Combating complacency

SenseiSteve

HD Moderator
Staff member
Communication is the key word here. Companies spend a lot of money on branding and on reputation management. One bad review on WHT, Hosting Discussion, Yelp, Angi or other review site can adversely affect your business and undo countless hours devoted to branding your business, and its good name.

For web hosting providers, one thing you cannot do is become complacent and assume your clients are all happy because they’re not entering service tickets.

Your thoughts?
 
Most of the unsatisfied clients will just go away without telling their host why they went away, the best is to send them an email after a couple of months asking them if anything is wrong and how you can improve your services.
 
It depends on the client. Some clients just live and find another service provider and some of them post negative reviews.
Sometimes, competitor post negative reviews. In that case we have to handle it in creative way.
To counter that we need to collect some positive review. Every company has bad reviews but client still buy from them.
 
You said it — keeping communication lines open and staying proactive on this task is probably your best bet to retain and multiply your client base.

We learn from constructive criticism, not positive reviews, so, if as a company you don't actively talk to your clients, you'll never know what they are thinking. It costs nothing to conduct a 10-15 minute call, but the effect of it could be the difference of retaining a $50-75/month client.
 
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I think it's a bit of a balancing act really.

You do need to be updating and improving services constantly, and you should also be proactive regarding customers sites, we periodically run speed tests on random sites for example, and if we see something a lot slower than we expected then we take a look at why.

On the other hand, I think that a lot of clients really don't want to be bombarded with too much communication from their hosting company, so we try to consolidate things and send messages out when they are actually genuinely useful.
 
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