These 11 Great Customer Service Stories from Business Insider are what building long term sales and customers for life are all about. Here’s a personal favorite:

Sainsbury’s, a grocery store in the U.K., must have been pretty amused when they received a letter from a three-year-old girl named Lily.

“Why is tiger bread called tiger bread?” she asked, referring to one of their bakery items. “It should be called giraffe bread.”

Lily was just being observant – the pattern on the bread does resemble a giraffe more than a tiger. To everyone’s surprise, Chris King, a customer service manager at the chain, responded. “I think renaming tiger bread giraffe bread is a brilliant idea – it looks much more like the blotches on a giraffe than the stripes on a tiger, doesn’t it? It is called tiger bread because the first baker who made it a looong time ago thought it looked stripey like a tiger. Maybe they were a bit silly.” He enclosed a gift card, and the bread was renamed earlier this year.

 

I found this article by way of economist Craig Newmark who added, “…I’d think it would be worthwhile for many companies to cut a little of their mostly stupid advertising and increase expenditures on services like these. ”

He’s absolutely right. If you can devote an extra 1 to 10% to advertising or chop 5-50% off your prices, you could make your customer’s day better instead.  The bonus, aside from increased sales, is that when we handle our business this way we get to deal with happy customers and happy employees and go home feeling good about our work at the end of the day.