Notifying Clients of a Call-Out Charge

[minc3d]

I waive my travel fee for most in town clients, but when I do charge it, I call it merely the "travel to customer location" fee. Then I always make note that travel from the customer location is complimentary.

The good always overrides the bad, and even if you have to charge for travel to, noting that travel from was comp'ed puts a smile on their face.

Tit for tat wording

 

[Mr.Mike]

This is NOT a bash on small startups...I was one and I'm still a small 1 man band operation with no desire to expand. But I do want to be treated with the same respect by my customers as a plumbers, mechanics and other repair people.

This discussion represents a range of approaches to travel and charging. If looked at from the perspective of an established business or from someone just getting into the trade, you can see how the approaches change. Since starting my business three years ago, I've evolved to take more of the position that, as a professional, It behooves me to charge a competitive by industry representative rate. If I want to give a customer a break, I may waive my travel fee. By the way, I work from my residence, I have eliminated having the customer bring their computer to me. That's just how I roll.

 

[Appleby]

I agree.......... We Fix the things that have all their precious memories and all their accounting books and without us they could loose ALOT of it......

No one gives us techs the respect we deserve.........

My point exactly....we have to treat our profession as one that deserves respect and run our businesses that way. Until then, we will never get the respect we want and deserve.

Speaking of other industries and on-site service fees.... we had a bunch of friends from church over tonight for a cook out and one of them owns a mom and pop hardware store and appliance repair shop that has been in business for about 75 years. He's the 3rd generation operating it. We were having some problems with our washing machine and about to buy a new one. I mentioned this to him and he said he didn't mind taking a look it might be worth repairing. He looked at it, diagnosed the problem and I asked what it would cost to fix. Without batting an eye he said, "Well I've got to charge a $65 service call fee but since we are friends I'll cut you a deal on the part." I never hesitated and said, "I'll pay full price for the part, gladly pay the service call fee and tell me what day you want to come next week." We stated talking business and he said with the cost of fuel and operating his business he just can't waive or lower his call out fees. I told him I totally agreed and would gladly pay it. I just liked how he was confident about his price, even to a friend. I actually appreciated and respected that.

 

[Tony_Scarpelli]

I agree, because it's so easy to start a repair business and the start up costs can be extremely low. They are not business people and have no idea of the real costs to run a business. Therefore they set their prices way too low and think that they will build a business solely because of price. They will undercharge for their services until they go broke and find another job....or go back to their "real" full time job. Then another new tech with the same mentality will take his place.

This makes it more difficult for the rest of us to charge the rates we need to to not only survive but make a decent living and expand our businesses. It also makes it difficult for us to be treated as equals with the rest of the service industry.

This is NOT a bash on small startups...I was one and I'm still a small 1 man band operation with no desire to expand. But I do want to be treated with the same respect by my customers as a plumbers, mechanics and other repair people.

I have a different perspective.

It takes 1-2 years to become a plumber but I have been diligently applying and learning IT for 17 years. I get about 50% more than local plumbers do for on site work.

I think they have a hard time comparing their skills to ours not the otherway around. Journeyman electricians can barely make $50 per hour on commercial jobs.

So, each of us should Charge what the market will bare.

My relationship with my clients is determined by my professionalism, knowing what to do, when to do it and how to do it. Being accurate in my accessments both in deliverables and costs. Managing expectations and achieving required results.

I know my billings are in the top 25% of all my competitors but then again so are my experience and skills. If I were a first or second year in business tech I might timidly expect $50 per hour or less than the electrician or plumber.

I never have a problem charging for one hour. I had to plug in a network hub once. They paid the $120 and we all laughted. It became a joke, so now when he calls I say is everything plugged in? Turned ON? Cables plugged in? I later did a four hour job for him that went over 20 minutes so I charged four hours rather than five for that job so he knows he got his money back. Pay me now or pay me later. He paid me then and it came back to him.

 

[smlie4]

I disagree with block times, someone always gets the bad end of the stick. It's either you rounding down your precise billable hours or the customer getting charged for something they never received.

