How many times have you had a bad customer service experience and thought, "Wow. That person (serving me) is REALLY unhappy."

Probably a huge percentage of those bad service experiences came from the employee's bad attitude rather than incompetence or a truly customer-unfriendly company policy.

And even those reasons might be traced back to poor morale. Incompetence is often caused by lack of interest in obtaining training or to even bother learning the job.

By contrast, how often do we consider it a bad experience when we're served by an inexperienced but cheerful person willing to keep on trying to help us?

Company-unfriendly policies are (thankfully) becoming more rare in this era of rapid information sharing where reputations matter as much as price or convenience, particularly to new customers. Even the cable companies are scheduling installations in shorter time windows and offer money-back guarantees for being on time. (Some say this is a sign of the Apocalypse... we shall see.)

But a boss who works hard to make sure his or her employees are happy builds a positive working atmosphere that carries over into customer service. Customers can tell when you love your job, and it makes them much more willing to work with you.

What have you done to make your employees (and therefore, your customers) happy today?