What is the most important service factor for a web service provider?
This could be a web hosting provider, a web site maintenance company, an application provider, etc., etc., etc.
What is the most important thing they can offer you today?
Communication. Clear, regular, to the point, and timely.
Without it, how easy is it to make decisions?
The web is a busy busy world with plenty of change every day and we all get neck deep in the things we have to do every day. One of the easier things to de-emphasize is regular communication with your client. Whether you’re Google or a web development company in Pennsylvania, there is always more work than time and if you’re not careful, you sacrifice some important priorities.
Communicating with your clients about important priorities IS an important priority.
I’ve noticed that our best vendors have actually picked up their game on communications. Hosting companies, such as Pantheon and Pair, provide us with weekly emails and quick follow ups to questions. The same holds true with some of the best WordPress plugin software providers out there.
And they use multiple platforms for providing information. We follow LearnDash on Facebook and they work regularly to keep their customers in the loop on their priorities. We follow others on social media as well.
The best of them use all these platforms as guide maps to their priorities and progress reports for their activity.
The worst, of course, use them for marketing almost solely. After a while, we tend to turn this stuff off.
You should follow your vendors somewhere. Most of us will send emails regularly, and often targeted for specific client reasons. But that might not be what you’re looking for – perhaps you are looking for suggestions or recommendations that frankly are too much and too regular to be sent daily in an email. Look for the social media feed, or their web site feed, if what they provide is of enough importance to you.
And take a look at all these options if it is an online vendor you are considering using as well. If they don’t use any channels to provide information to their clients and interested public, that’s a red flag that they are not prioritizing customer communication high enough.
Finally, a note about recipient behavior – don’t sign up to use a communications channel that you rarely use. Twitter is clogged with unused accounts – if you’re not there daily, probably shouldn’t sign up for feeds there. Same with Facebook, and same with non-primary email addresses. If you’re not going to check that channel, it is basically the same as never signing up in the first place – and perhaps you’ll need to be burned by missing important information before changing your behavior.