57 Customer Service Quotes to Inspire Your Team to Excellence
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Customer service is a grueling job. It’s a test of your resilience every day. It requires you to field all incoming queries from disgruntled customers with patience, empathy, and grace, all while trying to be a model professional when representing your organization. I’m out of breath just talking about it.
I’d say customer service is like a window into any organization. It tells you a lot about the people running the business. A well-oiled customer service team that’s out to ensure their customers have all the help they need is indicative of an organization that has their priorities right.
So yes, it’s a challenging job, but the work you’re doing is important not just from a business perspective but because you’re helping people get the most out of the money they’ve invested in your product/service. You’re helping others achieve their own goals.
In this article, I’ve hand-picked and put together 57 customer service quotes that will inspire you and remind you of the impact you create with your work, on difficult days. If you like any of these, I’d suggest printing them out and hanging them up by your work station!
Table of Contents
57 Inspiring Customer Service Quotes to Push You on Difficult Days
1. “If you make a sale, you can make a living. If you make an investment of time and good service, you can make a fortune.”
– Jim Rohn, entrepreneur and author
2. “To earn the respect (and eventually love) of your customers, you first have to respect those customers. That is why Golden Rule behavior is embraced by most of the winning companies.”
– Colleen Barrett, Southwest Airlines President Emerita
Recommended Read: 5 Real-Life Scenarios of Legendary Customer Service)
3. “Always keep in mind the old retail adage: Customers remember the service a lot longer than they remember the price.”
– Lauren Freedman, author and retail veteran
4.“The more advocates you have, the fewer ads you have to buy.”
– Dharmesh Shah, co-founder and CTO of Hubspot
5. “No matter how hard you try or how much you spend, your brand can’t be any better than what your customers experience.”
– Mike Wittenstein, CX leader, founder at Storyminers
6. “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
– Maya Angelou
7. “At any given time in your interaction with the customer, simply ask yourself this question: Is what I’m doing right now going to get that customer to come back next time?”
– Shep Hyken, author and keynote speaker
8. “Customer service shouldn’t just be a department, it should be the entire company.”
– Tony Hsieh, former CEO of Zappos
9. “If the shopper feels like it was poor service, then it was poor service. We are in the customer perception business.”
– Mark Perrault
10. “Building a good customer experience does not happen by accident. It happens by design.”
– Clare Muscutt, founder and CEO of Women in CX
11. “Customer experience is the next competitive battleground. It’s where business is going to be won or lost.”
– Tom Knighton
17. “Customers don’t care about your policies. Find and engage the need. Tell the customer what you can do.”
– Alice Sesay Pope, VP, Global Device, Digital and Alexa Support (D2AS)
18. “It is not the employer who pays the wages. Employers only handle the money. It is the customer who pays the wages.”
– Henry Ford
19. “Being on par in terms of price and quality only gets you into the game. Service wins the game.”
– Dr. Tony Alessandra, author and business expert
20. “To give real service, you must add something which cannot be bought or measured with money, and that is sincerity and integrity.”
– Douglas Adams, author
21. “Customers don’t expect you to be perfect. They expect you to fix things when they go wrong.”
– Donald Porter, former VP of British Airways.
22. “The key is to set realistic customer expectations, and then not to just meet them, but exceed them—preferably in unexpected and helpful ways.”
– Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Group
23. “The goal as a company is to have customer service that is not just the best, but legendary.”
– Sam Walton, founder of Walmart and Sam’s Club
24. “Courteous treatment will make a customer a walking advertisement.”
– James Cash Penny
25.“It takes months to find a customer, seconds to lose one.”
– Vince Lombardi
26. “Do what you do so well that they will want to see it again and bring their friends.”
– Walt Disney
27. “Two important things are to have a genuine interest in people and to be kind to them. Kindness, I’ve discovered, is everything.”
– Isaac Bashevis, singer and author
28. “Make every interaction count, even the small ones. They are all relevant.”
– Shep Hyken, author and keynote speaker
29. “Although your customers won’t love you if you give bad service, your competitors will.”
