General Consultant Discussion

I was just at a customer site to do an upgrade. 30 GB of MAS 90 with only 25 free space. Needless to say they needed to upgrade their hardware before I could begin. One thing they asked while I was there was how I could minimize their downtime. I've not been regularly offering this option -- though I'm forever pestering @JimWoodhead to do so --- but one of my options going forward for upgrades will be a ""you provide us a remote login to your server and we convert your data overnight"". Ok ok - so you're already doing this. But are you charging more for it? Think about the value that this adds to the customer versus we go into their office and take their entire staff down for up to half a day.. Just food for thought. Oh, and it's not a feature Sage is like to offer soon -- or ever...

We typically do this. It's the exception versus the norm to do it during the day.

Do you charge more for it?

We offer this as well and yes, there is a premium for it. Customer's choice - is it worth the premium for the benefit of NOT being down?

I think it's a great option and I am embarrassed that I have not been using it more regularly. This is something that I don't think Sage will be able to match us on in terms of their assisted upgrade services with the Gold Plan. NOTE: I would probably also price this after hours option much higher if a customer was NOT on my support plan - or maybe not even make it an option at all and the customer would be forced to have us do the work only during their business hours unless they were on our plan.

We don't charge more.

I price it into the fixed fee and charge more for doing the work on-site. I accomplish more remotely than sitting at clients office watching a progress bar. If they require on-site service, I'm less productive, so their cost increases. I do charge more for weekend work though.

Mark I totally agree - the only part I don't like is that as soon as I'm not seen on-site -- at least for go live -- the customer can pretty easily choose from a wider assortment of providers to do the work remotely. That could just be a false fear on my part - but it's always in my head that a big component of our service differentiation is the ability to be on-site.

We do the conversion, etc. during off-hours but we are ALWAYS onsite for the go-live.

Wayne - I agree that being on-site is beneficial for some services, but practically speaking, it's not the norm (at least for me). Some clients will always prefer on-site service, but I don't think geography is the ""special sauce"". Go live is always on-site for local clients.

We do most of our work remotely. I am on the phone almost all day. I think what matters most is that we provide results, not that we're physically standing there. Like Mark, however, we are physically on site for most go lives. It provides an added comfort factor.

Upgrades are all fixed fee. Our standard terms are 50% premium for nights, weekends and holidays charged at our discretion. We waive this for really good clients. For some reason I am always surprised when clients choose this and pay the premium willingly. As with others, all work is remote and we are on-site for live. Because we customize user test scripts and follow up on these until there are no issues, being remote does not take away from our presence. @ThereseLogeais This is what we're supposed to be doing on Saturday nights! :D

LOL!!!

I think working remotely to perform these tests has higher value to the customer because it doesn't interrupt their workflow. Sounds like for the most part we're all doing similar. I do think an option for ""we convert this all overnight outside business hours"" is something most customers will pay extra for.

I'd love to do it, but it's hard to make an argument for charging extra when someone says ""why can't you log in remotely and start the conversion at 5 PM?"" I'd charge extra if I have to babysit the conversion, but simply starting it at 5 and checking on it the following morning?

Many times it turns into more than just flipping a switch - and there's no practical way to tell ahead of time whether the data is going to be ""flip switch"". Example - on conversions with inventory if the customer has lots of out of balances you'll get stuck dealing with that. Then when they have 15 mirror image test companies that they insist are mission critical and you have to correct those in order to migrate - you're stuck again. Before you know it the time is 1am. I'm not saying this is rocket science in all occasions - however what you're describing can in many instances turn out to be the upgrade version of ""quick question"" -- meaning it's not as quick as it seems. It's also possible that I just run into all the odd ones.

I hear ya. For the most part, all this gets resolved in advance, so the issues that surface are probably from the last few days. Granted, if I start running into this stuff, I stop and delay until the following day... or if it must be done overnight, it's either built into quote or I contact customer and let them decide whether they want to wait or pay extra. It doesn't happen often.