Like the weather, customer service is something everybody complains about, but nobody seems to do anything meaningful about.

Part of the problem is the fact that when we say, customer service, we mean different things. If we havent defined our terms, then we promote misunderstandings, conflicting standards, and inaccurate measures.

Plus, were less likely to make customers happy on a consistent and reliable basis, and well miss opportunities for generating customer loyalty, repeat and referral business, and consistently higher profits, presuming these are our goals.

Lets start with basics, a simple Economics 101 refresher, and go from there.

There is a commonplace distinction in economics between goods and services. Our economy produces both.

Refrigerators, potatoes, tanks, ball point pens, and air conditioners are considered goods. Theyre things, tangible entities that are easily observable and measurable.

Services include haircuts, your accountants calculations, and your teachers lecture.

The American economy is said to be a mix of 70% services, and 30% goods. Because of this lopsided proportion, youll hear broadcasters and commentators repeat the fact that America has a service economy.

Being in a service economy means at least 70% of us are directly, inextricably, and completely engaged for our livings in delivering customer serviceliterally--a service to customers. (But if you ask most people Are you in customer service? theyll say no, thinking youre referring to a specific department or to a narrow business function.)

Even if were employed in the goods sector, say in manufacturing, were still tethered to customer service. Savvy economists point out: There is no such thing as a commodity; a never changing product or raw material, which has no service dimension attached to it.

Take copper wire. It has to be delivered, invoiced, financed, explained, and apologized for, if it doesnt meet certain requirements or specifications. The wire doesnt sell itself. Order entry people, salespeople, and delivery people have to get it to a customers door.

All of these helping hands servethey add value to the wire itself, and their ministrations become part of the product that is sold and bought.

The refrigerator that finds its way to our kitchens is also inventoried, displayed in a retail space or online, sold, financed, delivered on time or late. Fridges are bundled with future, contingent services memorialized in warranties, promises to provide customer support in the event units malfunction.

What we think of as Customer Service is obviously a huge part of every economic transaction that is made.

There are two parts to an effectively delivered economic service: (1) Competence and (2) Human Factors.

My barber needs to cut my hair in an acceptable manner, and be available on time for my appointment. Reduced to essentials, thats the competence part of his service, the basic satisfaction that Im bargaining for.

But if hes a persistent grouch, and I had a barber like this once, then the human relations component of his service is lacking.

In that situation, Im getting less than full value for my money. I expect a good haircut and a pleasant hair cutter. The bare bones service, however technically competent, needs to be paired with good customer service, in this case a pleasant, polite communication style.

Typically when competence and human relations skills are both present, customer satisfaction is created.

Weve all had the experience of eating at a restaurant with great food but lousy service. Its a classical approach-avoidance conflict. Sooner or later, well probably stop patronizing the place, unless we enjoy mistreatment or there is a secret satisfaction such as the possibility of spotting a celebrity.

The dental hygienist that refuses to clean your teeth without providing a tedious lecture about diet, brushing style and flossing also creates service dissonance and an approach-avoidance conflict.

The knowledgeable professor who has a keen mind but who obviously prefers to be doing research rather than student advisement is also offering a defective, incomplete, and mixed-signal service.

If you take a flight from New York to LA, and someone asks you, How was your flight? your response will be an evaluation, mainly, of the service you received.

Your reply could include three obvious dimensions: (1) The smoothness of the ride, whether there were bumps en route and a hard or soft landing; (2) The overall comfort you experienced during passage, having adequate legroom, meals, and easy aisle access to lavatories; and (3) Serendipitous factors such as whether you were belted next to a speed-talker who wouldnt let you do your work or shut your eyes.

These service dimensions overlap.

Experiencing turbulence, the pilot that changes flight paths for smoother air is definitely providing a service, while acting competently to avoid potential danger. His sensitivity to human factors, especially empathy for the comfort of passengers, is informing his decision to seek alternative routing.

The legroom and number of aisles you find on board are determined by the airlines based on a tradeoff between economics and comfort. Do they use bigger, more comfortable planes? Do they squeeze an extra row or two of seats in, making everyone a little less comfortable?

