It seems like every company whether it be on their social media accounts, websites, or even in the ads, likes to talk about how much they care about their customers or offer the best customer service. If you’re an entrepeneur and take the time to keep in the loop on business development talks, blogs, and conferences, you have no doubt been practically drowned in articles and videos on the importance of caring about your customer.

With so many people talking about it’s importance, and every business saying how great they are at it, it’s surprising to me how little I experience GENUINE customer service.

The problem, as I see it, is that customer service doesn’t mean the same thing to a lot of “traditional” business owners that it does to the rest of the world.

There seems to be this misnomer that good customer service means being friendly and smiling at your customer. While this is nice and somewhat important, if you are telling your customer you can’t or won’t help them, all the toothy grins in the world are useless. You are still giving them bad service.

The key to actual customer service is really simple: make sure that each customer leaves happy. The part where that’s difficult is that I don’t just mean the person who calls in to pay their bill or ask a quick question. That guy who calls you to dispute charges or thinks you shipped him a faulty product, you need to make him happy too, and you aren’t going to do that by telling him in a friendly tone that he’s screwed.

Now there is the occaisional customer who will dishonestly try to get money from your company (returning something to you for a cash refund without a receipt that he bought on ebay already broken), but that’s a whole lot different than a customer who doesn’t want to be billed extra when he forgot to change his plan before his introductory rate ran out. Even if his plan is to cancel his membership, if you make that process easy, and waive the charges for the last month, the next time your company comes up with him, he will have good things to say about you. I promise the value of that action is greater than the $14.99 service charge you reversed because it creates good will with your customer.

In a world that is more connected than ever thanks to social media, that little gesture could go quite a long way for your company.

Bottom line, before you put out your next box of free dougnuts with a sign that says how much you like your customers, think about whether you really show it in a way that matters.