101 Inspirational Customer Service Quotes

1. The goal as a company is to have customer service that is not just the best but legendary.
Sam Walton, Founder of Wal-Mart

2. Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.
Bill Gates

3. It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.
Charles Darwin

4. It is not the employer who pays the wages. Employers only handle the money. It is the customer who pays the wages.
Henry Ford

5. Well done is better than well said.
Benjamin Franklin

6. Spend a lot of time talking to customers face to face. You’d be amazed how many companies don’t listen to their customers.
Ross Perot

7. Kind words can be short and easy to speak, but their echos are truly endless.
Mother Teresa

8. If you do build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful.
Jeff Bezos, CEO Amazon.com

9. In the end, the customer doesn’t know, or care, if you are small or large as an organisation. She or he only focuses on the garment hanging on the rail in the store.
Giorgio Armani

10. The customer experience is the next competitive battleground.
Jerry Gregoire, CIO, Dell Computers

11. Customer satisfaction is worthless. Customer loyalty is priceless.
Jeffrey Gitomer

12. Quality in a service or product is not what you put into it. It is what the client or customer gets out of it.
Peter Drucker

13. To understand the man, you must first walk a mile in his moccasin.
North American Indian Proverb

14. Customers don’t expect you to be perfect. They do expect you to fix things when they go wrong.
Donald Porter, V.P. British Airways

15. Good service is good business.
Siebel Ad

16. There is a spiritual aspect to our lives – when we give we receive – when a business does something good for somebody, that somebody feels good about them!
Ben Cohen, Ben & Jerry’s

17. The more you engage with customers the clearer things become and the easier it is to determine what you should be doing.
John Russell, President, Harley Davidson

18. One of the deep secrets of life is that all that is really worth doing is what we do for others.
Lewis Carol

19. Being on par in terms of price and quality only gets you into the game. Service wins the game.
Tony Allesandra

20. You’ll never have a product or price advantage again. They can be easily duplicated, but a strong customer service culture can’t be copied.
Jerry Fritz

21. Every great business is built on friendship.
JC Penney

22. If we do not lay out ourselves in the service of mankind whom should we serve?
John Adams

23. Rule 1: The customer is always right. Rule 2: If the customer is ever wrong, re-read Rule 1.
Stew Leonard, CEO Stew Leonard’s

24. If you’re not serving the customer, your job is to be serving someone who is.
Jan Carlzon, ex-CEO SAP Group

25. If you want to lift yourself up, lift up someone else.
Booker T. Washington

26. In the world of Internet Customer Service, it’s important to remember your competitor is only one mouse click away.
Doug Warner

27. Know what your customers want most and what your company does best. Focus on where those two meet.
Kevin Stirtz

28. Loyal customers, they don’t just come back, they don’t simply recommend you, they insist that their friends do business with you.
Chip Bell, Founder Chip Bell Group

29.Make a customer, not a sale.
Katherine Barchetti

30. If you do build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful.
Jeff Bezos, CEO Amazon.com

31. Customer service is not a department, it’s everyone’s job.
Anonymous

32. Dealing with people is probably the biggest problem you face, especially if you are in business. Yes, and that is also true if you are a housewife, architect or engineer.
Dale Carnegie

33. Make your product easier to buy than your competition, or you will find your customers buying from them, not you.
Mark Cuban

34. If you do build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful.
Jeff Bezos, CEO Amazon.com

35. The interesting thing is when we design and architect a server, we don’t design it for Windows or Linux, we design it for both. We don’t really care, as long as we’re selling the one the customer wants.
Michael Dell

36. A customer is the most important visitor on our premises, he is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him. He is not an interruption in our work. He is the purpose of it. He is not an outsider in our business. He is part of it. We are not doing him a favor by serving him. He is doing us a favor by giving us an opportunity to do so.
Mahatma Gandhi

37. When people talk about successful retailers and those that are not so successful, the customer determines at the end of the day who is successful and for what reason.
Jerry Harvey

38. It’s a very, very tough market. So unless you do a really good job, you buy the right products from the manufacturers, you service the customer, they keep coming back, they bring their friends in, it’s all about numbers, numbers, numbers.
John Ilhan

39. A lot of companies have chosen to downsize, and maybe that was the right thing for them. We chose a different path. Our belief was that if we kept putting great products in front of customers, they would continue to open their wallets.
Steve Jobs

40. If you work just for money, you’ll never make it, but if you love what you’re doing and you always put the customer first, success will be yours.
Ray Krock

41. For us, our most important stakeholder is not our stockholders, it is our customers. We’re in business to serve the needs and desires of our core customer base.
John Mackey

42. If you love your customer to death, you can't go wrong.
Graham Day

43. We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It’s our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.
Jeff Bezos, CEO Amazon.com

44. You’ve got to look for a gap, where competitors in a market have grown lazy and lost contact with the readers or the viewers.
Rupert Murdoch

45. In our way of working, we attach a great deal of importance to humility and honesty; With respect for human values, we promise to serve our customers with integrity.
Azim Premji

46. Customers don’t always know what they want. The decline in coffee-drinking was due to the fact that most of the coffee people bought was stale and they weren’t enjoying it. Once they tasted ours and experienced what we call “the third place”.. a gathering place between home and work where they were treated with respect.. they found we were filling a need they didn’t know they had.
Howard Schultz, Chairman and CEO Starbucks

47. Don’t try to tell the customer what he wants. If you want to be smart, be smart in the shower. Then get out, go to work and serve the customer!
Gene Buckley, President Sikorsky Aircraft

48. The most important adage and the only adage is, the customer comes first, whatever the business, the customer comes first.
Kerry Stokes

