Maintaining your position

Third-party maintenance contracts must be assessed with care, argues Andrew Beaumont

Over the past few years, third-party maintenance providers have stepped out of the shadows of OEMs and gained market traction, using experience and cross-vendor expertise to offer services for less.

In many ways this has been great news for resellers, enabling them to offer their customers maintenance contracts that are not only cheaper but also diverse when it comes to hardware platforms.

Acquiring customers is incredibly hard in today's market, and customer retention is critical. So the ability to resell maintenance contracts that reflect a customer's budget is an advantage.

In my view, though, the quality of service offered by third-party maintenance providers varies greatly, creating untenable business risk both for resellers and their customers.

Many have decades of experience, highly trained staff – perhaps including former OEM employees – and spend a lot on cross-vendor spare parts. Yet others do not.

Organisations are moving away from OEM contracts, a shift that has encouraged a great deal of start-ups to enter the market. Many such new entrants may not be able to afford to deliver the quality and breadth of service they promise.

These newcomers may entice resellers with the promise of an additional few thousand pounds in margin on each contract.

But when the worst happens and the customer actually requires proactive, reliable support, too many of these companies simply do not have the resources or skills required.

How long will it take to get the problem resolved if the provider has to go to the market to attain the required skills or spare parts? Does the typical four-hour service-level agreement (SLA) start when the customer calls, or when an inexpert individual on the support desk verifies that the issue is covered under the contract?

What does the SLA even mean? Is there a well-qualified engineer on site, with the right parts to hand as a result of calling the customer before attending, or will an unqualified individual be sent to meet the basic requirements laid out in the contract?

Whether it results in a major incident or simple day-to-day inadequacy, you could have a key customer in meltdown and a hard-won relationship in jeopardy.

There is no doubt that third-party support contracts will become an increasingly important component of the reseller portfolio. But what are you actually buying?

Andrew Beaumont is sales manager at Maindec