Charge the customers for every minute of your professional time.

Getting to the site location takes time and resources if the customers wants you there then make them pay for your time, if the come to your workshop then they don't pay call-out.

I wouldn't recommend raising your rates to factor in drive time coz then your rates will be over priced. Explain the call out to the customer.

Option 1 includes wasting their time unplugging all the cords at the back of their computer uncertain whether they are going to know where they all go, waiting at traffic lights (this can be 1/2 your day if you live in Perth), heavy traffic, road rage, trying to get to a location at a certain time, then once it is all done doing it all in reverse and then getting home and there is cords everywhere, they start windows and the mouse doesn't work or the printer or the "installing hardware wizard appears".

Or offer them them the option of conveniently you coming to their house working on their computer in place without them even having to lift a finger all for one low price of $40!

 

[Tony_Scarpelli]

What we do is this:

$39.99 first 30 minutes if you carry it in to our store, $59.99 per hr after.
$49.99 for us to pick up your pc (within 10 minutes of our store-whole town). Then we still charged $59.99 per hour for instore work afterwards.

However if we work on site:

$99.99 per hour (up to 10 minutes one way travel time). So you actually get 50 minutes for $99.99.

That was in home charges and Business paid $120 per hour on site or call out fee for first 1 hr including one way travel.

With the new reality of higher prices and particularly fuel expenses we now charge everyone $120 per hour on site or call out charge, first, second and every hour after that.....

If you are out of our travel distance of about 15 miles, then you pay travel both ways or from the time we leave the shop until the time we return to the shop or our next customer. I have one client who is 50 miles away and we charge them 1 hr travel to and 1 hr travel from. We give them a break on the return travel whenever we are there 4 hrs or more.

Basically I think you should be able to state your charges a simply as possible. So that is why we have one charge for call outs or on site....$120. We still do pickups which is slightly different or deliveries as we spend little time onsite in those cases.

I will say that we do handicapped and really old seniors who are "shut-ins" for the same price as our shop bench rate as they do not have a choice to bring the PC in or not. We also give 20% disount to military, fireman and police.

 

[allanc]

If you are on-site only, just raise your rates.

If you offer on-site and in-shop, raise your on-site rates and give them the choice.

If you're looking at doing an extra charge for those beyond a certain distance, I'd stick to terms they immediately would recognize like "travel surcharge" or "out-of-area fee". I'd only notify existing customers out of area.

Within the past week, I checked with some of my clients who call upon other 'trades'.
These include plumbers, electricians, alarm companies, etc.
The 'call-out charge' is mostly in the range of $20-$25 and some charge as high as $35.
These costs are for Toronto, Canada and in CDN$.

 

[phaZed]

I charge a $25 flat rate fee called a "Travel Charge" if I have to leave the shop. I'm able to work on many computers at the shop, but only one at someone's home. There's a fee for that. Gas, mileage, wear and tear on vehicles, etc.

Usually I try to schedule a whole day for just service calls, or I at least lump them together on the same day when I can.

Most of the time, my clients end up deciding they don't want to pay the $25, and bring it to the shop. They didn't want to travel and pay for the gas either.

On another note, the same $25 covers Pick-up & drop-off scenarios as well. I just can't do a Virus removal on-site most of the time while leaving the shop unattended. I lose too much business when customer X calls and needs to have service today.. but I'm on a service call.

 

[jdpetrov]

My business has a 20 mile service area that is no charge, and then everything else I charge extra labor for my time to drive out there. About 99% of my current business is within those 20 miles, and that 1% either will pay the extra fee or won't utilize my services, so then I lose out on only 1% of my business.

Since I do not have a brick'n'mortar location I have to go on site for 100% of my jobs, so for people close enough to me I just eat the cost of gas, which at 20 miles tops is not too bad, even these days.

 

[Tony_Scarpelli]

If by block time you mean hourly increments, I think that is hughly standard in our industry.

