This is a guest post by Robi Ganguly, the co-founder and CEO of Apptentive.

A few key takeaways:

• Know who your customers are.
• Engage with your customers and learn from them.
• Use the information you learn to achieve “Customer ESP.”

Entrepreneurs often talk about their motivations behind starting a company and highlight their desire to work for themselves. Many entrepreneurs talk about their need to build something. At Apptentive, we feel a strong desire to create and to control our destiny. We enjoy what we do, we believe in what we’re doing, we’re building a great team and we absolutely LOVE our customers.

This guest post is written by Matt Winn.  Matt is the Social Media Manager atVolusion, a Grasshopper partner .

Ah, the end of the holidays. It’s a time to wind down, take down the tree and remove the lights from the front yard. Relaxing activities, right? Wrong.

For online business owners, the ordering processing party doesn’t end with the holidays, especially when customers begin returning merchandise. While returns are inevitable, you can reduce the number of customer support questions, chargebacks and overall frustration by creating a foolproof return policy.

This guest post is written by Matt Winn.  Matt is the Social Media Manager at Volusion, a Grasshopper partner .  This post is the first in our four part series on customer service during the holidays.  Be on the lookout next Wednesday for the next post in the series on the Volusion Blog.

When you think about awesome customer service, what comes to mind? Your favorite barista that goes heavy on the espresso shot? That tech support guy who didn’t laugh because your “broken” TV wasn’t plugged in? Regardless of situation, great customer service typically stems from positive personal connections.

So how do you transcend personalized customer service to a faceless ecommerce site?

This is a guest post by Erica Moss, the social media outreach coordinator for the Master of Science in Nursing program at Georgetown University.

In this competitive marketplace, little details can get lost in the big picture. You and your company work hard every day to provide consumers with the best possible product and to position your organization at the front of the pack. One simple way to achieve your goal and to keep your consumers loyal, that is often overlooked, is to make it easy for your customers to contact you.

If you’re a regular reader of our blog, you already know that we love getting to know our customers.  Whether it’s through a guest post, customer spotlights, or simply hopping on a phone call – meeting our customers is one of the best parts about working here.

We recently took to Twitter and Facebook to find out a little bit more about our customers, their business and their favorite Grasshopper features.  As you can see below, our call forwarding and read your voicemail features really take the cake.