55 customer Service Quotes to Keep You Focused on What Really Matters

Culture

How your company operates on the inside may not seem to have much to do with how customers are being treated on the outside. However, the reality is that your company culture is central to defining your organisation’s customer satisfaction levels. It is the company culture that establishes the employee paradigm and sets priorities. In short, company culture determines customer interaction.

1. You are serving a customer, not a life sentence. Learn how to enjoy your work. (Lauri McIntosh)
2. Your customer doesn’t care how much you know until they know how much you care. (Damon Richard)
3. 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)
4. 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)
5. 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)
6. Your website isn’t the centre of your universe. Your Facebook page isn’t the centre of your universe. Your mobile app isn’t the centre of your universe. The customer is the centre of your universe. (Bruce Ernst)
7. In the old world, you devoted 30% of your time to building a great service and 70% of your time to shouting about it. In the new world, that inverts. (Jeff Bezos)
8. Make the customer the hero of your story. (Ann Handley)
9. It is not the employer who pays the wages. Employers only handle the money... It is the customer who pays the wages. (Henry Ford)
10. Open, honest communication is the best foundation for any relationship, but remember that at the end of the day it’s not what you say or what you do, but how you make people feel that matters the most. (Tony Hsieh)
11. A customer service apology is stronger with a personal touch. (Shep Hyken)
12. In an era when companies see online support as a way to shield themselves from costly interactions with their customers, it’s time to consider an entirely different approach: building human-centric customer service through great people and clever technology. So, get to know your customers. Humanise them. Humanise yourself. It’s worth it. (Kristin Smaby)
13. To give real service you must add something which cannot be bought or measured with money, and that is sincerity and integrity. (Don Alden Adams)
14. One of the greatest gifts you can give to anyone is the gift of attention. (Jim Rohn)
15. If we consistently exceed the expectations of employees, they will consistently exceed the expectations of our customers. (Shep Hyken)
16. Clients do not come first. Employees come first. If you take care of your employees, they will take care of the clients. (Richard Branson)
17. Employees who are controlled cannot respond caringly, you need superior knowledge and real leadership, not management. Because of this we specifically developed a selection process for leaders; we don’t hire managers. (Horst Schulze)

Advantage

Although many companies are happy to provide lip service towards their customers, there are still a surprising number of businesses that are unwilling to back it up with real client-focused service. As such, those organisations that make a determined effort to put the needs of their customers first discover a significant competitive advantage over those who do not. And given that customers prefer to do business where they feel most comfortable, that advantage quickly translates into increased profits.

1. People expect good service, but few are willing to give it. (Robert Gately)
2. In the world of Internet Customer Service, it’s important to remember your competitor is only one mouse click away. (Doug Warner)
3. Make your product easier to buy than your competition, or you will find your customers buying from them, not you. (Mark Cuban)
4. There are no traffic jams along the extra mile. (Roger Staubach)
5. 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)
6. Being on par in terms of price and quality only gets you into the game. Service wins the game. (Tony Alessandra)
7. The customer experience is the next competitive battleground. (Jerry Gregoire)
8. There are many who subscribe to the convention that service is a business cost, but our data demonstrates that superior service is an investment that can help drive business growth. Investing in quality talent, and ensuring they have the skills, training and tools that enable them to empathise and actively listen to customers are central to providing consistently excellent service experiences. (Jim Bush)
9. Good customer service costs less than bad customer service. (Sally Gronow)
10. If you a make a sale, you make a living. If you make an investment of time and good service in a customer, you can make a fortune. (John Rohn)
11. Know what your customers want most and what your company does best. Focus on where those two meet. (Kevin Stirtz)

Loyalty

It’s been said many times that it’s far more cost effective to keep an existing customer, than it is to try to find a new one. According to Bain & Company, a 5% increase in customer retention produces more than a 25% increase in profit. Dependable customer loyalty is an investment—one that pays off through increased sales and improved brand reputation. And thanks to the wonder of the internet, happy customers can now easily become brand evangelists, reaching potentially thousands of other possible clients. Of course, these advances can be a double-edged sword when it comes to unhappy clients.

