I want peoples thoughts on if turning into a co-op type company is a good idea.

Let me explain my idea.

DephNet has been trading for a number of years now and we have a number of clients. What I would like to do is to give them a larger say in how the company is run. Is that a good idea or not?

The way I can see this working is that every client gets 1 vote per , recuring, service they have.

I have said that atleast 10% of our profit's goes to the clients, so once a year they will get a chance to vote on how this 10% is used, be it as an account credit, given to charity (if so, a further question will be sent asking which one), re invested into the company, or something else.

Would you, as a client, think that this helps with building a relationship with the customer?

For a web hosting company, I'm only interested in if the company can provide reliable servers and good support.

For a web hosting company, I'm only interested in if the company can provide reliable servers and good support.Good job we are not just a web host.

Webhosting makes up about 10% of our business income.

I could see it helping with customer retention rate as well as word of mouth.

In fact, if you use that 10% correctly, you might even be able to turn it into a profit.

For example, take that 10% and get some awesome free stuff made for you - things that your customer will find useful.

I am not sure exactly what your company does, but if you give your customers some related free items it will do wonders for your relationship building. They will also think twice about quitting your service too.

One idea that a lot of continuity based services do is FOOD. Send your customer a free box of cookies every 6 months with a nice letter attached thanking them for their business. Some say it helped increase their retention rate by another 3 months! I'm serious!

So a 5 dollar box of cookies might turn into another 30 dollars of revenue for you(assuming you charge $10/m for whatever service you offer)

Your customers will never think about receiving something like cookies in the mail, you could win some gold starts with them!