I talk a lot about the importance of building and nurturing relationships with your customers, and how this is key to success as an entrepreneur. But what does that look like? How can you actively work on building better relationships with your customers? A great place to start is by getting inside your customer’s heads. What are those indispensable things your customers want you to know about them?

Don’t you wish you could just get inside your customer’s heads and see exactly what’s going on in there? You’d be able to feel what they’re feeling. You’d have a deep understanding of those problems that keep them up at night. You’d know just what to say and when to say it.

Since you can’t literally get inside their heads, I’m going to help you get into their heads figuratively.

There are a few common things that all customers want. These “wants” are pretty standard across business types and target markets. There may be some things that I haven’t listed here that apply specifically to you and your business, but I feel like these are the most universal customer “wants” across the board.

8 Indispensable Things Your Customers Want You to Know

1. Your customers want to feel important

Recently I walked into my favorite neighborhood coffee shop for an afternoon Americano. There was only one other customer in the place, and the barista was busy making her a latte. So I stood at the counter, directly in front of where the barista was working, and waited.

I tried to make eye contact, but she never looked up at me. I knew she was busy but I just wanted her to acknowledge my presence.

It wasn’t happening.

Your customers want to feel important. They want to feel like they matter to you. Sometimes, they may even want to feel like they’re the most important person in the world, if only for a moment.

I wasn’t expecting her to stop everything and wait on me instead, I just wanted, at that moment, to feel like I mattered.

She could have easily said, “Hey, how you doin’? I’ll be right with you”, and that would have been perfect. I would have felt like I was important.

Your customers want to feel important. So do something, even something really small and basic, and make them feel important.

2. Your customers want to be treated like human beings

When you call Zappos customer service, a real person answers the phone in less than one minute. Seriously. There’s no phone tree menu, no recording, no buttons to push. A real human being simply answers the phone.

Zappos also encourages their service representatives to stay on the phone with the customer as long as it takes to resolve their issue. There are no rules or time limits. Zappos’ current record for the longest customer service call is 10 hours, 51 minutes. That’s just crazy, right?

What Zappos gets better than any other large company out there today is that their customers just want to be treated like human beings. They’ve taken something as fundamental as a customer phone call with a rep and turned it into a truly remarkable and unexpected experience.

Since when did treating people like human beings become the unexpected experience?

3. Your customers want you to listen

I was in the restaurant business for around 15 years. I did just about every job you can in a restaurant, from dishwasher to general manager. During the time working as a general manager here in Cincinnati, I took my family out to have dinner at a different restaurant.

It was not a pleasant experience. They said it would be a 30-minute wait, it took over an hour. They got our order wrong. When I asked a server to help us she said, “sorry,