Although I subscribe to Business Week, I somehow missed this article on creating and maintaining loyal customers. The folks at Church of the Customer Blog caught it and provided the link.Their original post appears here.

To me, the most powerful tip had to do with some of the things we’re tempted to do in order to sneak a few extra profits:

Don’t treat your customers as if they were expendable. Companies that break the Golden Rule by misleading, coercing, and disrespecting their customers effectively turn them into detractors. Examples in today’s world are countless, but they include nuisance fees and hidden charges, poor in-store service, and dreaded automated customer help lines. Such mistreatment causes customers to switch to competitors, cut back on their purchases, and, worst of all, warn others to stay away from the company.

My favorite recent example was the “spa use fee” that two different Scottdsale hotels saw fit to add to my bill at a conference. $15 a night in one, $13 a night in the other. In their “defense”, it was in the fine print in my reservation after I booked it. But geez, guys, if you’d told me it was $154 a night I would have paid without complaint. Telling me it’s $139 and then sticking me is dirty pool.