For those of you who have been following the saga of my domain name changes, I have an update!

Last week I received a telephone call from our old webhosting service. The lady, wanted to tell me that our contract was up and that I needed to arrange payment to prevent loss of service on the websites that I manage. I told her that I had just completed rebuilding my websites and that I have contracted a new webhost. I also told her that I would not be renewing our contract due to lack of service on the websites that I manage. I gave her a brief run down on all the problems I had had with their hosting service and how no one returned phone calls, answered emails or trouble tickets.

She wanted to know who I had tried calling, emailing etc – I told her that it was her! I had no other contact info for the company and that to me it was a one person effort and that the one person was pretty much in over her head. About that time she finally realized that I had been a customer for over 8 years and after several minutes of deep apologies and regrets she asked if there wasn’t something that she could do to make it up to me. I told her that a major problem that I had was that I was unable to transfer any of my original domain names which caused me to lose a number of readers that had been following my websites. To transfer the domain names to our new webhost required a transfer code and an authorization from her. She provided me with the transfer codes and sent the required authorization to the domain name registrar.
I have it now set to automatically transfer any incoming request from any of the old domain names over to the new websites so that no matter which name is used you will get to the same place. My business was theirs to own and they chose not to support their customer. BTW: My new webhost provides 24/7 customer support with live people in the USA! I have unlimited storage and bandwidths (no caps) and a whole bunch of other free stuff and the best part is that I am now paying $56/yr vs $88/yr which had I not had such poor support I would still be spending.
When I was working, lo these many years ago, we spent a lot of time on customer retention…

• Acquiring new customers can cost five times more than satisfying and retaining current customers
• A 2% increase in customer retention has the same effect on profits as cutting costs by 10%
• The average company loses 10% of its customers each year
• A 5% reduction in customer defection rate can increase profits by 25-125%, depending on the industry
• The customer profitability rate tends to increase over the life of a retained customer

Something to think about should you or yours, still be working…