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If you’re a smart business owner or manager, you know that to gain new customers and keep existing ones, your employees must continuously provide exceptional customer service.

Unfortunately, getting that point across to your employees, who tend to lapse into a coma at the start of formal customer service training, can be challenging.

Because the use of humor often helps to make training more interesting (and therefore more effective), let’s borrow a bit from late-night funny man David Letterman. Share the following Top 10 list with your employees to give them a chuckle–and sneak in a little customer service training at the same time!

“Top 10 Things You Should NEVER Do When Striving to Provide Exceptional Customer Service”

10. Post a sign proclaiming “Failure to plan on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part!”

9. Laugh hysterically when a customer asks if you can provide requested information by the end of the day.

8. Put a customer’s letter in the bottom of your In Box (otherwise known as the Black Hole).

7. Think about your dream vacation in Bakersfield while a customer is explaining what he/she needs.

6. Set a new land speed record heading out the back door when you spot a customer approaching with an “I have a problem” look on his/her face.

5. Do your famous grizzly bear impersonation when a customer interrupts your real job by asking for help.

4. Say “I’m working on that right now” when a customer calls to ask about the status of his/her request–while you’re reading a tabloid story about celebrities who give their babies weird names.

3. Put your customer’s call on hold while you head home for the weekend.

2. Use the following nonverbal cues while expressing your desire to help: sticking out your tongue, rolling your eyes, shaking your fist, pounding your head on the desk.

And the number-one thing you should NEVER do when striving to provide exceptional customer service…

1. Answer every question with “It beats the hell out of me” or “You’ve mistaken me for someone who cares” or “Why are you still here?” or “The dog ate my brain.”

Here’s one more important customer service tip you should share with your employees: everyone they deal with is a customer. This includes their coworkers, their subordinates, and their superiors (including you), as well as the people who buy your company’s products or services. You can easily adapt the above Top 10 list to internal customer service tips by substituting the word “coworker” for “customer.”

Printed newsletters are a really easy way to contact your prospective and current customers. They can even increase your sales while reducing advertising costs. Research shows newsletters get four times the readership of adverts or brochures, and customers are seven times more likely to buy from you than an average member of the public. A good newsletter can improve name recognition and brand awareness, establish your authority in your field, and differentiate your business from the competition.

Make the layout of your newsletter inviting. If it looks too packed with information it may seem hard work to read. Break up the copy with plenty of space and keep articles short. Use intriguing titles or ones that suggest the article provides quick and easy shortcuts. Also use photographs or cartoons on the cover to draw people’s attention.

Choose your articles carefully so that each one promotes the correct image of your business. Decide whether the article is to reflect your expertise, customer care or some other aspect of your business. If you are not sure which areas are important and of interest to your customers slip a survey into your newsletter.

You should start the article writing process by deciding what specific results you want from the article. It may be to introduce a new product or service, or to counteract what a competitor is claiming, or to highlight why a customer might be interested in a special offer you have.

A good newsletter will have a longer shelf life than adverts and are more likely to be passed around to prospective customers. Get a balance between generic articles that would be of interest to your wider client base and those specifically about your products and services. Do not waste effort and space producing articles that are unrelated to your field. Also check that the views expressed in articles are unlikely to offend your customer base.

Try to keep copy simple and as jargon free as possible. Use short sentences. Involve the reader by asking questions. How could your business benefit from this advice?

A profile of a customer can show how your product or service is used, the results that it can produce, why someone would purchase from you, and what they are planning to do in the future with your assistance. If they are prestigious clients the article will give a positive reflection of your business as well as providing them with some useful and free PR.

Generate new leads by offering a free subscription to your newsletter on your business’s marketing materials. Emphasize the news content and useful advice, and how it could benefit your prospective customer. Only a few of those who sign up for the newsletter will be time wasters. It is possible that as many as 80% could be converted to customers within six months. Without the constant contact that the newsletter offers they could drift into the arms of a competitor.

Making and marketing your own DVD. Does that sound like a viable business? Well, let us see…

You shoot some video tape and have it transferred to a blank DVD. Just a few bucks spent for a one time expense. From there you can have the DVD duplicated with four-color printing on it and have it in four-color printed packaging which makes it look very professional for just a couple dollars each, but that’s just if you want to be fancy about it by using photographs. Otherwise, two-color printing will work just fine.

Now your DVDs are ready to sell. From just over a dollar’s worth cost for production when you use two-color printing, you can mark up your product as you see fit. Charge $97.00 or $149.00 a copy, over and over again. Or produce a set of DVD’s and charge $495.00! Does not take much math skills to figure why people are becoming rich doing this!

The way to make a valuable DVD is to have it show and tell how to do something people want to do, or how to have something people want to have. You can come up with some ideas if you reach into your experience of things you have learned or discovered how to do.

This is the information age and if you put out the information, people are going to buy it up because they are hungry to know everything. Truth is that if you are currently selling printed how-to material, you can command a much higher price to provide that information in DVD format. Sell them your knowledge on a DVD.

Of course you will need some equipment to make your DVD. You can be up and running without a big budget. A tripod holding a digital camcorder than can connect directly to your computer so that you can use video editing software and a good microphone so you can be heard clearly is what it comes down to.

Having a remote control on your camcorder could even make video editing unnecessary, since what really counts in DVDs is the information contained in the DVD and not how pretty the presentation is. What really makes winners is down and dirty content.

A good place to get content from which to produce a DVD that you can call your own is http://www.infogoround.com. In fact there is so much there covering the most popular niche markets that you can give yourself the reputation of being an expert! InfoGoRound has hundreds of top quality, private label articles for the taking!

Converting some of the many information products found at InfoGoRound to DVD is the fast track to being a ‘how-to’ author able to effortlessly bring in the easy money. You will have so much content to work with that you should even use some of the video you make to put up on a website. Showing free video samples on your website is sure to drive traffic and skyrocket DVD sales.

Are you ready to do this and join the ranks of the Millionaire Internet Marketers? There are a couple of those marketers who amazingly enough have separate website videos in the same spacious white room with huge decorative windows. Assuming they don’t live in the same mansion, you might think they are filming in the same studio. If you think that then you would be wrong.

You can make your video look like it was done at a beautiful gorgeous place no matter what the surroundings you currently have. To set up your own amazing studio, get some florescent lights as they provide lighting without much extra heat or shadows, and set up a screen for your background. Put a light on each side of the camera pointing toward the screen. You will want to experiment in order to get the lights placed just right.

Now you have a clutter free background by using a screen, which could just be a sheet or curtain placed up. The secret to having any type of background you want however, is to invest in a chroma key green or blue screen. Also get and learn how to use video editing software that has chroma key effect. What chroma key effect does is replace the colored background with any type of background you want… even an image of the inside of a mansion! It is definitely the way to make a great impression.

Information DVDs are perfect products to develop. You can build your whole business around them. They are inexpensive to make, yet have a high-perceived value. They are heavily in demand, and staggeringly easy to sell for big fat wallet-filling profits. Film yourself on DVDs sharing what you know or make a presentation from the treasure-trove of information found at http://www.infogoround.com. The money you can generate from doing this is outrageous!