The cost of jet fuel could have recently spiked, so theyre ditching amenities in an effort to maintain profit margins. This appears to be an economic decision, but it is unavoidably a service decision, as well.

That blabber youre sitting next to is NOT the fault of the carrier, unless you request being moved to an unoccupied alternative seat. Then if you are needlessly denied a change, this becomes a service issue for which the airline is answerable.

Does a parent traveling with small children in tow have easy access to a diaper changing station in the lavatory?

An airlines service contains even more facets.

Service starts long before the flight takes off, very possibly with the memory one fosters regarding a prior flight she took, or a friend or a colleague took on that or another carrier. If the conveyance was bumpy, less than satisfying, or too costly, then these perceptions will taint the expectations the customer fosters.

A bad trip could lower her expectations, making her easier to satisfy this time, or it could function the opposite way, making her hyper-critical, shortening her fuse.

Is the passenger able to book a reservation with relative ease, obtaining accommodations on the most desired dates and at the most convenient times?

Are the reservations or travel agents nice and easy to communicate with? Was the online booking fast and without glitches?

So far, we can see that service is universal, its everywhere, indispensable.

Yet, there is a competing perception, that customer service is an option, an extra, a non-bargained for favor that a company provides to its clients.

Im a great lawyer, so I dont have to be nice, goes the thinking.

Do you know the number one reason lawyers are sued for malpractice? They dont communicate effectively, typically failing to return phone calls in a timely way!

Be grateful were getting you to your destination safely, is increasingly the message of airlines to passengers.

In other words, if were competent, thats enough service. You dont hear the once frequently recited mission statement very much, anymore:

Were here for your comfort, and if theres anything we can do to make your flight more comfortable, dont hesitate to ask.

But believers in the concept that you can satisfy customers by being competent, but unfriendly, are kidding themselves, just as much as those that believe you can be a charming fool, technically inept, and prosper over the long haul.

Complete customer service requires technical competence and appropriate human relations skills.

We need both, always have, and always will.

Dr. Gary S. Goodman is the best-selling author of 12 books and more than a thousand articles. A frequent expert commentator on radio and TV, he is quoted in prominent publications such as The Wall Street Journal and Business Week. President of Clientrelations.com and Customersatisfaction.com, his seminars and training programs are sponsored internationally and he is a top-rated faculty member at more than 40 universities, including UC Berkeley and UCLA. Gary brings over two decades of management and consulting experience to the table, with the best academic credentials in the speaking and training industry. A Ph.D. from the Annenberg School For Communication at USC, an MBA from the Peter F. Drucker School of Management, and a J.D. degree from Loyola, his clients include several Fortune 1000 companies and successful family owned and operated firms.

He can be seen on CNBC at: http://www.cnbc.com/id/15840232?video=417455932# and reached at: gary@customersatisfaction.com

Yes! A lemon detox diet IS effective for both cleansing and weight loss.

Here's the idea:

Consuming anything sour makes the liver and gallbladder purge stored toxins. The liver is especially important for weight loss and overall health. When the liver is filled with toxins, it cannot do its critical tasks in metabolizing fat. So that is why it is essential to keep your liver in top working condition.

In a lemon detox diet, you use the juice of a fresh lemon in a cup of hot water in the morning. The morning is when our bodies are in a natural cleansing phase, so it is a good time to consume cleansing foods and juices.

Then, you also use either fresh lemon juice or a slice of a lemon in water that you drink throughout the day. In the lemon detox diet, water is a key component. You should drink at least 64 ounces a day.

Lemon juice provides an added benefit: it also supplies the body with a good dose of vitamin C.

But don't use lemon juice as your sole method of cleansing or weight loss.

Although a lemon detox diet is beneficial, it will not be as effective as a more thorough detox. You will lose more weight and gain more energy by going through a more thorough detox.

In a more thorough detox, you will consume vegetables, fruits, spices, and herbs that are known for their cleansing and fat-burning abilities. Fresh lemon juice is a part of a more thorough detox diet.

But most detox diets (such as Ann Louise Gittleman's Fat Flush Diet) incorporate a detox period of at least two weeks.

