer has a problem, we dial in, fix it, all within the hour. Been using it for a while, but still can't get over this amazing capability. In case anyone isn't aware, UltraVNC has JAVA support (customer uses browser/URL to see your screen) and there is a Single Click version (UltraVNC SC) that allows building a 'single click' directly into an application, so the customer clicks one command to make his/her screen online to your support rep (without router changes). One glitch I'm dealing with at the moment is it's very slow when run on a Vista machine (am testing a fix now). Bill Asked via tweet earlier today how vendors handle clients who've let support lapse. I eluded to the proverbial concern about customers not wanting to pay for the milk since they can get the cow for free. Got this tweet back from Jody Meyer: JodyMeyer: @mbabcock16 /Client Support/ We back charge here at MAGI to catch them up. There is no free milk here. Report [OT] Abuse: http://leafe.com/reportAbuse/[email protected] sco.net _______________________________________________ Post Messages to: [email protected] Subscription Maintenance: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profox OT-free version of this list: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profoxtech Searchable Archive: http://leafe.com/archives/search/profox This message: http://leafe.com/archives/byMID/profox/[email protected] ** All postings, unless explicitly stated otherwise, are the opinions of the author, and do not constitute legal or medical advice. This statement is added to the messages for those lawyers who are too stupid to see the obvious.
