One of our concerned esteemed customers called up my office today to tell me about posts written about our website http://www.ucvhost.com. He is a very good client of our and offered his help to post good reviews about us. This started made me thinking

1. Are we this bad to earn wrath of our beloved customers?
2. What we did to fix the problems, if they did exist?
3. Why people think that we are cheap so we might be bad?
And many more questions.

It’s a very tricky situation and might proved to be a controversial blog entry. When a prospective buyer go out for webhosting purchase, he likes to see reviews written by some old customers or existing customers on various websites or Blogs. And this works as “word of mouth” strategy for making a sane purchase decision.
Using these communities of learned people, prospective buyers can quickly make decisions about a website capability to support them or not. However there is a catch,

1. You miss out on dates of posts.
2. You don’t know, if client’s website was shut down because of
nonpayment of renewal fee?
3. Weather the post was made by a jealous competitor?

And some more questions which might question authenticity of posts.
Always look out for email address or affected URL and try to get in touch with the poster. I have been using these websites myself and found them to be a formidable way of communicating your feelings bad or good to likeminded people.

I always try to check few things about posts, if posts are anonymous and contain no reference about dates or email address or effected domains etc. I also check if posts are really old and belonged to Stone Age of web hosting business or so old that the technology it talks about doesn’t even exist.

I don’t claim that 100% posts are untrue and false about ucvhost.com, however at least 80% of them contain fiction rather than solid fact.
Use these posts as a tool to make decision; don’t use them as a yard stick to measure different companies, because doing that you might end up getting skewed results. There are good SEO companies who do “Reputation Management” and ensure that all the bad posts are wiped out from internet.

We could have hired one(”Reputation Management Company”)? Our Marketing Director wanted us to do the same, however I opposed it because:

1. By hiding our follies we will not become perfect company.
2. If we are really bad then whatever we do to improve our so
called “Reputation”, our intelligent customers will definitely come
to know.
3. These posts are constant reminder that we might have
committed mistakes in past and they constantly remind me of
not repeating them.

Customer service is an ongoing effort , webhosting is a 24/7/365 factory, providing impeccable service is tough but not impossible and we all do mistakes under pressure. Customers should post about problems and issues about a particular webhost however at the same time they should also spare some time to give some positive remarks about good job done.

That’s about it for now. I would like to continue on this further in some of my other post in future.

Ady,