Several CEDIA members that ChannelNews spoke to on the issue, have said that their needs to be "agreement" among installers and specialist retailers as to what services should be charged for, without breaching any trade practises legislation.
Rab Turner of Carlton Audio in Melbourne "I for one am looking for answers; we need as an industry to have a services charge model. I for one am attending CEDIA to explore what other members are doing when it comes to charging a customer for our time. Right now we are giving away time a classic example is that when a customer buys a receiver and something goes wrong they call you and expect you to fix an operational or user problem and when they do call it is always when one is busy serving a customer".
He added"The whole concept of service charges needs to be evolutionary".
Len Wallis of Len Wallis Audio in Sydney said "Service and what we charge is a big issue. We need to charge customers for the expertise that we have as CEDIA members not only for ongoing home automation installs but for ongoing product support".
Another CEDIA member who did not want to be named said "The IT industry charge up to $200 for a support call, many larger homes are far more complex than some IT sites. We have to deal with entertainment automation, distributed sound, networking and communication, security and data. What we need is a service charging system. Another problem is the wallies who walk in buy a sound system and every time they stuff the setting or the configuration up they expect us to fix it for nothing. Then you have the wife who perpetually stuffs up a fully configured universal remote. In the US several CEDIA members have set up remote services and are charging $75 for simple plugging in the remote to the network and remotely returning the device to its original configuration".
