Thoughts from HostingCon

This morning, I moderated a session at HostingCon on metrics that matter.  The participants really ground down into the metrics that they used, and that they thought would be important from a marketing perspective.  From a legal perspective, one of the issues I highlighted was identifying customers who are important, and why.  Like it or not, when you’re making legal decisions, often times the decision, and what choice you make among various legal options, will depend on what the customer is worth to you.  While no lawyer is going to advise you to do something illegal simply because the customer makes you a lot of money, most legal dilemmas are capable of resolution in more than one way.  So if you don’t know how valuable a customer is to you, you are missing a valuable tool you can use to choose between legal options.  Indeed, I’ve worked with a number of hosts who have created “VIP abuse” provisions of their abuse policies. 

Sounds like a great customer retention method to me.  However, to avoid tripping your company up legally, you’re going to need to know more than how much the customer gave you last month.  You’ll need more metrics on support, business, lifetime of customers and things that will help your decision making process, this will give you the information you need to differentiate between customers.