As mentioned last week, I have a lot of thoughts about what an economic recession or downturn may mean for Internet marketers. A lot of others do as well, and I’ll be occasionally sharing - and commenting on - their thoughts as we start to see the fall-out from the global financial crisis.

One of my ‘hit predictions’ is that customer service will become much more important. Depending on your niche, you may not be able to rely on as many new customers buying from you every day, every week, every month, etc. If so, you’d probably be wise to focus less on generating and converting new customers… and more on satisfying your existing customers and getting them to buy more, and more often, from you.

What’s the best way to do this? It’s with top quality products and services, and great customer service, right? I talked about ‘good’ customer service yesterday, but ‘great’ customer service is what brings the kind of customer loyalty and repeat business on which great companies are built. Customers expect good customer service, but great customer service goes beyond their expectations, and ideally turns them into loyal, raving fans.

Ironically, few Internet marketing speakers seem to talk about customer service. They’re full of ideas about generating traffic, building a list, developing products, putting up blogs, converting traffic into customers, selling affiliate products, finding joint venture partners, and so on… but seem to have very little, or nothing, to say about how to deliver exceptional customer service. It makes me wonder whether some of these people are actually running real businesses for the long term.

But maybe when times are good, and there is a continual stream of buyers entering the market, many businesses don’t need to take so much care of their customers. Not if they know there’s plenty more ‘fish in the sea’. But if the economic recession truly causes people to spend less, across all markets, that may mean you and I have fewer potential customers too. And that means we need to take better care of the ones we have, if we’re to survive and thrive.