Compiled by Omar Zaibak
Customer service is growing in importance as a competitive business differentiator heading into the new year. Here is a collection of 50 of the most inspiring and useful customer service quotes to keep in mind: Compiled by Omar Zaibak.
- The goal as a company is to have customer service that is not just the best but legendary.
Sam Walton, Founder of Wal-Mart - Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.
Bill Gates - It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.
Charles Darwin - It is not the employer who pays the wages. Employers only handle the money. It is the customer who pays the wages.
Henry Ford - Well done is better than well said.
Benjamin Franklin - 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 - Kind words can be short and easy to speak, but their echos are truly endless.
Mother Teresa - If you do build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful.
Jeff Bezos, CEO Amazon.com - 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 - The customer experience is the next competitive battleground.
Jerry Gregoire, CIO, Dell Computers - Customer satisfaction is worthless. Customer loyalty is priceless.
Jeffrey Gitomer - 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 - To understand the man, you must first walk a mile in his moccasin.
North American Indian Proverb - 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 - Good service is good business.
Siebel Ad - 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 - 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 - One of the deep secrets of life is that all that is really worth doing is what we do for others.
Lewis Carol - Being on par in terms of price and quality only gets you into the game. Service wins the game.
Tony Allesandra - 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 - Every great business is built on friendship.
JC Penney - If we do not lay out ourselves in the service of mankind whom should we serve?
John Adams - 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 - If you’re not serving the customer, your job is to be serving someone who is.
Jan Carlzon, ex-CEO SAP Group - If you want to lift yourself up, lift up someone else.
Booker T. Washington - In the world of Internet Customer Service, it’s important to remember your competitor is only one mouse click away.
Doug Warner - Know what your customers want most and what your company does best. Focus on where those two meet.
Kevin Stirtz - 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 - Make a customer, not a sale.
Katherine Barchetti - If you do build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful.
Jeff Bezos, CEO Amazon.com - Customer service is not a department, it’s everyone’s job.
Anonymous - 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 - Make your product easier to buy than your competition, or you will find your customers buying from them, not you.
Mark Cuban - If you do build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful.
Jeff Bezos, CEO Amazon.com - 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 - 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 - 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 - 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 - 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 - 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 - 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 - The nature of any human being, certainly anyone on Wall Street, is ‘the better deal you give the customer, the worse deal it is for you’.
Bernie Madoff… - 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 - 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 - 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 - 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 - 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 - The most important adage and the only adage is, the customer comes first, whatever the business, the customer comes first.
Kerry Stokes - I won’t complain. I just won’t come back
Brown & Williamson Tobacco Ad - Customer service is just a day in, day out ongoing, never ending, unremitting, persevering, compassionate, type of activity.
Leon Gorman, CEO L.L.Bean