As customers, we all need to make these ten declarations to businesses in order to get all of the service and satisfaction we deserve.

I call it The Customer Service Manifesto.

(1) You serve me; I don't serve you.

(2) Give me as many satisfactions for my money as you can.

(3) Make the satisfactions relevant to me, to what I hold dear, and not to what is important to you. In other words, give me what I need!

(4) Be available to help me to achieve the results I anticipated when I purchased.

(5) Don't bullshit me.

(6) Pay me for any inconvenience I have suffered because of you.

(7) Surprise me with perks, just for the heck of it.

(8) Don't bundle what I really want with expensive, useless frills that I don't want.

(9) Make it easy for me to stop doing business with you.

(10) Never, ever completely eliminate the human touch from your service.

This article explores the third of these items: Make the satisfactions relevant to me, to what I hold dear, and not to what is important to you.

In other words give me what I need!

Technologists are incessantly bundling irrelevant features into products that a miniscule number of customers need and use. For years, we've seen this "feature-creep" in software.

Whenever a software manufacturer updates products, you can be sure that the main application will be accompanied by needless bells and whistles that only gobble up more memory and slow down our computers.

Why do they do this? Do they really believe we're going to use these baubles?

They do it to create a sense of differentiation from the last generation of product, to give us reasons to buy the new, to upgrade. But as any modern salesperson can tell you, FEATURES ARE NOT BENEFITS!

A feature is what a product contains, an aspect of it. A benefit is the value we derive from USING that feature.

Customers buy benefits, and couldn't care less about features, unless they're teenage technologists, themselves, who adore gee-whiz novelties.

Undoubtedly, my cell phone has features I'll never use and I don't care about.

A big one is text messaging. I prefer voice messages for a lot of reasons, including the crucial fact that I get to hear the tone of the other person's voice; and if that person is a buyer or a customer, that's crucial to me, to determine where I stand with them, attitudinally.

Car dealers, especially when they have a hot model, are known to stuff each vehicle with features that buyers don't want, simply because they can get away with it, because that model is in limited supply.

I tried to buy a Mercedes SUV but the dealer insisted I take one that had fog lamps, unattractive steel cage-type headlamp grills and body armor, and some other gadgets you can't see and are unlikely to need or use.

These features added no less than $10,000 to the price of the vehicle!

When products become needlessly exaggerated with irrelevant features we need to fight back and notify sellers that we're not going to upgrade or be up-sold.

Tell them: "Give me what I need, and not what you want me to buy!"