In business, terms and conditions represent the ‘glue’ in the relationship. They are a communication between a business and its customer/client. Why is it then that so many terms and conditions sound stuffy and cold, particularly for service businesses? How would it be if your terms of business were user friendly, like a conversation with your customer? Do you think it would enhance the relationship to have a communication that sounds like it is coming from you?
Such an approach may not suit every business, but for most it works: you might start with an attempt to write down an imagined conversation with a customer in which you explain your terms and conditions provided they are needed. If you do not have up to date terms of business, you might want to take the opportunity of updating them but otherwise you can use your existing terms as the basis for the new “conversation” and then all you would need to do is have the existing terms checked against the new version you have written to see that they cover everything legally and do not expose you to unreasonable risks and that they are user friendly.
To help you do this for yourself and to illustrate what we are talking about, we have a number of sample paragraphs below. Please feel free to use them as you wish. The key is to create user friendly contracts in all your busines relationships.
Sample “conversation” clauses.
“We are really proud of our service and we want to make sure that you are really happy with it too. Our terms are designed to be fair to both of us and disagree, please feel free to make comments on them.”
“In the unlikely event of problems between us, our liability to you is going to be limited to £X because that is the maximum amount to which we are insured for each claim. If this does not meet your needs, please raise this with us as we may be able to arrange special insurance for you at cost.”
“Your privacy is important to us. We take trouble to keep your personal information safe and secure and only accessible to those members of our team who need to have access to it. We keep your personal information for up to six years after which it will be deleted.”
“The aim of our service is to give greater efficiency to your business and to help you make more money. In doing that we believe it is important that we are straight with each other in all communications, open, honest and transparent. We promise to be this way and ask that you do the same with us. Please raise any concerns you have with us so that any problems can be dealt with early on.”
“We are committed to having a good working relationship with you at all times. In order to do that, it is important that we both follow the terms that we agree between us and we agree any alterations to it. If at any time either one of us is not happy with what the other one is doing, we will let each other know as soon as possible. We will specify what is not working and ask the other person to deal with it. If there is anything material that is either not capable of being made good or is not made good after [30 days] then either one of us can end the contract giving each other notice in writing.”
Contrast this with “either party may terminate this agreement either immediately in the case of a breach of contract which is not capable of being remedied or otherwise at any time after [30 days] upon receipt of notice of breach specifying the breach complained of unless such breach has been remedied to the reasonable satisfaction of the complaining party.
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