As the Chinese proverb says, we live in interesting times.
In recent years we seen a sharp increase in our overheads, and
the impending changes in the new business rates and rent increases are going to
have a significant impact on our costs, not to mention Brexit adding 20% to the
cost of imported hardware. This has made for a challenging climate for most small businesses, and it's inevitable that we will need to adapt to the new business climate.
Our last price increase was in January 2011, and we’ve made
every effort to keep our prices as low as possible, however as with most of our competitors, we realise that we need to increase our prices if we are to maintain the service levels that our customers expect from us, so from 1st
May 2017 we will be increasing our prices as follows:
In-House or Remote Support
First quarter hour - £25.00+VAT
Each subsequent quarter hour - £20.00 VAT
Call-out Charges
First half hour - £60.00+VAT
Each subsequent quarter hour - £20.00 VAT
Weekend/post 6pm rates: add £2.50+VAT per quarter hour
Over the last decade we’ve seen a dramatic shift in the way
we support our customers. Originally we used travel to the customer’s
office to resolve anything but the
simplest problems, however with the improvement of remote support tools, we now
do the majority of our work remotely. This is great news for our customers as
it dramatically reduces support costs, however the changing approach to how we
support you means that our relationship with our customers has also evolved
One important aspect of this, particularly when we are
administering cloud services for you, is that we need to keep more detailed
information about your licenses and settings. Needless to say trust is of
paramount importance, particularly when you also allow us remote access to your
computers, and this has led to a closer relationship with our customers.
For many of our business customers in particular, we feel
that the pay-as you-go model no longer suits the new style of relationship. One
important aspect of this is that as support incidents take less time to resolve
it has become increasingly uneconomical for us to invoice for many incidents,
which has resulted in an increasing amount of our work being given away for
free. It therefore makes sense to move
the remote and telephone support services into a new charging model where we
charge £25+VAT per computer; we believe
that this amount is both affordable for small business, and competitive as it
will include unlimited remote and telephone support, and for customers who choose
this model we will continue to charge site visits at our old 2011 rate. We will be phasing in these changes over the course of the next few months, so there's no need to do anything just yet.
We will also offer these customers a Service Level Agreement
so that you can benefit from guaranteed response times, and for those who want
a higher level of service we will offer packages that also include free on-site
support. Please let us know if you want more information about this.
