I’m planning a trip to the UK – where I’m from – later in the year.

Last time I went there I still had my SIM card from when I lived there. I’d changed it to a prepaid account before I moved, so I just added some credit and everything worked great. Since then Three have changed their terms of service and cancelled my account for no other reason than I haven’t topped up my phone in two and a half years.

I need an alternative, and the most cost effective solution for international travel is almost always to buy a SIM in the country you travel to, but is that something I want to deal with on vacation, in each and every country I visit? It is not. I’m prepared to pay (or at least not save as much) to not have to do that.

I found a company called OneSimCard that seemed to fit the bill, offering a SIM I could buy ahead of time and use to save me some money whenever I travelled. Unfortunately the fact that they have three products that all fulfil my need (but each with their own advantages and disadvantages) and I had to work to figure out which was best was a problem, and the checkout process that didn’t quite work correctly was the nail in the coffin.

We could debate whether “the customer is always right” all day long but one thing I hope we can all agree on is that the customer is always the customer: their role in all this is to give you their money in exchange for goods and/or services, and your job – your only job – is to make that process as smooth and simple as it can possibly be. Make sure they’re happy and they come back later to do it all again too, ideally.

Whether you work at a local grocery store or a large multinational, that’s something we’d all do well to keep top of our minds.