Website Support Contract - How to Manage Unused Support Time?

[Metzed]

I'm a web designer and offer support contracts to clients who I create websites for - to provide ongoing maintenance and support for them and their website. One client is asking me to amend the contract as it is up for renewal.

I have 3 support packages and each one offers a different amount of allotted support time per month for a set fee per month.

I have one client who before the first contract was signed (a year ago) asked that any unused support time be transferred to the following month. I said that this was not possible and drew comparison with UK mobile phone contracts where any unused minutes in a month are lost.

Now the client is looking to renew the contract after the first year has passed and the client has asked that at the end of each month any unused support time is used up by us by proactively finding out what improvements can be made on the client's website and then making the improvements. The downside of this is that you only find this out at the end of the month.

Do you think this is a reasonable request? Or do you have any suggestions on the best way to deal with this and left over support time?

 

[Anjam]

Is the client confusing support with consultancy? We also made this mistake many years ago but then had our contracts re-written to define what support was and what it included.

 

[Price-Tracking]

My first thought would be that providing a support service is like insurance - it's there if you need it, if you don't the money is lost. So you wouldn't go back to your insurance company if you hadn't claimed and start asking them to do extra things for the money you've paid!

However, you say that you provide an "amount of allocated support time", which I think makes this a different case. In other words they've paid you an amount of money for you to set aside a specific amount of time soley to help them (if they need it). All they're saying is they want to make sure they use all the time they've paid for each month, by having you do alternate work if they don't have enough primary work.

So it doesn't seem that unreasonable to me to ask you to use the time they've paid you for to work for them, even if it may not be exactly for what they are paying for. It would certainly seem to them that they are paying you to do nothing - or indeed, you will almost certainly be using that time to do something else, so they are effectively paying you to do work for yourself or someone else. Which would seem from their point of view to be a tad unfair.

So I don't see their request as entirely unreasonable, especially as they are asking you in advance for the service going forward (ie. they're not trying to apply this retrospectively to a previous agreement).

Ultimately, it comes down to whether or not you are will to do the work, and/or whether or not you're willing to lose them if they decide to take their business elsewhere.

 

[ITsoldUK]

Agree with the above.

Clearly define what you do under the package and what is NOT included (such as carry over time) and this would remove any confusion for new customers.

With the existing client, treat him slightly differently IMHO, ask him what it is he expects to see improve over the month and then meet him somewhere in the middle of course, ensuring you rule out the carry over as this would prove very detrimental in the long run to your pricing models and would create massive issues further down the road.

A client in the hand is worth 200 prospects visiting your site

 

[cmcp]

You need to make it clear what they are paying for, ie your support availability and or services on retainer. Retained services are not carried over to following months. Just be careful on what you agree to provide for the cost. They're right to question how much they're spending and what they get, but if you give them too much time for your buck trust me they'll put requests in left right and centre (eg at the end of the month) to use up what they see as paid for time.