This is too long!

Why?

Well, a detox requires that you deprive yourself of most of the things that you love. The longer that a diet requires you to deprive yourself, the lower the chance that you'll STICK with it.

The optimum period for a detox diet is one week. Most people can stick to a restricted diet for that long.

Want to lose up to 7 pounds in 7 days, have more energy and feel more relaxed than you have in years? Go to http://www.powerfulweightlosssolutions.com to get your FREE copy of The 7 Day Detox Diet & Cookbook, a highly effective, brief detox diet that will do wonders not only for your metabolism, but also for your overall health and energy levels.

To be profitable, there has to be:

a) Demand

b) Good affiliate programs you can promote (also high bids at the Pay Per Click Search engines is a good indicator).

To find out this information, I use Wordtracker and affiliate networks like Commission Junction.

Let's take the example of two potential niches and see if they are profitable. The niches I have chosen are "electric toothbrushes", and "hair removal".

Let's check Commission Junction (CJ) first.

Once you are logged in, click on "Get Links".

Select Links from the Search drop-down box, and type in hair removal into the search box.

Looking down the advertiser list of the results, you will see that there are several merchants offering hair removal products.

Click on the 3 Month EPC link at the top of that column to order the results by EPC. Those top performing ads look great. Check out the advertisers by clicking on the Advertiser link for any particular link.

(EPC is the amount of money the average affiliate makes per 100 visitors he sends to that merchant).

I clicked on Folica.com to see more information about that advertiser. Look at the EPC for the advertiser as this gives a better indication of overall advertiser performance than individual links.

A 3 month EPC of $17.63 (at the time of writing) means that for every 100 clicks from affiliate sites, the affiliates average $17.63 commission. Anything over $10 is good. You can also check out the 3 month trend for the advertiser. In this case, Folica.com have a very consistent EPC.

This is a good niche as long as there is demand.

Repeat the above steps for my other potential niche "electric toothbrushes". This time, just type in "toothbrush", not "electric toothbrush".

There are a few merchants there, but they are either new, or don't have any EPC data (at the time of writing this book). This lack of any clear data starts alarm bells ringing in my ears.

However, just to make sure, select "Products" from the drop-down search box, and type in toothbrush.

Ahh, now we have something. There are some novelty toothbrushes, and normal electric toothbrushes. Click on a few of the merchants and check out their EPC. When I checked they were a little disappointing, so I would rank the profitability of the toothbrush niche quite low.

I know I can find electric toothbrushes at Amazon and promote them from there, but Amazon has a very low commission rate.

Of the two, hair removal seems the better option. I hope it has a high demand.

Let's check demand

I like to carry out a couple of tests for demand. Firstly I'll check how many competing pages there are at Google for my main phrase. The higher the number, the more demand (since other webmasters have chosen to create pages on the topic). Secondly I'll head over to Wordtracker and check to see how many phrases are used to search for my niche. As I wont be able to compete in Google for my main phrase, I need to make sure there are sufficient phrases I can rank well for.

Let's look at this in detail.

1. Head over to Google and do a search for hair removal and electric toothbrushes,

hair removal - 25.6 million competing pages. electric toothbrush - 1.96 million.

(These figures were accurate on 13/02/2006. Click the hyperlinks for the two phrases to check what those figures are today).

OK, hair removal is looking promising.

Now head over to Wordtracker. Wordtracker in my opinion is the best tool for carrying out keyword research. I don't personally rate the accuracy of the Overture suggestion tool (and all keyword tools that use it for demand figures).

Login to Wordtracker.

In the Multiple Search section, click on Compressed search.

Type in hair removal, and select 500 from the Number of Results drop-down box.

Click Proceed.

When the results are all displayed, you will notice that 500 results are returned. This is good as it means that there are a lot of potential phrases for this niche.

Now for a little trick I use.

Scroll to the very bottom of the page. The table gives you the "Count", and "Predict" figures for each word.

At the time I checked, the count and predict figures were 10 and 12 respectively for the last phrase in the list.

This tells me there are a lot more phrases than just this 500. Correctly carrying out keyword research, will yield thousands of potential phrases for this niche.

