third party service calls

[fixthecopier]

I was wondering how many of you get third party service calls? This is where someone in an office somewhere sets himself up as a service provider and sells maintence contracts all over the country. When calls are made, they find a local who they will hire to do the call for preset amounts. In the past it was a good source of extra money, but I recently had to do a couple for a rather small amount of money. My boss did not want the competition to do them, so I fixed an HP plotter for $45. That was not too bad, because it took me 20 minutes and was in the middle of my territory, so no travel time. A week later I get another call. This one was 50 minutes one way to get there. These people do not pay extra for travel. As I do the call in procedure to tell them this old laser jet 4 needs a fuser, I am reeding the paperwork that came with the call and it says if I have to make a second trip, they will pay $25 for this one for our expenses. It was 50 min out there and 50 min back to the shop. When they found out that UPS would not deliver to the site because of how remote it was, they wanted me to go pick it up, for no extra money of course, which I refused to do. I did go back and put it in, because I like the customer. The customer had a Konica color copier, about 8 years old. She told me that one time they called a work order in, and a TV repair man drove from South Carolina, which was another 2hours south of my shop, and he blew canned air into the machine, told them not to do it, and left. They did finally get a real tech on the copier after a few calls. Do any of you take these low paying calls?

[OMD-227]

Back when I was at a dealer in a regional area, we used to get these calls for printer repairs like Lexmark & HP, because no-one from Melbourne would drive the several hours for a call on a printer out in the country.
I always fitted them in around MY schedule, as these were not OUR clients. The money received was always peanuts, but we considered it as money to cover all fuel costs while driving to OUR clients who we were visiting that day anyway.
We often got calls from these companies asking when we were going to go there, but our office girls knew we were in total control of when they were done and we would arrange it next time we were going to be in that area. These companies had no other choice but to use us.
In many ways it worked as our advantage, as we upgraded them to one of our MFD's on a full service contract alot of the time.

It may look like a PITA now, and not worth doing for the money received, but its well worth it if you can upgrade them to one of your machines in the process.

[RRodgers]

I think in this economy, if you see any money laying on the ground... Pick it up.

[nmfaxman]

Spend the money in LOCAL advertising.
All they do is make big money by answering a phone.
If you all refused to take the calls, you would all keep the money local.
More business means more jobs locally.

[jonezy999]

The worst thing regarding third party calls for me is the fact that the fault has been diagnosed by a phone call. Have been sent an entire doc feeder for a little brother multi function, which turned out to have a stuck sensor actuator.
Just had one this morning on a samsung, been provided a fuser, told not to go onsite before parts arrived. Visit site this morning to find fuser is indeed past its life, but there is no reference to the broken parts inside the cassette which the secretary mentioned to me before I had even laid eyes on the box. Had I been the one to diagnose the fault, all parts would have been ordered and replaced at the same time, now another trip, disassembly and more down time.

The extra money is nice, but sometimes, like when the third party wants used parts returned under specific guidelines, which take an extra hour to do, it just doesn't seem worth it.

[fixthecopier]

I used to do calls for one company that insisted that you pretend to be an employee of their company,I guess to put an illusion that they are a big nationwide company. It was hard to explain to them that everyone already knows who I am, and I may be wearing a company shirt.

[Ducttape n Glue]

We do a fair amount of these. At last count we are servicing for 6 "Service Providers" and a 7th called yesterday to ask our rates.
Of those 6, I will continue to do business with 4 of them. We hashed out the payments and costs ahead of time and we both agreed to terms. The other 2 failed to meet the terms agreed upon, note they didn't pay in a timely manner, so if I decide to do a call from them again it will be credit card only and on my terms only.
I'm not in business to loose money, but if I can have a mutually beneficial business relationship with these "Service Providers", I will.

Here's a good one, we followed up on one of these 3rd party service calls where the 1st tech didn't finish the job. When we got to the customer, he had already totally disassembled the printer right to frame. Paper cups full of screws, all covers, components, PCBs neatly laid out on the floor and counters, nothing but the metal frame sitting on the desk, literally. From the looks of it I think he may have been pissed of at the "Service Provider", as this "SP" is one of the 2 who did not meet his obligations. Needless to say we did not re-assemble.

[fotocom]

When we quote for third party calls we have a two tier system.
We quote a particular price for calls within an hour radius of the our shop, and we quote a second price for calls over an hour from our shop. We are flexible with this of course. If the customer is over an hour away we generally would not provide as quick a response time as we do to our own contract customers.
Generally all our third party calls are simple fixes, paper jams loose cables,incorrect settings etc. It rare that they take longer than 30 mins.

[Ducttape n Glue]

I asked if anyone ever heard of Lan Logics on another thread but haven't heard anything on them.
They called here to ask if we would do a service call for them and as I was speaking to him I looked them up online. Their reviews showed that they had not paid others for calls made on their behalf. When I asked him how they would pay, he asked for terms of net 30, and I told him about his reviews. He then put me on hold and came back with " My boss says do the call and bill us and we'll pay you right away". I said how about credit card, he said ok and would email me the client contact and info.

Needless to say, I never heard back from them.