PC Support Anywhere Idea

gingernuke

From the MSN terms of service

4. How You May Not Use the Service.

In using the service, you may not:

• use the service in a way that harms us or our affiliates, resellers, distributors, and/or vendors (collectively, the "Microsoft parties"), or any customer of a Microsoft party;
• engage in, facilitate, or further unlawful conduct;
• use any portion of the service as a destination linked from any unsolicited bulk messages or unsolicited commercial messages ("spam");
• use any unauthorized third party software or service to access the Microsoft instant messaging network (currently known as the .NET Messenger Service);
• use any automated process or service to access and/or use the service (such as a BOT, a spider, periodic caching of information stored by Microsoft, or "meta-searching");
• use any unauthorized means to modify or reroute, or attempt to modify or reroute, the service;
• damage, disable, overburden, or impair the service (or the network(s) connected to the service) or interfere with anyone's use and enjoyment of the service; or
• resell or redistribute the service, or any part of the service.

No mention of using it commercially and why should there be both you and your customer paid for a copy of windows. Its no different to using it in a commercial environment.

As for pricing sit down with a coffee and come up with a top twenty list of jobs you have been asked to do by friends / relations and then work out a comparable charge. Don't underprice yourself though as with all IT jobs the customer is not paying for a fix they are paying for somebody who knows what they are doing.

Commercially you will not get massive amounts of work as you can only do 'out of hours' support but the home market is massively under supported as you will find when you talk to your first customers. Most so called technical support companies will just try and replace hardware to fix a fault they don't like software faults as its a minefield.

I have over ten years of doing this under my belt, nine in the craziest environment in Cumbria and it never fails to amaze me how little help is offered to home users.

braken2000

Where abouts in cumbria?

I dont want to undercharge my self

That would not be good!

comicmankev

I provide remote support to clients. I charge on an annual invoice which is paid in advance. Most clients are small businesses. For individual users there is a £30 per hour charge for me to visit (On a no fix no fee basis). Clients on remote support are aware that if the problem cannot be fixed there is a further call out cost.

It will be very hard for your to provide remote assistance on a 'per call' basis. The only option that I can see is to install credit card services in your home, take these details before you proceed on the proviso that you only charge the card if fixed. Obviously this is another thin that people may not want to do, but it is an option (And you'd probably be surprised at the amount of people that WOULD give these details!)

braken2000

Is having credit card processing facilities expensive?

Tim_L

do it via paypal

Lazy_Ike

braken2000 wrote: »

Is having credit card processing facilities expensive?

Yes.
Not going to re-research the figures. I used to have this facility. You would have to have a Business Bank account, although you can usually get that at no cost for first year/18 months. Costs include; Set up charge, monthly rental and per transaction processing charge. This last charge is related to monthly usage. Lower the usage, higher the charge.
On Ebay/Paypal boards there are often complaints about the charges/commission taken by Paypal, but compared to running your own facility (especially with low turnover) Paypal is not bad, and is widely known thanks to its use in Ebay.

OogaBooga

Have you thought about how you'd market yourself? The best service in the world won't sell unless people know about it.

braken2000

Thank-you lazy Ike. I just wanted to make sure on that one. I thought It would be pricey. I would prefer the paypal route. Mych easier at the moment.

As for marketing, I am not really sure. Obviously I would google rank as high as is humanly possible. But Apart from that I am a bit stuck. I thought of maybe an ad in a novice computer magazine, but I can see that being pricey.

Any ideas?

OogaBooga

I'd have thought directly marketing to small business would be the most rewarding approach, but that doesn't fit with doing this part time does it?

dbramley

I'm not sure how you could offer small business startups when you only work on an evening - most businesses will be closed!

You'll also have to consider what you'll do when someone doesnt have an internet connection or if their problem is with the internet.

Then you may get into situations where you are talking a customer through installing the remote app software and they can't do it - you'll have wasted a lot of your time that you can't charge for.

As for charging I'd go with by the hour - some Word problems can be a pain in the a.. to fix and could take you hours and some server problems can be quite simple!

Whatever you deciede do - good luck!