If I come out for 10 minutes its and hour. If you didn't need me to come out then you would not call andpay me to come out. It is not my fault, nor problem if you only need me to plug in your router because one of you silly employees left it unplugged.

From my experience the jobs that required me to be on site less than 30 minutes were so stupid as that I felt I should charge them double for a stupidity charge, not discount my time.

I have 40 or 60 hrs a week at best that I can bill. I am going to bill as much of it as reasonable and possible. On the other hand when I am at a clients office 3 hrs and I am ten minutes past the 3rd hour, I may round it down. above 10 minute and 3 hrs and the are payng for the next hour.

However I do remember when I am into a guy for 30 minutes or more so next time I come out for 1 hr 15 minutes I do not charge him for the 2nd hours as it cannot always go my way. I guess what we are talking about is how each of us makes it right with our customers.

I tend to get the first money upfront and then if it keeps happening to my advantage with the same client the I have a client appreciation moment but I make sure that they are aware of what I am doing for them as a gift so that i do not turn them into mooches expecting me to do stuff at discount or free very often. That is how many have run themselvs out of business.

Case in point, I know a guy had three great clients so he kissed their arsts. That is ok but then he started giving them huge freebies and discounts to the point that they began to demand even more from him and then he felt trapped. He lost one client who got the feeling he was charging so much because he was so damned eager all the time. Its called the law of unintended consequences.

Don't go over board on your great customers or bad things can happen.

Set a precedences of always charging them something and when you do something for less than your normal rates and policies you must tell them. Don't assume they realize you are doing nice things for them. They usually don't. Also they should always expect to pay you the next time you do something.

I always tell my clients that they have problems and they pay me to make those problems my problems. That is as plain as it gets. Otherwise I would rather be flying one of my airplanes or sailing my boat.

Funny, My clients always thank me, always.

 

[Tony_Scarpelli]

I charge a $25 flat rate fee called a "Travel Charge" if I have to leave the shop. I'm able to work on many computers at the shop, but only one at someone's home. There's a fee for that. Gas, mileage, wear and tear on vehicles, etc.

Usually I try to schedule a whole day for just service calls, or I at least lump them together on the same day when I can.

Most of the time, my clients end up deciding they don't want to pay the $25, and bring it to the shop. They didn't want to travel and pay for the gas either.

On another note, the same $25 covers Pick-up & drop-off scenarios as well. I just can't do a Virus removal on-site most of the time while leaving the shop unattended. I lose too much business when customer X calls and needs to have service today.. but I'm on a service call.

So I get the feeling that some folks charge xx amount in their shop and then the same price to go on outcalls or call outs what I call On-Site service, and they want to chg a bit more for auto expense and travel so they might have a call out charge.

If I work in my shop I can easily bill out 3x the billing rate as I have 10 computers on my bench at one time and I just keep them going. I do have to stop to start or stop a procedure bit I am doing way more than one machine at a time. So I probably make $195-250 per hour bench rate when busy.

However when I go on an out call I can only charge that one client $120 per hour. So while the charge is double my shop rate it is not making me rich. I always explain to customer I prefer they bring their systems in as it saves them money, make me more money and I can work faster with all my tools and software and internet connections and backup computers.

I think it might be a mistake to try and only charge your bench rate plus call out fee for an out call.

 

[allanc]

So I get the feeling that some folks charge xx amount in their shop and then the same price to go on outcalls or call outs what I call On-Site service, and they want to chg a bit more for auto expense and travel so they might have a call out charge.

If I work in my shop I can easily bill out 3x the billing rate as I have 10 computers on my bench at one time and I just keep them going. I do have to stop to start or stop a procedure bit I am doing way more than one machine at a time. So I probably make $195-250 per hour bench rate when busy.

However when I go on an out call I can only charge that one client $120 per hour. So while the charge is double my shop rate it is not making me rich. I always explain to customer I prefer they bring their systems in as it saves them money, make me more money and I can work faster with all my tools and software and internet connections and backup computers.

I think it might be a mistake to try and only charge your bench rate plus call out fee for an out call.

