Monetising Support for Existing Clients

Last year I posed the question of how to monetise support for clients who we are not hosting and who we have no established support contract.

Through this blog, I was contacted by a local business owner who had a novel approach to the problem.

They provided Information Technology Consulting clients and they asked their ad hoc clients to purchase Support Credits in advance. Then when the clients needed something done their support credits would be debited.

So after some careful thought we have implemented a similar solution for these clients and we built an online payment page and support logging system.

For use most support queries take between 10 - 15 minutes to resolve so we decided that we would charge in minimum fifteen minute increments.

At first I think clients were a bit affronted when we told them that they would have to buy support credits, but in the first couple of weeks we started to see more and more credits being purchased.

Now about about four months into the Support Credit System we have seen an interesting outcome.

For a lot of smaller clients they not only buy support credits for 'support' and general enquiries, they also think about what extra enhancements they would like on their websites and applications and pre-pay to have these done.

It's a win win for us and the clients, we get paid in advance by credit card, the clients can log in and view their support credit balance and we can easily track the support requirements.

AND we are making more money because for the small tasks that would be too time consuming to invoice and do it's all automated.

When the client purchases a support credit they are automatically sent a Tax Receipt so we don't have to, and we can easily import the financial information into our finance package for our accounting purposes.

We are also looking to expand the system to all of our clients including the ones who host through us. So we will be differentiating between general support enquiries and enhancements and updates to sites.

For example if a client calls or emails to ask how to do something on their site that's normal support which is included with the hosting fee.

However if they call in to ask us to make an enhancement to the site, or add in new functionality, rather then going through a whole invoicing process, we can tell them an estimate of the number of credits to do the task and then get them to purchase the credits.

To address the needs of clients for different levels of support and in recognition that sometimes a client may need immediate help or outside normal business hours support we have three zones for the credits:

• Normal Business Hours - 1 Credit = 1 Hour
• Between 7-8:30 AM and 5:30 - 7PM - 1 Hour = 1.5 Credits
• All other times are 1 hour = 3 Credits.

It also has had the effect that clients no longer call on a Saturday or Sunday to ask us to some menial task, because in effect a 15 minute support call for something can cost 1 Credit.

Overall it's been amazing solution to a problem that could have had a really serious impact on the business, and because it's all published and available online through our website we can be slightly removed from the actual 'hard sell' process and let the clients themselves decided whether they do actually want what they are asking for.

Read about our suport credits on our website

Comments on Voip

In a previous post I discussed the research I did for a VOIP PBX and deciding on the Linksys SPA 9000.

At first I was going to purchase and install the system myself, it looked relatively straight forward and easy.

But after a false start where I ordered the hardware from an online store and then had a hell of a time actually getting my order delivered I did some more reviews and got some quotes for the hardware and installation.

For the three phones plus the actual SPA 9000 I was going to spend about $800 on the hardware, but in the end after speak to Mark at BlueWolf I decided to spend the extra money and have them both configure and provide the solution.

I am very glad that I did choose the option of having someone else configure the system, it took them hours of work to set it up and I can only imagine how long it would take if I had done it instead.

We were originally going to use IInet for our voip, as we use IInet for our Internet access and I wanted to reduce the number of providers.

But after a series of false starts with the technical issues we changed to a company called comvergence for the VOIP.

The phone system has been in for a few months now and I am very happy with the solution. Mark at Bluewolf was a bit concerned that our ADSL modem would not be able to handle both the normal Internet and Voice traffic, but so far we have been fine.

The reduction in cost has been quite dramatic, our outgoing call charges have reduced to about $50 a month although our inbound 1300 number has gone up due to our increased incoming calls from interstate clients.

The only one problem we have is with voicemail and unanswered calls, but this is because I did not buy the extra module for internal voicemail.

If a call is unanswered at the moment it goes to our message bank externally which then emails me the voicemail.

There is an additional Linksys device that we can add in to the network that will allow us to have voicemail internally and I think in the next few months I will add this in.

Although the cost of the system went from $800 to almost $1700 the cost has certainly been worth it. From the obvious benefit of having a proper phone system where we can transfer calls internally etc it's fantastic, and the reduction in call costs has been superb.

Overall the system should pay for itself within about 8 months which is outstanding.

I would also certainly recommend Bluewolf if you are looking for a similar solution.

http://www.bluewolf.com.au/