Web Hosting Company Survey Reveals What Customers Want - Character Points Four Through Six

The fourth item on Supanet's list reflects back to the second item, great customer service; it's "responsive support." If your customer has to leave five trouble tickets with you just to get some kind of reaction, the last one is likely to include a comment about changing web hosts. Even if you can't get to a particular item right away, you need to send a message to your customer that you have received their ticket and will look at their problem as soon as possible. Give them a short, reasonable time period as to when they can expect to hear back from you about it - and treat that as an ironclad promise.

Remember, if the issue they're bringing to your attention is affecting their ability to serve their own customers, they're likely to be very short on patience. If your customer sees that you're working on the problem, and giving it a priority, they'll be reassured. The only way they can see that is if you keep them in the loop as to what is happening.

Surprisingly, it's only when we get to the fifth item on Supanet's list that we come across "generous web space and bandwidth." One would think that this would be more important than it is. Perhaps web hosting customers have figured out that web space and bandwidth is cheap (or else there wouldn't be so many free web hosts). When a particular commodity is cheap in comparison to other things, people often value it less. Still, that's fairly high on the list, so there is some concern about this.

Customers who have used web hosts for a while know about overselling, which may explain one of the reasons this item made the list. Also, as a web host, it's a good idea to be honest with your customers about their web space and bandwidth needs as you understand them - don't sell them more space than they need, but don't sell them less either. For example, the needs of an ecommerce site will be different from the needs of a primarily content-based site, and even among content sites, a text-based site will have needs that are different from a podcaster's site. Naturally, site traffic also plays a role.

The sixth item on Supanet's list is "web site security." I'd be more surprised that this didn't rate higher if it wasn't for the nature of the qualities that rated above it. If a hacker breaks into one of your customers' web sites, it can be a worse problem than if a thief breaks into a brick-and-mortar store. A hacker can do more than steal merchandise; he can vandalize the site, steal credit card and other information to commit identity theft, set up malicious scripts to download spyware onto the computers of web surfers who visit the site, use the site as a base from which to send spam...the list goes on. It could damage or destroy someone's livelihood. Don't let this happen to your customers; take web site security seriously.

Next: The Final Four >>
 

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