Just doing the math quickly .... your shop rate is $60 and onsite is $120 per every hour then?
That is interesting and I do not think that I have seen another member here who charges 100% more for onsite.

 

[Tony_Scarpelli]

Just doing the math quickly .... your shop rate is $60 and onsite is $120 per every hour then?
That is interesting and I do not think that I have seen another member here who charges 100% more for onsite.

Yes, you are correct and I make more money on the bench at $59.99 than I can going out on site for $120. And I get more crying sob stories about the $59.99 per hour shop rate it seems than I do about the on-site charges.

Funny huh? Human nature.

We do pickups for $49.99 and drop off for $49.99 but that usually means no more than 10 minutes in the home plugging and unplugging the computer.

We do handicapped folks for our in 'shop rate' as they have less choice in the matter. Or when we can, usually we just pick it up for $10 and charge the shop rate for every thing else and then drop it off free. I try not to get too sentimental but I like to treat people like I would want to be treated.

TO be fair, I have 17 years experience in business integration/consulting Networking so when I go on site it is often for higher level stuff than virus removal. Often Servers are involved, network switches, hubs, cat 5 issues, databases, accounting and proprietary software.....

The shop carry in stuff is hardly ever network related wan;lan stuff. So its not exactly comparing apples to apples. Also when I get 3-4 hr jobs its business and my home customers are seldom more than 1 hr.

Case in point, got a call to go to a ladies house. I get there she has a i7 870 CPU, 12 gig ram, raid 1 and 2 TB partitions and virus is the reason for the call. However it quickly turned into a failing HD.

Then I look closer one of the two drives was getting smart warnings so I get a backup of her data with the external Tb drive I carry with me. By the time we filled my drive we didn't have all her pictures of her horses but we had qbooks and intuit and taxes.

She had a raid zero spanned two 1.5 tb drives and then partitioned them 1 and 2 tb. It was a mess. I can't figure why do that but I think she wanted the speed of read/writes with the raid zero, still I would not have let her do that.

She lost a bunch of stuff and now is looking at $$$ to recover the 1.5 Tb drive and then someone has to do the rebuild of the raid and recover both drives if she wants any more data. Its one of those in for a penny in for pound deals.

This is not a call that one of my bench techs might have handled with any grace. She didn't even realize she was in trouble until it was too late. As I began to get her data the drive just disintegrated out from under us.

She has a million dollar operation on one nice machine that was in a dusty environment and she did have an online backup but no one bothered to read the error messages which says that she has been over her allotment of space since October last year.

Oh well, she probably gets $100,000 for one Thoroughbred and what is a big deal to me is small potatoes to her.

 

[Carl]

I charge $100 to go to the site then shop rate for all work.
(Its a "convenience" charge - I'm doing them a favor by going to the site - if they want to save the $100 they can drop it off - I can make more doing 2 or 3 in shop units than 1 on site)

Biggest bill I handed out was $1,500/hr from my door back to my door (Price agreed before leaving) - 3 am call absolutely positively had to be up by 7:30am - No Excuses! - turned out that a secretary kicked the plug out. - took 1 minute to diag. - gave them a "Complementary" system scan to make sure everything else was OK - would have felt bad if it took longer to write the check than to do the work.

 

[allanc]

I charge $100 to go to the site then shop rate for all work.
(Its a "convenience" charge - I'm doing them a favor by going to the site - if they want to save the $100 they can drop it off - I can make more doing 2 or 3 in shop units than 1 on site)

Biggest bill I handed out was $1,500/hr from my door back to my door (Price agreed before leaving) - 3 am call absolutely positively had to be up by 7:30am - No Excuses! - turned out that a secretary kicked the plug out. - took 1 minute to diag. - gave them a "Complementary" system scan to make sure everything else was OK - would have felt bad if it took longer to write the check than to do the work.

