"I spent all afternoon arranging flowers on your tables. We set aside that small dining room for you and while we were waiting for you to show up, we turned other customers away!"

Dear Readers,

My mother was shocked when a restaurant manager started berating her for sitting in the wrong dining room. This summer, when 10 members of my family gathered at one of Cape Cod's fancy restaurants for a special dinner, the maître d' seated us in the Bistro. Apparently there had been some confusion. The manager thought we wanted a small room where the meals run to six courses. The maître d', however, had us down for the Bistro, the less costly option that we had reserved. Once the disgruntled manager discovered that we would not be using the small dining room she had prepared, she interrupted our dinner - twice - to express her displeasure.

Saving the day was the young waiter who doggedly urged us to enjoy our meal. Without this summertime employee, we probably would have walked out, making the experience a total loss for everyone involved. His exuberance, however, demonstrated that he understood the important role that customer relations played in his own compensation.

For anyone who doubts the direct connection between retaining customers and maintaining one's livelihood, there are three new books with advice worth heeding:

• "A Complaint is a Gift," by Janelle Barlow and Claus Moller (Berret-Koehler, 2008)

• "All Customers are Irrational," by William Cusick (AMACOM, 2009)

• "Who's Your Gladys? How to Turn Even the Most Difficult Customer into Your Biggest Fan," by Marilyn Suttle and Lori Jo Vest (AMACOM, 2009)

Because attracting new customers is far more costly than retaining old ones - 5 to 10 times, according to Cusick - attending to customers is a vital part of just about everyone's job description. Keep in mind:

Emotions rule. Both Cusick and the team of Suttle and Vest focus on the power of the emotional appeal when courting customers. "If you don't have perfect processes or products but you do have highly engaged employees with the right attitude, you can still succeed," says Cusick. Employees with dismissive attitudes can kill a business. "The real reason customers leave a company, two-thirds of the time, is because of employee indifference," he says. "People can sense indifference right away." Customers should leave every interaction with the feeling that someone cares whether their problems get resolved. In addition to wanting to feel cared for, customers fear feeling out of control. Keep your customers informed. "You don't want a customer at any time to feel like they don't know what's going on," says Cusick.

Difficult customers need special care. Among the most surprising sections of Suttle and Vest's book is the one that encourages employees to reframe their customers' most difficult traits in their own minds. A customer who is pushy or demanding can be considered someone who "knows what he wants." Someone who is rude is "willing to say what's on his mind." At the other end, someone who comes off as cold might be a "private person who takes time to establish trust," and so on. If you can listen to, assist and eventually win over your "Gladyses" - your most demanding customers - retention rates will grow, they say.

"It takes practice," Vest admits. "If you have a rude customer, it's reframing what you see. You try to see somebody who has the potential to be nice, you just have to reach them." Vest suggests taking this challenge: Try to reach a difficult customer by establishing some personal connection and being extra nice. Because people with poor social skills are rarely treated well, they are often surprised and eventually may become open to forming a business friendship. "It's the connection that brings [customers] back," she says.

Bad news travels fast. If complaints are not addressed satisfactorily, they will be amplified. Barlow and Moller note in their book that most dissatisfied customers tell somewhere between eight and 20 people about their complaints.

And then there are people like me, who put them in the newspaper.