Phone support is an area where many new IT consultants lose their shirts. They want to offer high quality service so they make phone support part of their service contract. The problem is they end up giving away the phone support for free.
When you are billing on a hourly rate, the hours you spend providing phone support need to be charged as well as on-site time. Let's face it, with phone support you're going to be contacted by phone, on your cell phone, by pages, by email etc... You're going to be doing phone support on a remote basis - and you can expect to do a lot of it.
There is a great deal of time involved in phone support and if you don't get paid for it, your hourly rate is $0.00. Profitable businesses don't charge $0.00 for their services. If you think you can justify giving away phone support "only to good clients" or "only just this once" you are fooling yourself.
When you give away phone support you also take away your clients' incentive to call you for an on-site visit. Why would they pay you $100 on-site when they can call you up, get a few instructions, and then not have to pay anything? Are these clients gong to remain good clients? No, they'll start to abuse the free phone support - it's human nature to want to save money.
Bottom Line on Phone Support
Don't give your phone support away for free! The information you provide over the phone is just as valuable as the support you provide on-site. You need to understand that giving away phone support is not going to boost your business and it's not going to make good clients more loyal. Your "good" clients will start to abuse it and you will hemorrhage money if you provide free phone support.
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