Why can’t people just provide simple honest service?

Surely, it’s not new radical thinking to expect a supplier to be honest with you and not over complicate the service they provide, is it?

What am I talking about?

Well, at the end of last week we had a company ask us for some help with a print technology contract they’d agreed with another service provider.

It was in 2 parts:

• The lease agreement: Which is a financial agreement to lease the equipment from an FCA approved finance company over a given period. In this case it was 5 years.

It’s important to note. In these arrangements you don’t own the equipment (the finance company does) and you rent it from them for a fixed monthly or quarterly charge over the period.

At the end of the term some finance companies (through your service provider) will allow you to own the equipment for a peppercorn fee of £50 or £100.

• The service agreement: Which you agree directly with your service provider and usually runs in parallel to the lease agreement.

The service agreement normally includes the consumables you’ll need and a guaranteed maintenance response service if something goes wrong. And you’ll pay an agreed price for each printed page.

Sounds quite simple doesn’t it? Unfortunately, this is not always the case.

In most instances the lease agreement is fixed for the term with no surprises, so you know exactly how much you’re paying to rent the equipment over what period.

It’s the service agreement where many problems can arise, usually because of unscrupulous service providers (although not illegal) being loose with the truth when discussing their terms with customers.

In this instance, the business concerned, thought they were getting a great deal from their service provider, paying just 3.5p for a printed colour page and 0.35p for a printed mono page.

On the face of it, they seem to have got a fantastic deal, but was it just too good to be true?

Well, it’s several years down the line and we’re looking at their latest service charge invoice dated December 2020, and they’re now paying 6.12p for a colour page and 0.61p for a mono page.

Amazingly, in just a few years, their document printing costs have risen by 75%. We can’t think of many other industries with price hikes happening on this massive scale.

So, how did this happen?

Well, it comes back to those unscrupulous service providers we mentioned earlier, who insert a clause in their agreement saying something like:

‘The service provider can increase the agreement prices by providing 30 days written notice’.

Which means, they can increase your prices whenever they wish, if they put it in writing. In our experience, this can happen up to twice a year and in this case, resulted in a 75% price increase.

Can the customer do anything about it?

Not usually, and if the customer threatens to terminate the agreement, the service provider usually draws their attention to a further clause, which will say something like:

‘If you terminate this agreement (no matter the cause) you agree to pay a settlement figure of the total average service charge amount to cover the time remaining on the agreement.’

So, even if you terminate, they still get all the money they would have made from you over the whole term of the agreement. There’s only one winner in these cases, and it’s certainly not the customer.

Unfortunately, in this current case, the customer only has two options:

• Put it down to experience, ride the agreement out, making sure it’s cancelled exactly when it says. Otherwise, they may try and roll on the agreement for another year or more.
• If you’re that unhappy with service providers actions, terminate now and negotiate a reduced termination fee if possible.

We’re just not sure how these unscrupulous service providers are still able to operate (let alone sleep at night). They must have lots of unhappy customers who’ll never do business with them again.

It’s simple for us, our agreements provide two things, guaranteed great service, and guaranteed fixed prices for the length of the agreement.

Many of our customers are on simple rolling monthly agreements, and while they remain on the same agreement, their price is guaranteed to stay the same for life.

If you’re reading this, please take our advice to read terms & conditions thoroughly. We know you shouldn’t need to, and trust should go both ways. Unfortunately, not every supplier is trustworthy.

…and you know what they say, ‘if something looks too good to be true, it usually is!’