Treat your customers right, they'll stay with you forever. Treat them wrong, and they'll find someone else to do business with... but not before they tell all their friends to avoid your business like the plague.

I spent many years working for a large corporation with an extremely high customer turn-over rate (known as "customer churn" in the business). High attrition rates are endemic in businesses that don't treat their customers right. Let's face it, you can have the best product or service in the world, but if your customers don't like you, they'll leave in a hurry.

So how do you treat them right? A few great examples can be found in the hotel business. Ritz Carlton hotels and resorts have a motto, and all their employees have it memorized. It is, "We are Ladies and Gentlemen serving Ladies and Gentlemen." If a customer expresses a problem to one of the Ritz Carlton ladies or gentlemen, it is their responsibility to take care of it. It isn't every someone else's problem.

Another resort chain makes it their business to know everything about their guests and record it for future visits. Sounds spooky on first hearing, but consider how it works. Your first visit, you ask for the New York Times, and order coffee to your room first thing in the morning - cream, no sugar. You ask for extra pillows. The next time you visit, your room is pre-stocked with extra pillows, and the following morning, the New York Times shows up at your door step magically with fresh brewed black coffee.

Take that same pattern and apply it to your business. If you make it your mission to know everything about your customers, build relationships, remember their birthdays, anniversaries, know their likes and dislikes, you will have made customers for life.

CRM, or Customer Relationship Management systems, make this possible. They are like a huge data warehouse for all your customer's valuable information. Account notes, history, past communications with them, personal information, contact information... the works. They allow you to quickly and easily access the information at a moments notice.

They don't work by themselves, mind you. Your employees must take ownership of your customers' well being, and by putting a powerful tool in their hand like a good CRM system, you will be able to treat your customers better than ever, and with some effort, keep them for life.