Where I grew up, there was a little window next to the sidewalk in a New England style brick building, where you could peer inside and watch tailors hand-stitching mink coats.

If you just stood there, sooner or later, an amazing thing happened.

One of the tailors would smile at you, slide the window open, and hand you a scrap of mink, about six inches long and two inches wide.

Here, here, hed say with a big grin. Take it! and then hed chuckle his way back to the workbench.

Im sure some kids didnt know what to do with them but with a dozen of these scraps your mother could stitch a very cool Davy Crockett hat for you, or with just one, you could scare your friends by wiggling it like a captured skunk.

What I didnt appreciate at the time is how clever this was as a customer service investment. Every kid had a mom who was destined to ask where he got the mink, and shed hear how nice the people were to her kids.

It was a very prudent investment in good will.

Moreover, when the kids grew up, they would become buyers and when they wanted coats, guess where theyd go, first?

This is called taking the long view of customer relationships.

It puts Customer Relationship Management (CRM) thinking to shame, which despite its protestations to the contrary, is a what-have-you-done-for-us-lately approach to customer satisfaction.

The CRM folks micro-measure todays transactions to determine which customers are work perking, and which ones should be utterly ignored. They have no interest in the long-term, in seeding their communities with sweet gestures, which later sprout into arbors of support.

What can you do, to caress your customers, present and future, with the gentle touch of mink?

Answer this well, and youll build a path to customer satisfaction that will survive the test of time.