Where are you located?
I might be willing to fly from Canada to your location and push the plug back in the wall for that $1,500

 

[smlie4]

I charge $100 to go to the site then shop rate for all work.
(Its a "convenience" charge - I'm doing them a favor by going to the site - if they want to save the $100 they can drop it off - I can make more doing 2 or 3 in shop units than 1 on site)

Biggest bill I handed out was $1,500/hr from my door back to my door (Price agreed before leaving) - 3 am call absolutely positively had to be up by 7:30am - No Excuses! - turned out that a secretary kicked the plug out. - took 1 minute to diag. - gave them a "Complementary" system scan to make sure everything else was OK - would have felt bad if it took longer to write the check than to do the work.

Nice work! Many techs probably wouldn't have agreed to such a guarantee nor answered their phone at that time. I guess this is great example of a 'Niche'.

To most customers it is was just a simple as a plug, but for you it could have been a nightmare and the customer would have still got charged the same, 1:0 to you.

It takes a lot of technical knowledge to find the simplest problems and know that this is the root of the cause, people with out the knowledge will plug it back in and hope for the best still unsure if their is problems to come.

Yesterday I customer brought in a laptop because iTunes had no sound, it took 2 minutes to show her how to use the volume. $80 to me!

 

[glricht]

I charge $100 to go to the site then shop rate for all work.
(Its a "convenience" charge - I'm doing them a favor by going to the site - if they want to save the $100 they can drop it off - I can make more doing 2 or 3 in shop units than 1 on site)

Biggest bill I handed out was $1,500/hr from my door back to my door (Price agreed before leaving) - 3 am call absolutely positively had to be up by 7:30am - No Excuses! - turned out that a secretary kicked the plug out. - took 1 minute to diag. - gave them a "Complementary" system scan to make sure everything else was OK - would have felt bad if it took longer to write the check than to do the work.

Our business is strictly on-site and I've had emergency calls too, but never had the guts to charge $1,500/hr! Great that it worked for you!

I also get my share of simple fixes, I've had two calls in the last few months where the PC had no sound and discovered that the audio cable was plugged into the wrong port. Like you, I did a bit of checkup too so that it wouldn't take longer to write the invoice than it did to fix the problem.

 

[Tony_Scarpelli]

If I am on site for something that takes just a minute or two, I will often double check that their backup is working correctly, all MS updates are performed, update and run the ccleaner, malwarebytes and make sure the antivirus is current and working so at least they get a minor tune up.

I might check the event viewer for applications, security and system to see that there are no red errors. If they have more than one computer I might take a look at each system or at least ask each user if they have had any difficulties.

I try to give them some value

 

[Carl]

Nice work! Many techs probably wouldn't have agreed to such a guarantee nor answered their phone at that time. I guess this is great example of a 'Niche'.

Thanks, Its a guarantee / gamble that I am willing to make If I am familiar with a system (know where I can grab parts in an emergency). I have 2 numbers, 1 for regular 9 to 5 stuff and 1 for emergencies, the emergency number forwards to my cell - I always answer. Emergency calls are Emergencies to somebody and Emergencies are big money and good PR because they know they can count on you when they need you. They know it isn't going to be cheap - When they are selling ticket items $1,500 to get their system working is more cost/effective than loosing $100k because it isn't.

As Tony_Scarpelli points out

I will often double check that their backup is working correctly, all MS updates are performed, update and run the ccleaner, malwarebytes and make sure the antivirus is current and working so at least they get a minor tune up.

I might check the event viewer for applications, security and system to see that there are no red errors. If they have more than one computer I might take a look at each system or at least ask each user if they have had any difficulties.

I try to give them some value

There is no question about giving them value and what he has outlined is very close to what I referred to as a "complementary system scan" sure it took a few minutes but still...

To most customers it is was just a simple as a plug, but for you it could have been a nightmare and the customer would have still got charged the same, 1:0 to you.

I was expecting a nightmare.

Where are you located?

South Florida

 

[Tony_Scarpelli]

Hey Carl,

I got in-laws in Homestead. Got to look you up when I come that way.

I try to get out to Sun N Fun or one of the fly-ins at least once a year. The tornado closed the event the day I was preflighting to come down there.