Great article!<p>One of the article's points that hits home for me is something I had learned in the first month of my first job outside college where I had to work with customers over the phone and email: Never make a promise you cannot keep. Manage customer expectations; they are the customer's perception.<p>The article suggests getting things done early for the customer, and that is great, but the customer is also comfortable waiting until the exact time that you specified, too. That early stuff is good bonus cookies, but the core trust issue is doing your thing on time. And if, for some reason you cannot make it, as early as you can figure that out, tell them, and give them a reasonable new time.<p>As a customer, time is a very important thing to me. For example, when my ISP has told me their tech is going to show up between 8 and 10 AM, 10:15 AM is completely unacceptable to me -- I usually call in for that. If they had told me 8 to 10:30, I would not have had a problem. Even better, if they had called to tell me they were going to be late as opposed to me having to call and find out after the fact that they were going to show up an hour later, I would have been happier.<p>This stuff is amazingly simple to do, too. I think it relates to an implied point in the article: customers appreciate when you admit your mistakes and arrange ways to resolve them rather than hide/ignore them when they are obvious to the customer.