"Customer satisfaction" seems like a straightforward kind of idea. Who could misunderstand its meaning? But you don't have to go far to find those who don't. For all of us who fly a lot, the airlines provide incessant models of what not to do. "Sit back and relax," they say, reading off a card - sometimes two, even three times each leg of the flight. What, do they think we're going to perch on the edge of our seats the whole time? When we land, do they say, "Now sit forward and tense up"? It's ridiculous - a meaningless phrase. Reading the same nonsense off a card every flight tells customers that nobody really gives a hoot about them: that they are simply commodities to be processed by the same formula of empty, rote phrases, time after time. Nobody has actually thought about them as live specimens; they are simply mouthing the same stuff, every flight, without a thought.

I grant, a couple of times I have had flights where the flight attendant said something human - and those occasions have stood out in my mind and made me want to fly that airline again - but it's rare and getting rarer; commercial aviation is becoming more and more a matter of herding commodities from place to place. It's no fun to be treated like a commodity.

Now let's head back to the rental industry and have a look at ourselves for a moment.

The people at Keystone Rental in Duluth, Ga., know what customer satisfaction really is. They treat customers as individuals, not as commodities.

Of course, when you're flying, you may not have much of a choice about airlines, and you certainly can't go anywhere once you're strapped in. So the airlines may well get away with treating customers like cattle, even with contempt, and mouthing the meaningless may be just a symptom of a more general attitude. I seem to be reading more of that kind of comment on commercial aviation all the time. The talk shows, too, have picked up on it. More people are flying, the market is growing, and there is less incentive to treat customers as people - that's the general theory, as I understand it.

Try pulling that in the rental industry and it's different: nobody is strapped in.

Satisfying customers is a big task, but it starts small and simple: talk straight with people; say something worth hearing instead of filling the air with fluff; and treat them like valued customers, don't process them like helpless livestock.

Now I want to challenge your understanding of "customer satisfaction" just a bit by questioning what seems obvious: who exactly is the "customer"?

The fact is, the customer is not just the person across the counter. The customer is everyone, employees included, from the owner on down. People on the inside are "internal" customers.

Many of the top manufacturing companies have made a point of this in their operations for years. It's a concept that many rental companies have made part of their thinking, too, perhaps without realizing that the concept has a name and is common practice elsewhere. In the manufacturing setting, the "internal customer" relationship might be an assembler who gets parts from a welder; the assembler is the welder's "customer." When the welder thinks of it that way, he or she takes on a new attitude toward the work: another person depends on it, depends on having it done right and on time, depends on it in order to make a living. It's not impersonal; it's important - an important contribution to another human being's need. The same relationships apply all down the line, top to bottom and back up. The boss is part of the chain of customer relationships, too. Everybody is interrelated in an organization dedicated to customer satisfaction.

The factory model is easy to transplant to the rental company. Picture, for example, the relationship between a mechanic and a counterperson. The counterperson either has the equipment, ready to rent, or has to make some sort of lame excuse to the renter about why not. The counterperson is the mechanic's customer. It's a matter of relationships based on who needs what from whom, who can fulfill another's need for the good of the operation - not who is inconvenienced or who has the fanciest title or who's been there longer. It's attitude.

And, as someone once said, "Attitude determines altitude."

Customer satisfaction can be measured, too, in terms of customer dissatisfaction: the number of customers per 1,000 who say they wouldn't come back next time, for example - there's a metric you could get your hands on. And over time, you could improve performance against a known benchmark, if you asked customers if they'd come back, why or why not, and recorded the data.

The alternative is simply to assume you're satisfying customers, based on ego or past performance. But when you let ego wrap around you or let past performance cloud your vision, you begin to take achievement for granted, and not far down that slippery slope you find yourself treating customers like commodities - and somebody else who knows better will take your business away from you. Unless your customers are strapped in and can't do anything about it.

Big financial management package this month, too - on managing cash flow, scheduling taxes to your advantage, increasing profitability from the assets you already have and finding the right bank with the best mix of banking services for your business.

Don't miss Competitive Management this month, either - we have features on RentX's open house and barbecue, Neff Rental's maintenance plan for contractor customers and using the phone to really sell your services, not just quote rates. Enjoy.