by Bruce Pilgrim

Created on: May 26, 2007

Providing excellent customer service is crucial to the survival of any business, but this is especially true for a small business. If doing business with you is deemed a good experience by your customers, you'll be fine your customers will come back for more and tell other people about you.

However, providing good customer service is not as simple as it might seem. There are certain mythic notions about working with customers that don't hold up under closer inspection. It may seem counter-intuitive, but much of what seems like common sense is actually nonsense.

Myth #1: Good, Fast, or Cheap. Pick Two
The above statement has long been regarded as common sense in such diverse industries as printing and software engineering. The operative word is "or," and the implication is that you can get high quality, quick turnaround and/or low cost, but only two of the three.

If the good-fast-cheap tradeoff was ever true, it no longer holds water in the Internet age. There are simply too many competitors out there who are ready, willing, and able to eat your lunch. In their book "Built to Last" Jim Collins and Jerry Porras call this notion "The Tyranny of the OR." Their study of some of the world's greatest companies has led them to conclude that the OR orientation does not equal innovation. Great companies, they demonstrate, embrace the "Genius of the AND," promising and more importantly, delivering good, fast, AND, cheap.

Now, before we leave this discussion, keep this advice in perspective. Quality should never be compromised, to be sure. Yet, Fast and Cheap are concepts with considerably more elasticity. Quick turnaround is generally good for both you and your customer. But how quick is reasonable? And while you want to charge a fair price, you have to make a profit.

Myth #2: The Customer is Always Right
Sometimes customers don't understand or don't care about reality. They will ask you to do the impossible, immediately, for nothing. That's only a slight exaggeration.

You can usually identify these people the first time you meet them. They'll tell you how poor they are, treat you with suspicion, and make it very clear that whatever they say goes.

If you aren't able to weed these folks out early in the process, you'll put up with a lot of pain and suffering. One way to cope with difficult customers is to build in what I call an "-hole factor," a percentage you add to the price to compensate you for dealing with jerks.

Ultimately, the best way to deal with such people is to not

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