Your customers have most likely heard about it, and maybe even experienced it: predatory vendors who prioritize costly charges rather than establishing a close working relationship that is mutually beneficial. Don’t let your customers be the victim of bad vendor contracts, seek out partners that are trusted master agents.

One of the ways your customers can know that they’re going down a bad road with a potential vendor is to look at how much risk is going to be shared. A good vendor will bring them a shared risk agreement. However, vendors that put themselves above clients, often claiming, falsely, that the client needs the vendor more than they need the client should be avoided. These vendors will even often include assurances that if they perform badly, the client can’t terminate the contract.

There are a growing number of vendors willing to push risk off to their clients and offer no assurances for quality performance. Here are some examples of vendor tricks that signal your customers should look elsewhere for a vendor contract:

1. Fishing for Fees
There are vendors out there willing to sink time and money into intrusive and time- consuming audits of clients so they can find minute non-compliance discrepancies. The audits are excessive, to say the least, and result in large audit costs and subsequent payments to remediate non-compliance.

2. Intellectual Property Issues
Watch for details hidden in the contract where the vendor includes clauses that require the client to abstain from ever saying their intellectual property rights have been violated by the vendor. The clause will sometimes even go so far as to clear the vendor even if they have intentionally misappropriated intellectual property. This clause can also extend to affiliates.

3. Undefined Services
The terms defining service levels, functionality and support standards, among other items, can be moved to URLs, which will change at a moment’s notice (and the client isn’t always notified). Still, they’re tied to making payments for services that are undefined.

4. Poor Protections
Operating in the cloud, some service providers will offer service levels that are extremely limited and come with little to no remedy in the event of failure – essentially offering no protection. Many of the service levels that are promised have no chance of success. In the worst cases, the vendor will only make a reasonable effort to provide services, and there is no recourse for the client.

At eXemplify, we consider ourselves as more than just a master agent. We are uniquely suited to assist our clients in moving their customers to more trustworthy and high-performing services. Contact us today and let’s go over our transparent and reliable terms, built around a mission of mutually beneficial outcomes.