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College of the Customer is built in single-topic “seminars.” Here is the currently spotlighted seminar. Help yourself to what interests you, and please bust right in with your own opinions–you don’t even need to raise your hand.–Micah
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"Yes! You may bring in your ice cream cones --just be careful of their drips." (The welcome sign at Chris Cambridge's Scrimshaw Workshop, Bar Harbor, Maine)

Hello and good-bye are two of the most critical points in a customer transaction. So learning to properly greet and bid farewell to your customer is the greatest shortcut to customer delight that I know of, as I demonstrate here with the help of a blindfold.

I then offer the dubious-sounding but entirely true story of the warm welcome worth $100 million, a subset of the concept that service begins when a customer comes in contact with you (not necessarily waiting until you make intentional contact with the customer).
In the physical world, it’s time to realize that your receptionist is actually your all-important department of first and last impressions, while in an online environment, you need to plan for the reality that your best laid plans to greet your customers will likely get waylaid as soon as Google, Wikipedia, and other drivers of traffic get involved.

Barriers, such as those that hamper the disabled and other minority groups actually affect more potential customers than you think. Avoid barring them at the door. On a different note, as Chris Cambridge so wonderfully illustrates in his Bar Harbor, Maine gift shop, make it your goal should to encourage, rather than deter the pet-wielding, ice cream licking customers who, if you’re lucky, will make a (profitable) mess out of your store. More generally, the way you treat customers when you greet them sets the stage for all of your customers’ expectations, most specifically which of the three basic levels of service you supply at your establishment.

Finally, I mention the ultimate reason to be kind to a customer or a vendor: it may be an unexpectedly permanent good-bye.

–Micah Solomon

(Jonesing for more on this specific subject? Check out Chapter 11, Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit: The Secrets of Building a Five-Star Customer Service Organization, Leonardo Inghilleri and Micah Solomon, foreword by Horst Schulze, Founding President and COO, The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company. Publisher AMACOM BOOKS, international distribution by McGraw-Hill, available here.)