Courteous treatment will make a customer a walking advertisement.
Interpretation
Treating customers well leads to positive word-of-mouth and recommendations.
This quote emphasizes the importance of customer service in business. When customers feel valued and receive courteous treatment, they are more likely to share their positive experiences with others, effectively becoming advocates for the brand and driving new business through their recommendations.
In practice
A store manager might use this quote in a staff meeting to emphasize the importance of customer interaction.
The friendly smile, the word of greeting, are certainly something fleeting and seemingly insubstantial. You can’t take them with you. But they work for good beyond your power to measure their influence. It is the service we are not obliged to give that people value most.
I do not believe in excuses. I believe in hard work as the prime solvent of life's problems.
How can we expect our children to know and experience the joy of giving unless we teach them that the greater pleasure in life lies in the art of giving rather than receiving.
A merchant who approaches business with the idea of serving the public well has nothing to fear from the competition.
Every man must decide for himself whether he shall master his world or be mastered by it.
It is the service we are not obliged to give that people value most.
The lesson for businesses is you are dealing with real people. Those are your customers, those are your employees, those are your bosses, and the better you understand how real people tick, the more successfully you will be able to accomplish your goals.
It turns out that is exactly what product strategy is all about—figuring out the right product is the innovator’s job, not the customer’s job.
Entrepreneurs have only the murkiest picture of the future in which they are making their bets, and also there is ambiguity: they don't know when they push this lever or that lever that the outcome is going to be what they think it is going to be - there is the law of unanticipated consequences.
The most efficient way to produce anything is to bring together under one management as many as possible of the activities needed to turn out the product.
If your goal is anything but profitability - if it's to be big, or to grow fast, or to become a technology leader - you'll hit problems.
**New business concepts are always, always the product of lucky foresight.** That's right - the essential insight doesn't come out of any dirigiste planning process; it comes form some cocktail of happenstance, desire, curiosity, ambition and need. But at the end of the day, there has to be a degree of foresight -- a sense of where new riches lie. So radical innovation is always one part fortuity and one part clearheaded vision. [first-line bold by author] [2002] p.23
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