In a bacon and egg breakfast, what's the difference between the chicken and the pig? The chicken is involved, but the pig is committed! When it comes to your level of contractual commitment with GUARDIAN RFID, we welcome you to be either the chicken or the pig.
Neither approach is better than the other - it all comes down to the unique circumstances of your agency or facility. For instance, if your county’s procurement rules can’t obligate beyond year-to-year, that’s fair. Our standard system agreement is designed with these scenarios in mind. Conversely, if you already know what you want and understand the financial predictability of a longer commitment, our standard multi-year agreement offers a valuable solution.
If you’re not sure where your agency stands, this blog will help answer:
No, you aren’t required to enter into a multi-year agreement when deciding to implement Command Cloud. However, it’s important to note that most county and state governments do in fact enter into multi-year agreements with GUARDIAN RFID for Command Cloud, which will be explained later in this blog.
In a year-to-year agreement, you’ll pay the same amount for software and services you paid initially – excluding any inflationary adjustments or price changes that could go into effect and are subject to increase every 12 months.
Also in our year-to-year agreements, you automatically subscribe to a predetermined number of SPARTAN devices based on your licensing tier. For example, if the average daily population of your jail is 80 and you choose to proceed with the Command Cloud Defender Edition option, you’re going to automatically receive four SPARTANs as part of your initial fee. You can add more at the current list pricing if need be.
GUARDIAN RFID is committed to ensuring seamless service during a year-to-year agreement. You’ll always have the same quantity of licensed, fully operational SPARTANs at all times. If one were to malfunction, we automatically ship you a SPARTAN to replace the non-operational one. If you drop your SPARTAN from the upper tier of a pod and it breaks – you’ll just pay the replacement fee.
More than 98% of all GUARDIAN RFID customers execute multi-year agreements. These agreements are generally three years long, but approximately 33% of customers request a term length longer than three years.
The top reason why multi-year software licensing agreements are popular is because multi-year agreements can lock in better pricing by providing price stability and protection from annual price increases, especially during seasons of inflation and price fluctuations.
Our multi-year agreement has a few key clauses for you to know. Here are a few examples:
Mutual Indemnification
Limitation of Liability
Data Ownership
There is zero long-term obligation with a year-to-year agreement. If this is the route you choose and you later decide you want to end your Command Cloud subscription at the end of one year, just notify your JailOps account manager of termination 60 days prior to its renewal.
Let’s break down the pros and cons of both multi-year and year-to-year agreements.
Multi-year agreement pros:
Multi-year agreement cons:
Year-to-year agreement pros:
Year-to-year agreement cons:
For the sake of transparency, GUARDIAN RFID has a .06% percent churn rate each year – meaning that we retain 99.94% of all users nationwide.
We believe there’s one metric that indicates why churn is so low – and it isn’t due to a lack of choice because there are low-cost imitators – as well as the Dixon Ticonderoga Company, maker of the world’s best #2 pencil.
It's our Net Promoter Score (NPS). Over the past decade, our NPS has averaged 87.
NPS is a customer experience metric that measures how likely a customer is to recommend a business to a friend or colleague. The simplicity of an NPS survey is that it’s one question: your likelihood to recommend GUARDIAN RFID to someone else.
Customers rate their likelihood of recommendation on a scale from 0 to 10 which helps identify customers that are dissatisfied to the point of leaving.
To put that into perspective, here are some brands with the highest NPS scores you may be familiar with:
To answer the question, why do customers terminate their use of GUARDIAN RFID?, the most common reason among the .06% percent of our customers who leave is because of a change within their jail management system (JMS). For example, an agency’s JMS could suddenly offer a new mobile inmate tracking solution that they either received for free – or has the perceived benefit of being “better” since their JMS is their primary enterprise software.
Ultimately, whether you pursue a one-year or multi-year agreement is your prerogative. No one decision is completely absent of risk – so it’s important that you think through this decision and ask agencies who have been using GUARDIAN RFID for varying lengths of time in your area for their feedback. Ultimately, their experiences will carry more weight than anything we wrote in a blog.