As part of my job, I put in at least 40 hours a week on customer service. I'm just a customer service rep. My two biggest projects are dealing with misbehaving apartment brokers in New York and lightly moderating our discussion boards.

We are a very open, very democratic site, which means we get all sorts of people. We do get some bad guys who are a few fries short of a Happy Meal. So we have to enlist the aid of our community to help us. The lesson implicit in this is that people will help you out and behave in a really good way. If you trust them, they will respond to that trust.

American corporate culture seems to devalue customer service in a big way. I say, go the other way. Do it right. Trust your customers. Give them power to do things right. Service costs will drop, and customers will become more devoted to your products and services. This ain't rocket science.