I just need a sanity check, because my personal standards may not be MOST people’s personal standards.
Suppose you’re a business, and a customer is about to enter into a fairly long-term contract with you (1-year-plus). Not a particularly complex one, and the sort of business situation that lots of ordinary people are involved in (eg think insurance, though it’s not insurance)
You send them an email link to the contract, which will expire after X amount of time, and set up some automated reminders that will kick in before that time.
In your opinion, what are reasonable values for:
- how long the contract will take to expire?
- when the first reminder is sent?
- how many reminders till expiry?
No poll coming, because I don’t want to skew people’s answers
One variable here is whether it’s a seller’s market, or the buyer’s. In other words, do you want their money more badly than they want your particular services? Do you compete against many similar businesses?
That will influence how generous your timeframe can reasonably be.
Assume that it’s a fairly mature market, in which there’s locally some hundreds or thousands of people who want the service, and about half a dozen companies that supply it.
In other words, there’s no serious power differential between supplier and customer here - the supplier isn’t desperate for any one customer, and any one customer could equally well go to a few different suppliers
I think I would want the initial contract to be just one year to allow renegotiation at the end. Then I think I would send reminders at 6 weeks, 4 weeks, 2 weeks, one week, after which I would assume it will not be renewed.
There was a magazine I subscribed to that had a habit of sending a renewal notice 4 months in advance. I ignored it and ended up not resubscribing.