1. The rise of the citizen review site is a sobering development. No longer are you on top of the mountain, blasting your marketing message down to the masses through your megaphone. All of a sudden, the masses are conversing with one another. If your service or product isn’t any good, they’ll out you. (David Pogue)
2. Always keep in mind the old retail adage: Customers remember the service a lot longer than they remember the price. (Lauren Freedman)
3. 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)
4. Whatever you do, do it well. Do it so well that when people see you do it, they will want to come back and see you do it again, and they will want to bring others and show them how well you do what you do. (Walt Disney)
5. Every employee can affect your company’s brand, not just the front-line employees that are paid to talk to your customers. (Tony Hsieh)
6. Every company’s greatest assets are its customers, because without customers there is no company. (Michael LeBoeuf)
7. Profit in business comes from repeat customers; customers that boast about your product and service, and that bring friends with them. (W. Edwards Deming)
8. Customer service represents the heart of a brand in the hearts of its customers. (Kate Nasser)
9. The way to a customer’s heart is much more than a loyalty program. Making customer evangelists is about creating experiences worth talking about. (Valeria Maltoni)
10. Every great business is built on friendship. (JC Penny)
11. The purpose of a business is to create a customer who creates customers. (Shiv Singh)
12. Any customer that walks away, disrespected and defeated, represents tens of thousands of dollars out the door, in addition to the failure of a promise the brand made in the first place. You can’t see it but it’s happening, daily. (Seth Godin)

Feedback

Businesses tend to spend a significant amount of money on analytics, just so they can gain a better understanding of customer wants, needs, and concerns. So, when a customer is willing to approach an organisation in order to talk about his or her experience, it only makes sense to listen. Whether positive or negative, feedback is invaluable, because feedback gives your organisation an opportunity to improve.

1. Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning. (Bill Gates)
2. The more you engage with customers, the clearer things become and the easier it is to determine what you should be doing. (John Russell)
3. 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)
4. Customer experience is a catalyst of transformation. It directly impacts culture, strategy, structure and all parts of a business. (Christine Crandell)
5. 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)
6. No amount of advertising can repair the damage done by failing to properly address a customer’s concern. (Albert Schindler)
7. If you make customers unhappy in the physical world, they might each tell six friends. If you make customers unhappy on the internet, they can each tell 6,000. (Jeff Bezos)
8. Customers often know more about your products than you do. Use them as a source of inspiration and ideas for product development. (David J. Greer)

Expectation

When your customers choose to do business with you, they go into the agreement with certain expectations. 76% of shoppers view customer service as a "true test" of how much a brand values them. The key to providing exceptional customer service lies in understanding those expectations, and then in exceeding them. When you provide customers with what they want, they go home satisfied, but when you can give them everything they didn’t even know they wanted, then they’ll never want to go at all.

1. Customers don’t expect you to be perfect. They do expect you to fix things when they go wrong. (Donald Porter)
2. Get closer than ever to your customers. So close that you tell them what they need well before they realise it themselves. (Steve Jobs)
3. Always do more than is required of you. (George Patton)
4. Here is a simple but powerful rule: always give people more than what they expect to get. (Nelson Boswell)
5. Customer service is an opportunity to exceed your customer's expectations. (John Jantsch)
6. When you’re trying to make an important decision, and you’re sort of divided on the issue, ask yourself: If the customer were here, what would she say? (Dharmesh Shah)
7. The golden rule for every businessman is this: 'Put yourself in your customer's place.' (Orison Swett Marden)

The world of business has changed quite a bit since Harry Gordon Selfridge decided to focus his organisation’s efforts on satisfying its clients, but the basic premise of customer service will always be the same: give customers what they want, and they’ll do the same for you. Focus on the relationship you have with your customers, and treat them with dignity, courtesy, and honesty. Know that customer service is about more than simply solving problems; it’s about making people happy. When you know what resonates with your customers, don’t just aim to meet their expectations, aim to exceed their expectations, preferably in unexpected ways. If you can master this aspect of business, then everything else should fall into place.