Your customers are by far the most important people interested in your business. They are more important than yourself, your investors and your employees.

Unless you serve your customers and fully satisfy their needs, your investors, employees, and even yourself, will not be served, because your business will be nothing without its customers.

Customers vote with their feet and their wallets. The primary goal of your business is to deliver an experience every time your customers visit so that they have no reason to move their affections elsewhere. The experience must be relevant, timely, suitably personal, of value to the customer, and meet or exceed expectations.

And that must be the number one goal of your business, or it wont survive and no-one will be satisfied.

One of the blogs that I follow with interest is Becky Carroll's Customers Rock! As a thank you to regular readers she has published an e-book with the title "Customers Rock!™ - How Businesses Can Make Sure Their Customer Experiences Rock".

The eBook is a compilation of five of Becky's favorite blog posts from the last 12 months.  she has also included the comments along with each post so readers can continue to follow the conversation; many of these were quite enlightening!

Topics include:

• Taking care of existing customers
• Customer or client?
• Tips for listening to customers
• Stories and the personal touch
• Measuring customer relationships

On the topic of "How to Take Care of Existing Customers", for example, she writes "We have to focus on two main areas when it comes to our customers: bringing new customers in and taking care of existing customers. The old idiom, “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush,” comes to mind here.

"I like this definition from the New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy (Third Edition, 2002).

The things we already have are more valuable than the things we only hope to get."

This handy little book has some gems that are useful to any small business and is worth a read.  As the book is freely available for distribution you can download your own copy by clicking here.