Being able to work with a customer and ensure they are completely satisfied is a skill that you only can obtain through years of service. It also takes a very special person to be able to work in customer service.

Customer service is indeed an integral part of web hosting business. With so much competition in this business nowadays as far as features and prices are concerned, it is good after sales support and customer service which often helps customers in determining the right host.

I always respond within 24 hours of a ticket being raised (and more often than not, it's a lot sooner)

Customer Service is something that has a very bad reputation a lot of the time in many areas of I.T. and if you can rise above that, it means customers will single you out as the main choice above competitors on this reason alone.

In my opinion uptime and stability of services is more important, if you services are not good clients will go away anyway.

Of course that is very important also, it's not good having loads of uptime and stability of service if you don't communicate things to customers. Just general hand-holding is one form of support that gets overlooked quite regularly

I agree, Customer service is very important. I try to help a client as much as I can if they ask for it.

Sometimes it helps to proactively reach out to your customers - at random - to ask if you've exceeded their expectations. Very few companies do this, and it sets you apart from the competition.