Workers and employers, listen up. Just about all of us serve customers in some way: whether we build houses or build sandwiches, tend bar or tend flowerbeds, write traffic tickets or write news articles.

It’s critically important to serve those customers with an attitude and manner that makes them feel comfortable. However well you do your work, you can hurt your prospects — and your employer’s — in a big way if customers walk away feeling like they received poor service.

We could all get better at customer service. No matter how good we think we are at it, there is much we could learn, or be reminded of.

So we were excited to hear about a new partnership between the Saranac Lake Chamber of Commerce and North Country Community College to offer customer service training for area businesses.

A Community College Workforce Development grant is helping pay for it, which means it only costs $10 per employee. Plus, they’ll work with each business to schedule the training sessions; contact the chamber at 518-891-1991 or director@slareachamber.org. It’s a phenomenal deal, and we hope the organizers are flooded with interest.

This is one of the best kinds of things chambers of commerce can do, and for a community college to take a step like this to help educate community members in important ways is encouraging.

Imagine how much better our community’s economy and overall lives would be if all workers (and bosses) showed a slightly brighter, more understanding face to everyone they meet.

We plan to use this training for our staff, and we hope loads of other businesses do, too.