Charge for email or phone support?

[Toine]

I used to answer all kinds of questions for customers, prospective customers, and total strangers at no charge. I still do. I consider it very inexpensive marketing. When a conversation started with "I know this isn't your problem, but ..." and ended with "Thanks for your help" I knew they would remember me when they had a potential project.

Usually, I try to limit the time to fifteen or twenty minutes. If it starts to get too involved or time-consuming I politely indicate that this might be something I would need to do on a consulting basis and give them my rates.

I don't know for sure if my method is the smart business way, but it seems to me that a bit of uncompensated service is good for the soul.

I totally agree with you Tom. This is how we do business. One of my colleagues spends the majority of his time answering phone calls and emails from clients, often unpaid. He's one of our best engineers, no cheap labor. Eventually we may start charging for our time, e.g. extensive support on systems where the client clearly fails to do proper maintenance and thus has caused damage or excessive wear, or when it gets to a point where we think the client is using us as free consultants. Other than that we are happy to help them out and keep their machines and thus their business running and profitable. Keeps us happy, keeps our clients happy, and makes for clients who can afford to come back to us. We see a large percentage of return business from clients where we have a long lasting good relationship. I am convinced there is a relation with the way we support our clients.

And then there are always some who are just complete ###holes, never satisfied, always asking for more, keeping us occupied but not facilitating our troubleshooting. Yeah we help them out too, but not as enthusiastically as the fair and nice clients, and in the long run they are more prone to being charged for our services. It takes two to tango.

1. We have no support agreement, and it's not a regular customer. Can or should I charge for supporting by e-mail?
2. It took me 15..20 minutes to find the right documentation and to answer some emails. I had a pretty good idea about the solution. Should I intentionally keep it to myself, so I would "have to" visit and charge for both travel and work?

As to your second question: my personal preference is always firmly on the straightforward and honest side of the spectrum. I don't like to intentionally keep things to myself.

As a sidenote to this: I do value and adhere to my company's protection of intellectual capital, will not give away what we consider "trade secrets" or any clever tricks that we think make our products better than our competitors. Other than that I'm all for being open and honest about things. That also helps maintain a good relationship with clients: most of them sure do notice when you are honest while a slightly different answer might seem more profitable for my business. They appreciate an honest attitude.

This must however be a company wide policy. You cannot be alone in this approach with your company following another policy altogether. For this reason I think I fit in the kind of business where I am working and would not be happy in a company that treats clients differently.