You have heard this before and will probably hear it again, being nice pays… particularly in business. The little things that you say and do have a major impact on your customers. Let me give you a few examples. Yesterday I went out to dinner with my family at Miyoko Japanese Steakhouse, a rather upscale restaurant in a shopping mall area in metro-detroit. The meal was fantastic, and the service was decent (minus some slight lip from the overworked greeter, after seating us 30 minutes later then our reservation) but we will NEVER eat there again, here is why. We told the waiter that it was my mothers birthday. Like they usually do, at the end of the meal they come out banging on drums and doing their little birthday dance. They also gave my mother a tiny piece of cheesecake. When we get the bill, they included a $5 charge for the cheesecake! It turns out the “birthday dance” was really a “we just sold another piece of cheesecake dance”. Now this $5 was not significant, afterall it is a nice restuarant and the cheesecake only accounted for about 5% of the bill. Because we didn’t wan’t to make a fuss, we didn’t mention the $5 and went on our way. That silly $5 charge (and bad greeter) turned what may of been a positive experience at a nice restaurant into an experience where we honestly felt we were cheated while our meal was $5 higher in price we would of been happy.

Experience #2
After eating at the steakhouse I went to the Palace Lockeroom store to buy a tigers hat, the girl at the front refused to give me a 20% discount because i didn’t print off some coupon. Still upset from the previous experience, I gave her a dirty look and walked off with my purchase. That is when I heard her sarcastically mumble “your welcome” under her breath. Apparently I was suppose to say thank you for buying something from HER. I very nearly retured the hat.

People Talk:
There is a common saying that in whatever business you are in whenever you do an exceptional job your customer will tell 5 people but whenever you do a horrible job or piss somone off (or screw someone over by charging them $5 extra for an unwanted piece of cheesecake) your customer will tell 10 people about it. You never know who people will tell. This post will probably reach thousands of people (Nick has been doing pretty well in promoting his site recently), each one of them will know about my negative experience at Miyako Japanese Steakhouse and the Palace Lockeroom sports store both located in Great Lakes Crossing mall in Arburn Hills, Michigan.

The Moral of the story:
Never piss off your customers because your customers talk and your customers remember. In business, it is inevitable that you are going to have some dissatisfied customers. How you treat those customers will determine how successful you become. Perhaps some of these customers really have no reason to be angry (maybe I should have been a bit nicer when buying that hat), but that doesn’t negate the fact that they are still your customers. On the website that I run with Nick we sometimes receive rather strongly worded messages regarding certain posts. We could write them back a strongly worded reply, however it does not make business sense, instead it would just fuel their fire.

So remember: be nice to your customers and they will be nice to you!

*This post was guest written by Scott Aaronson. Scott has a Bachelors in Business Administration from Western Michigan University. He is currently getting his JD/MBA and in his free time works on many projects with nick including SampleADay.com.