– Kate Zabriskie, President of Business Training Works
30. “Rule 1: The customer is always right. Rule 2: If the customer is ever wrong, re-read Rule 1.”
– Stew Leonard, founder of Stew Leonard’s
31. “You don’t earn loyalty in a day. You earn loyalty day-by-day.”
– Jeffery Gitomer
32.“It’s not the customer’s job to know what they want.”
– Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple.
33. “Thank your customer for complaining and mean it. Most will never bother to complain. They’ll just walk away.”
– Marilyn Suttle
34. “Every company’s greatest assets are its customers, because without customers there is no company.”
– Michael LeBoeuf
35. “When the customer comes first, the customer will last.”
– Robert Half
36. “Customer experience is not about creating a team of superheroes…their superpower is that they’re embedded within an organization that sets the right policies and gives the right tools.”
– Greg Melia, CEO at CXPA
37. “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.”
– Warren Buffett, CEO of Berkshire Hathaway
38. “Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.”
– Bill Gates, former CEO of Microsoft
39.“People just want things fixed quickly…at the end of the day they just want to get back to work.”
– Marti Clark, Senior Program Manager at Salesforce
40. “We have a mantra, ‘don’t be evil,’ which [means] to do the best things we know how for our users, for our customers, for everyone.”
– Larry Page, CEO of Alphabet (parent company of Google)
41. “Customers are never actually personally angry at customer service professionals. They’re angry at the company, the product, or the situation in which they find themselves. Even when they say hurtful things, it’s not because of who you are as a person at the end of the day.”
– Maria Britton, CEO of Trade Show Labs
42. “It’s very important to have a feedback loop, where you’re constantly thinking about what you’ve done and how you could be doing it better.”
– Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and founder of SpaceX
43. “One customer well taken care of could be more valuable than $10,000 worth of advertising.”
– Jim Rohn, entrepreneur and author
44. “Support leadership deserves a seat at the table, period. We’ve been conditioned for so long to believe that what we do isn’t really valuable. Because of that, we accept that we’re not invited, we don’t question why, and we lack the confidence to stand up for ourselves, our team, and the customer.”
– Sarah Caminiti, VP of Customer Success at DNSimple
Recommended read: Why Customer Support Needs a Seat at the Table
45. “The most important thing in communication is hearing what isn’t said.”
– Peter Drucker
46. “Sales without customer service is like stuffing money into a pocket full of holes.”
– David Tooman
47. “Take care of your customers, and your customers will take care of your brand.”
– Amit Sarda, business and CRM consultant
48. “Excellent firms don’t believe in excellence – only in constant improvement and constant change.”
– Tom Peters
49. “Face the simple fact before it gets involved. Solve the small problem before it becomes big.”
– Lao Tzu, Philosopher
50. “Words of comfort, skillfully administered, are the oldest therapy known to man.”
– Louis Nizer, Lawyer
51. “Goodwill is the only asset that competition cannot undersell or destroy.”
– Marshall Field
52. “Our greatest asset is the customer! Treat each customer as if they are the only one!”
– Laurice Leitao
53. “Profit is the applause you get for taking care of your customers and creating a motivating environment for your employees.”
– Anonymous
54. “The reason it seems that price is all your customers care about is that you haven’t given them anything else to care about.”
– Seth Godin, author and entrepreneur
55. “What it comes down to is treating each and every interaction the way you would if a good friend were calling and asking for help. You’d go that extra distance to make sure they have what they need.”
– Nicole Saunders, director of community at Zendesk
56. “Empathy and an open ear will take you a long way. Try to tune in to your customers and really understand what they need. Meet the customer where they are.”
– Zeenah Abouchelleih, senior customer success manager at UserVoice
57. “Customer service is not a department, it’s an attitude!”
– Anonymous
Final Word
I hope that reading these quotes has fired you up to do the best you can at work. If there’s one thing I’d like to add to this, it’s that when you actually work hard and try, the results you get, whatever they may be, are very rewarding.
Again I reiterate, customer service is a challenging job, but someone has to do it. And that someone is shouldering the burden of ensuring that the customer is happy and that the organization is well represented. That’s no small feat.