49. I won’t complain. I just won’t come back
Brown & Williamson Tobacco Ad

50. Customer service is just a day in, day out ongoing, never ending, unremitting, persevering, compassionate, type of activity.
Leon Gorman, CEO L.L.Bean

51. Every company’s greatest assets are its customers, because without customers there is no company.
Michael LeBoeuf, Author of: How to Win Customers and Keep Them for Life

52. Excellent firms don’t believe in excellence – only in constant improvement and constant change.
Tom Peters

53. Friendly makes sales – and friendly generates repeat business.
Jeffrey Gitomer

54. Service, in short, is not what you do, but who you are. It is a way of living that you need to bring to everything you do, if you are to bring it to your customer interactions.
Betsy Sanders

55. Every contact we have with a customer influences whether or not they’ll come back. We have to be great every time or we’ll lose them.
Kevin Stirtz

56. Here is a simple but powerful rule: always give people more than what they expect to get.
Nelson Boswell

57. Customers today want the very most and the very best for the very least amount of money, and on the best terms. Only the individuals and
companies that provide absolutely excellent products and services at absolutely excellent prices will survive.
Brian Tracy

58. It helps a ton when you learn people’s names and don’t butcher them when trying to pronounce them.
Jerry Yang

59. Statistics suggest that when customers complain, business owners and managers ought to get excited about it. The complaining customer represents a huge opportunity for more business.
Zig Ziglar

60. I don’t do business with those who don’t make a profit because they can’t give the best service.
Richard Bach

61. If you don’t genuinely like your customers, chances are they won’t buy.
Thomas Watson, former CEO IBM

62. Merely satisfying customers will not be enough to earn their loyalty. Instead, they must experience exceptional service worthy of their repeat
business and referral. Understand the factors that drive this customer revolution.
Rick Tate

63. Men are rich only as they give. He who gives great service gets great rewards.
Elbert Hubbard

64. Our mission statement about treating people with respect and dignity is not just words but a creed we live by every day. You can’t expect your employees to exceed the expectations of your customers if you don’t exceed the employees’ expectations of management.
Howard Schultz, CEO Starbucks Coffee

65. People expect good service but few are willing to give it.
Robert Gateley

66. Revolve your world around the customer and more customers will revolve around you.
Heather Williams

67. The customer’s perception is your reality.
Kate Zabriskie, Author of: Customer Service Excellence: How to Deliver Value to Today’s Busy Customer

68. Do what you do so well that they will want to see it again and bring their friends.
Walt Disney

69. He profits, most who serves best.
Arthur F. Sheldon

70. The longer you wait, the harder it is to produce outstanding customer service.
William H. Davidow

71. The single most important thing to remember about any enterprise is that there are no results inside its walls. The result of a business is a satisfied customer.
Peter Drucker

72. When the customer comes first, the customer will last.
Robert Half

73. Right or wrong, the customer is always right.
Marshall Field

74. Under promise and over deliver.
Toby Bloomberg

75. Profit in business comes from repeat customers; customers that boast about your product and service, and that bring friends with them.
W. Edwards Deming

76. Your customer doesn’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.
Damon Richards

77. Every client you keep, is one less that you need to find.
Nigel Sanders

78. If you make customers unhappy in the physical world, they might each tell 6 friends. If you make customers unhappy on the Internet, they can each tell 6,000 friends
Jeff Bezos

79. The purpose of a business is to create a customer who creates customers
Shiv Singh

80. It’s much harder to provide a great customer service than I would have ever realised. It’s much more art than science in some of these other areas and not just about the facts but about how you are conveying them.
David Yu, Chief Operating Officer, Betfair

81. Nothing is so contagious as enthusiasm.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

82. Only a life lived in the service to others is worth living.
Albert Einstein

93. Good customer service costs less than bad customer service.
Sally Gronow, Welsh Water

84. Whether you are big or small, you cannot give good customer service if your employees don’t feel good about coming to work.
Martin Oliver, MD Kwik-Fit Financial Services

85. If we keep doing what we’re doing, we’re going to keep getting what we’re getting.
Stephen Covey

86. Everyone in an organisation should be involved with customer service, not only are they feeling the customer but they are getting a feeling for what’s not working.
Penny Handscomb

87. There are no traffic jams along the extra mile.
Roger Staubach

88. Good leaders must first become good servants.
Robert Greenleaf

89. We don’t want to push our ideas on to customers, we simply want to make what they want.
Laura Ashley

90. A shoe without sex appeal is like a tree without leaves. Service without emotion is like a shoe without sex appeal.
Anonymous

91. A little experience often upsets a lot of theory.
S. Parkes Cadman

92. Whatever your business is, talk to your customers and provide them with what they want. It makes sense.
Robert Bowman, CEO Major League Baseball Advanced Media

93. You are serving a customer, not a life sentence. Learn how to enjoy your work.
Laurie McIntosh

94. Your best customers leave quite an impression. Do the same, and they won’t leave at all.
SAP Ad

95. Unless you have 100% customer satisfaction…you must improve.
Horst Schulz

96. It starts with respect. If you respect the customer as a human being, and truly honor their right to be treated fairly and honestly, everything else is much easier.
Doug Smith

97. An ounce of loyalty is worth a pound of cleverness.
Elbert Hubbard

98. Customer service is not a department, it’s everyone’s job.
Anonymous

99. There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money
somewhere else.
Sam Walton, Founder of Wal-Mart

100. Worry about being better; bigger will take care of itself. Think one customer at a time and take care of each one the best way you can.
Gary Comer

101. Consumers are statistics. Customers are people.
Stanley Marcus

About the Author

Omar Zaibak is the Marketing Manager for Customer1 Corporation. Customer1 provides customer service and support software that helps contact centers deliver great support experiences to their customers, partners, and employees around the world. Visit www.customer1.com to learn more.

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