Charge for stuff that used to be provided at no additional charge
Always good for a chuckle until the numbers sink in. Some of this is old school--a classic example is network management reports, which are free if you negotiate that up front, but can cost a bundle if you ask for them after you’ve inked a deal. Another of more recent vintage is charging for managing (i.e., acting as the RespOrg) on toll free numbers, even when a carrier gets the traffic directed to the number. Still another is Proactive Notification -- the carriers expect the enterprise to notify them when the carriers fail to meet one of their own SLAs; if you want the carrier to notify you, additional charges may apply. And to prove that desperate times call for desperate measures, Verizon is so enthralled by its Web portal (which has its own problems, but those are beyond the scope of this article) that it has put in its Service Guide the right to charge customers $8 per paper bill. If you get 100 bills, that’s $10K per year.
How do you fight this one? The right provision--but it’s hard to get--is an agreement in which the prices in the pricing schedules are the totality of charges that can be levied for or on the services you are buying. A decent fallback is an agreement that you will not be charged during the term of the agreement for a service or feature for which you were not being charged when the agreement was executed.
"Migrate" customers to new products by discontinuing or raising the price of old products
Another Golden Oldie, this one dates back at least to the early 1970s when the Bell System hiked the price of Centrex to "incent" customers to buy Dimension PBXs (Centrex never recovered). The same technique was used to get rid of low bit-rate private lines and X.25 Service. Now it's being applied to frame relay, which Sprint has expressly said it will be discontinuing and Verizon and AT&T are discouraging customers from renewing, much less buying.
To be fair to the telcos, the effects of Moore's Law are such that for at least the last decade, when customers migrate to a new service or platform they generally save money immediately or very quickly, although the effects are often masked by rising demand.
Quote a stripped-down price for new managed services and get 'em on the "extras"
Remember the old story about the customer that aggressively negotiates a rock bottom price for a new car, only to find it jacked up and sans tires when he comes to pick it up? "Tires?" says the salesman, incredulously. "You wanted tires with that car? Gosh, I’m sorry, but they’re extra. Of course, I do have four brand new ones right here, and I can let you have them for $600, including valves, balancing and mounting."
In telecom the examples tend to be more subtle, but only slightly. Especially in managed service and outsourcing deals, the Scope of Work document can be as important as the contract, because if it’s not in the Scope of Work and you need it, the carrier will charge you extra for it.
