It has often been said that quality of products and service is the key to business success and for the most part it is indeed fact. Now then many marketing consultants say that; Nice People is the icing on the cake. In fact this is also true. You cannot train people to be nice, you have to hire nice people. You cannot increase someone's pay and expect their attitude to change over night, it will not happen that easy.
You see there are nice people, pleasant people and just great down to Earth People; then there are manipulators, BS'ers, complainers and ugly people too. Find good people and pay them what they are worth so they stay with your company. Nice people and employees in your business will make the difference.
As a former franchising founder, I always found that I could not seem to re-train hostile people to be nice people, no matter how hard I tried. You have to find nice people and train them to do the job and promote them and pay them fairly.
This is not to say that you can have lousy products or service, that too must be tops. Often I ask a trick question of my franchisee's crews; What is more important Quality or Service? Some times they will attempt to answer with one or the other and then rationalize their answer. The true answer is both and when you throw in nice people, well that really is a slamdunk. Consider all this in 2006.