Well, we are one of those small ISP's. Our company, over the past 6 years, had an association with a larger ISP. This larger ISP had customers in a Metroplex area as well as customers in South America.

If you believe in the old adage, all things are equal, when everyone is running the same two programs (MSIE & Netscape) and same type of equipment, then the percentage of trouble tickets would be the same in a small ISP as it would be in a large one. On one occasion the President of the larger ISP call and ask if I could come down for a meeting. So I did. The main topic of this meeting was, why were we having less customer complaints, than the big boys. Both companies were handling everything the same. My answer was, we started a Help Desk. Everytime something went wrong, I sent out an e-mail. The e-mail detailed the problems and how long I thought it was going to take to fix.

If during the repair, we found it was going to be longer, I sent another e-mail to our customers. Upon repair, I sent another e-mail and explained the problems and include, if the repair was a band-aid or a solid repair. I also e-mailed our group about planned outages, C&W problems, etc. Well it have been 6 years and I am still writing the e-mails. But now, we call the "Vidnet -- Alerts"

In our last poll, I asked if our customers wanted the "Alerts" stopped. To my surprise, a 100% of the users that replied stated, "No, keep up the good work." So, I don't believe you can go wrong, if you keep your customers informed. It doesn't matter if you are an ISP or a Software Company. The more information you can supply to the customer, the happier the customer. Even if they don't understand everything in the e-mail...