As a benchmark, anything above a 5 for the last phrases in the results (assuming 500 results were returned), is a good indicator to me that the niche has a lot of phrases to target. The higher the value of the count for the last phrase in the list, the more phrases you will find for that niche when you carry out your in-depth keyword research.

Want to see an example?

Type in insurance and select 500. Scroll to the bottom. The count figure when I checked was 180 for the last phrases in the list. That means there are a huge number of potential phrases for the niche of insurance.

Another example. Type in barbie doll. The last phrases in the list has a count of 3, which means this niche has far fewer potential phrases than the insurance niche.

A final example. Type in cadbury chocolate (the best chocolate in the world in my opinion).

Only 52 rows were returned when I checked (not the 500 that were obtained in the previous examples), meaning this would not be such a good niche.

Before finishing our profitability and demand research, there is one other check I like to carry out. How much are these phrases attracting at the Pay Per Click search engines?

Type in hair removal at Wordtracker again.

Scroll to the bottom.

Click on the perform a competition search.

Select Overture and click the proceed button.

You will need to type in the security code displayed, into the small box before you can get the results.

Scroll to the bottom of the results.

At the time of writing, the top bids for hair removal related phrases were nearly $40.

Wow. Companies are prepared to pay nearly $40 per click at the search engines for some phrases related to this niche.

This niche is hot, and potentially very profitable.

Putting Adsense on our site could prove VERY profitable.

To read more about how you can avoid being labelled as a "thin" affiliate, download your free copy of "Creating 'Fat' Affiliate Sites".

Addiction treatment program and alcohol addiction programs have been available for the heterosexual community in New York and New Jersey for well over 30 years. These addiction treatment programs have been of high quality and either, private, not for profit, federally funded, inpatient addiction treatment or outpatient addiction treatment. There has been addiction treatment for almost any kind of drug addiction or alcohol addiction. You can find addiction treatment programs for the elderly, adolescent, men or women, but what about the GLBT population (gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender). Where do those with a different sexual orientation go and feel comfortable? Where do the GLBT go where they can receive addiction treatment without being judged?

Gay Addiction Treatment History Historically, the GLBT community suffering from drug addiction or alcoholism, were expected to fit into primarily heterosexual drug rehab or alcohol rehab programs. Can you imagine being heterosexual and being asked to fit into a gay addiction treatment program, gay drug rehab or gay alcohol rehab program. Think maybe you might feel a little uncomfortable, have trouble fitting in or experience the result of internalized homophobia. What do you think your addiction treatment experience would be like? That is correct, you would never receive the greatest possible benefit from you addiction treatment experience. Because of this the possibility of relapse would be quite high.

Today, the approach to treating the GLBT population has begun to change. You can find drug rehab or alcohol treatment programs such as Lakeview Freedom Rings that has designed addiction treatment for the GLBT population within the structure of a state of the art addiciton treatment program. Addiction treatment programs such as this, have begun to emerge, but on a limited basis.

What is the Clinical Structure Within the Addiction Treatment Program The gay addiction treatment component is almost a program within a program. While the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender certainly have their own set of specific issues, people are people and addicts are addicts. Any quality gay addiction treatment component will have its own addiction therapist trained in meeting the recovery needs of the GLBT population, the staff at the addiction treatment center will receive sensitivity training and education to reduce and sometimes eliminate any homophobic attitudes and the GLBT patients will participate in clinical services with the rest of the population outside of their component.

NY and NJ Gay Addiction Treatment Services

Unfortunately there are not many addiction treatment centers in New Jersey or New York with "true" gay addiction treatment or gay alcohol treatment components within the confines of the drug rehab or alcohol rehab. When looking for a New Jersey Gay Drug Rehab or New York Gay Alcohol Rehab you might want to call 1-800-511-9225, a gay friendly addiction treatment helpline or go to ................................... www.gay-rehab.com.

Jonathan Huttner is one of the founders of Lakeview Health Systems, which operates an addiction treatment program which is gay friendly and has a gay addiction treatment component within the drug rehab program called Freedom Rings.