Computer Consulting Business: Hardware Warranty Services

Computer Consulting Business should supervise the hardware warranty services. Be there during service calls and provide coordinating support as a service of your computer consulting business.

As a computer consulting business, you shouldn’t be spending precious time and your clients’ limited budgets troubleshooting a malfunctioning monitor or CD-RW drive.

If your computer consulting business is large enough that you have both senior-level and technician-level staff, you’re probably already doing a great job of directing workload to the right personnel.

Are You a Company of One?

However, if you are a small computer consulting business, where perhaps you are the "company", it makes sense to let the PC vendor’s technical support staff arrange for hardware warranty repairs, using their large networks of national service providers.

Know the Facts about Warranty Service

As a computer consulting business, you will want to know how long the warranty period is, if it covers parts, labor or both and what the promised response and turnaround time on warranty service may be.

Also, determine whether the vendor will try to pressure your clients to do their own service. If so, are your clients prepared to pay your consulting firm to do the labor?

Scheduling Hardware Warranty Service Calls

If possible, try to have your clients’ internal gurus schedule hardware warranty service calls to coincide with times when you are at your clients’ offices on other related computer consulting business. Or at the minimum, be sure that your clients’ internal gurus are there to supervise the third party hardware technicians.

Be Involved

It’s really up to you to decide how active of a role your computer consulting business wants to take in coordinating and managing these hardware warranty repairs. In some cases, getting in involved with the full end-to-end responsibility makes sense, including packaging up the defective part to send back.

In other cases, you may be better off training your clients’ internal gurus on how to place these vendor tech support calls and supervise the hardware warranty repairs.

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Computer Consulting Business: Know about Vendor Hard Drive Replacement

Computer consulting business owners know that replacing a hard drive is labor-intensive, but business owners may not. Take the time to educate your clients what is involved reformatting a drive that you can do in your computer consulting business.

Many of your computer consulting business clients will come from non-technical, business backgrounds. As a result, many will not immediately grasp why a failed hard drive cannot "simply" be replaced by a new or refurbished hard drive.

As part of managing clients expectations, it’s important to educate your clients on the steps that go into formatting a hard drive, loading the OS, configuring device drivers, loading software applications, customizing the OS and applications and restoring data.

Educate Your Client

As a computer consulting business owner, you know replacing a hard drive is not as simple as removing the shrink wrap and installing the device into the PC. But, many times, your clients don’t.

Or they just assume that all the OS files, device drivers and software applications will "magically" appear. This all may sound really basic, but taking a few minutes when discussing PC warranties with your clients to explain these issues.

How does the Vendor Handle Hard Drive Replacement?

You need to know how your preferred PC vendors handle hard drive replacement under warranty service. What kinds of labor are covered if a desktop PC or notebook hard drive needs replacement under the warranty?

Some vendors specify that the hard drive device needs to be just physically replaced and operational, and recognized by the PC hardware setup program. Under this form of warranty coverage, the technician’s job is done the moment the empty (blank) replacement hard drive is installed in your client’s PC.

The Real Cost

Unfortunately, as most PC vendors feel financial pressure to reduce their support and warranty costs, your computer consulting business clients probably will be subjected to a no-frills warranty service approach. Hard drives for desktop PCs are relatively inexpensive, around $100 to $200 at retail.

So it’s important for your clients to understand that warranty service on a hard drive replacement generally doesn’t cover the more substantial labor costs involved with restoring the hard drive and system to the pre-crash condition.

If your clients outsource this work to your computer consulting business, it easily could cost them $200 to $500 (or more) in labor to get that PC hard drive back to its pre-crash condition. Even if your clients’ internal gurus handle the work, this easily could pull these internal gurus away from their "real" jobs for a half-day or more.

The Bottom Line about the Computer Consulting Business

The expense of recovering a crashed desktop PC hard drive tends to be more concentrated on soft costs, which most times aren’t covered by the PC vendor’s warranty, therefore we see more and more reason not to recommend purchasing extended warranty coverage with entry-level desktop PCs.

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