What are the most important aspects of keeping customers happy?

Communication and fast response times. If your site is down, and you send an email for help and 3 days later you get a reply, that won't do. An email back within an hour is reasonable. The problem may not be solved but you need to know that someone is working on it.

I completely agree- if you want to keep customers happy you need to have good lines of communication and good customer support. By good customer support, I don't mean giving one-line answers when a customer asks a question, but rather taking the time to explain the answer to him/her in detail.

Also, of course, customers are most happy when everything is working right. Choose a good network, good servers, and a good control panel well in advance before starting your hosting company so that any glitches you encounter will be minimal.

in the simplest terms, u keep customers happy by giving them more than they expected.

hi candice

I agree with what was said above about the fast response. 3 days ago I sent an enquiry about a product you r offering at M6.net. but I was kind of disappointed. at first I received an auto responder, and it took you 48h to send me back a response. I am wondering how it is gona be if I am hosting with you.
u definitely need to improve your response times.

Quick response is key. But I do think you need to distinguish between sales and tech support.

Tech support should be as fast as humanly possible. Granted, it may cost a little more for a service that has a tech available 24/7 but if your site is down or you have some other problem, you're loosing business every minute the site is down. Sure $8/mo is cheaper than $20/mo but if you can't get a hold of anyone when your site is having a problem, will saving that whopping $12 really make you feel better?

For sales/marketing support (i.e. questions about services, etc) 24 hrs is not unreasonable to expect a response. I'd even give it 48 hrs on a weekend or holiday period.

Knowledgeable Tech Support. I think this is one of the most important things. I have called a company numerous times to talk to someone at the other end of the phone who has no idea what he/she is doing.

~Chris

Fast response - the customer has to know that you're working on his problem!

Fast response time is defiently a major aspect as well as keeping them up to date with news happening around the servers that they are on. Also telling them if their site will be down for a while. To aquire super fast response times for when their site is down the best thing to do is use a monitor for all your clients and soon as one is down get on it right away and as soon as their e-mail comes in they get a response few minutes later.

MrLister! You con't happen to teach high school chemistry, do you? Just joking, I see your real name on there I had a teacher with that name - I hated that guy! (no offense to you!)

As for keeping a customer happy, with a hosting company I'll be happy if I don't have problems to start with Also helps to have a good, usable members area and control panel. Extra features are good too.

personally, i NEVER want my email to be delayed, ever, for any reason whatsoever. i don't care if a meteorite just blew up the white house, i want my friggin mail delivered and i want my outgoing mail to get on its way quickly. (i've had some VERY bad experiences with web hosts that have crappy mail servers)

i don't want any emails from the web host without my permission unless it immediatly effects me. for example, if they were scheduling some downtime so they could upgrade the server, it is fine if they email me (i expect them to). if they want to tell me about their great new super deluxe plan, i don't want it (unless of course i opt-in to get their newsletter or something similiar).

i've found that my customers like having their support questions answered by the same person whenever possible. the customers get to know their support rep and can get their problems fixed more quickly because their rep already knows about their website. it also adds a nice friendly feeling to the web host.

and last, i dislike pre-made replys! egh! i can't count how many times i've sent an email asking for very specific help and then getting back a very general pre-made reply because nobody actually READ what i wrote, they just skimmed it or used some badly programmed automation system. a fast response is great, but its not worth anything if the response isn't helpful.

oh and one more thing regarding support:

if its going to take more then a few hours to get my problem fixed, then i want to be told that. its real annoying sending an email to tech support and then not even knowing whether they got it because it takes them 2-3 days to reply. or maybe even worse, they say "we're looking into it, we'll get back to you" and then don't "get back to you" for 2 days, or never get back to you.

okay enough of my ranting, hope some of that helps you in some way.

Hi Everyone!

Thank you for all your helpful replies! I think one of the most important issues with everyone is that they need fast and reliable support! Something that I think is important is for clients to have freedom with their web hosts. Clients should be able to easily administer their web hosting accounts themselves by using their own control panel. This way clients can easily add and remove items from their accounts without having to wait for support to do it for them. Any thoughts about this?

easy-access help system to go along with the control panel so not-so-smart people don't have to ask support to tell them how to use their control panel. maybe like put a little "?" graphic next to bunches of stuff and people can click to popup a window that tells them what everything does and means. sometimes its easy to forget that most people don't have a clue what a DNS or a DSN is, and can easily get confused.