Give Your Customers What They Want
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Whatever may be said about attracting customers to your business (be it web hosting or anything else), it all seems to boil down to one thing: give your customers what they want. It sounds like a simple formula, but there are layers to it. With a recent offering from Monsterhosting.ca as an example, we’ll pick apart what it means.
When you’re a writer searching for a topic for your next article, sometimes you get lucky. You go through news items and how to articles and several of them crash into each other in your brain in a way that both makes sense and creates something new. They illuminate each other, and perhaps even reveal some principles (or at least good ideas). That’s what happened in this case.
You might have read Monsterhosting.ca’s press release about the free live online courses the web host has begun offering. I not only read it, I visited the company’s web site (though I haven’t signed up for any courses yet). I think it’s a great example of a company giving its customers what they want. Let me explain how.
The first and somewhat obvious step in giving your customers what they want is actually finding out what they want. If you visit the home page for Monsterhosting.ca’s live online courses, you’ll see that web host polled its customers to find out what kind of courses they were interested in. There’s also a link you can click on to send an email with your own suggestions for more courses.
Put another way, Monsterhosting.ca is trying to solve a problem for its customers – in this case, lack of knowledge in certain areas. Or, put more broadly, the problem could be described as the need to learn what will help an online business succeed. There are a number of ways this need could be filled, of course; for a variety of reasons, Monsterhosting.ca chose this particular format.
How can you as a web host find out what your customers need? Well, one easy way is to ask them. Another way is to be receptive when they talk. Haunt web hosting forums and see what issues are raised, particularly if the person raising the issue owns the kind of site to which you’d like to cater.
You might even consider treating your trouble tickets as suggestions. By this I don’t mean you shouldn’t take them seriously! But once you’ve solved the issue, realize that the trouble ticket represents a need you may not have been fulfilling. Are you not supporting a script someone needs for their web site? Was your control panel a little too complicated for one of your customers? It’s food for thought.
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