50 customer service quotes to inspire your team

Take these 50 customer service quotes to your next meeting to help inspire you and your team to take your customer service program to the next level.

Customer service is fundamental to delivering a great experience. We’ve collated the key insights from inspirational leaders in their field, so you can motivate your workplace and team.

Here are our top customer service quotes to inspire you.

Good customer service costs are outweighed by the benefits

These customer service quotes highlight the fact that though there might be a cost to good customer service, the benefits far outweigh the price of the investment. Outstanding customer service makes your business memorable and brings customers back time after time.

1. Bruce Temkin, Head of the Qualtrics XM Institute

“The customers that have had a good CX experience are much more likely to recommend the company, forgive the company if it makes a mistake, trust the company and try new offerings.”

One of the key points Bruce makes about CX is that an organization’s customer experience is a reflection of its own culture and operating processes. And it’s so important to live this point as good CX delivers real business results.

2. Robert Chatwani, Chief Marketing Officer at Atlassian

“First and foremost, invest in building an emotional relationship with your customers, not just a functional relationship, but really forming that bond to build brand love and product love, because that, ultimately, is what leads to customer retention and happiness.”

CX can occur in any department. Even in marketing, you can make a real impact on how you help customers feel connected with your products.

3.  Jim Rohn, American entrepreneur, author and motivational speaker

“If you make a sale, you can make a living. If you make an investment of time and good service in a customer, you can make a fortune."

Customer service represents how your business cares about its target audience. The time and effort invested in how you treat customers is paid back tenfold when customers return to make further purchases, or spread the word about their positive experiences with your brand.

4.  Jerry Fritz, Director of Management Institute University of Wisconsin

"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."

It’s easy to assume that the advantage of being the lowest-cost option or providing the best product on the market will continue in perpetuity. The reality is that markets will fluctuate and change, and competition will always be just around the corner.

By investing in the aspects of customer interactions that seem more intangible - such as customer service — you’re better able to weather the changes in external conditions you can’t control.

5. Stan Phelps, author and speaker on customer experience

“Customer experience isn’t an expense. Managing customer experience bolsters your brand.”

Seeing customer service or customer experience as a costly expense can often frame customers as a burden. In truth, customers aren’t the adversary - they’re the reason your brand exists and continues to thrive.

By framing good customer service costs as an investment, rather than an unwanted expense, you’re able to better justify the expense of training staff, purchasing software and other related items you need to stand out for your customer care. It’s a brand investment — and it’ll pay dividends.

Customer perception, business value

Your customers’ view of your brand is what creates business value. If they see you as trusted experts or as reliable providers, for example, they’re more likely to return to your brand again and again. Here are some excellent customer service quotes to help your team find the right mindset when servicing your customers.

6. Kevin Stirtz, author and digital marketing expert

“Know what your customers want most and what your company does best. Focus on where those two meet."

You absolutely need to know what your customer wants. However, you also need to know what you as an organization are particularly good at. What makes you unique in the market? How do you provide that extra special something?

To have a winning product or service you must provide a solution to a customer problem and do it so well that customers don’t want to or need to go elsewhere.

7. Peter Massey, customer experience expert, keynote speaker and experienced facilitator

“Stop doing dumb things to customers.”

Straight-talking Peter gives a gem to CX teams: know what is smart to do, and know when to stop doing something that’s dumb.

Reflect on your actions and, based on your results, the quality of the idea, and the customer feedback, decide whether it was a smart action to take. If it’s not, don’t do it again.

8. Kate Zabriskie, author and customer experience consultant

“The customer’s perception is your reality.”

Your products and services are only as valuable as your customers perceive them to be. You could spend millions implementing a cool new idea, but if customers don’t perceive it to be valuable, then it’s money wasted.

Get to know what drives your customers expectations, and understand how much value they place on every part of the customer journey. Only then can you identify the impact of the changes you make to your services.

9. Larry Page, co-founder of Google

“Always deliver more than expected.”

The invention of Google was definitely more than anyone expected of a group of technology entrepreneurs. As one of the best known brands in the world, the results of Larry and others’ hard work speak for itself.

CX teams might be tempted to limit the kind of customer experiences that are on offer, but you should aim to go beyond customer expectations and offer first-class experiences that they’ll remember for longer.

10. Peter Ferdinand Drucker, Austrian-American management consultant

“Quality in a service or product is not what you put into it. It is what the customer gets out of it.”

It’s easy to get caught up in what’s the “best” in terms of products. However, even with the most effective product in the world, if the customers aren’t getting what they need out of it, it’s not really an effective product. Your customers’ view on your brand quality will be directly influenced by the way they perceive your products and services: how useful the products are, whether they solve a problem, or whether the customer service they had while purchasing was good.

Incidents of bad customer service are learning opportunities

It can be easy to see failure as a setback, but when it comes to customer service, every challenging piece of feedback can actually prove very useful in finding out what to do right. You don’t have to keep providing poor service - your business can take negative feedback and adapt its approach to improve.

Here are the top customer service quotes to help you understand why the times you get it wrong are as important as the times you get it right.

11. Robert Kiyosaki, author of ‘Rich Dad Poor Dad’

"Inside of every problem lies an opportunity."

Rather than viewing problems in your customer experiences as problems, looking at them as learning opportunities can transform your strategy. Negative customer interactions can tell your team where common problems lie, or where you’re not meeting expectations. For example, bad feedback can tell you how to increase customer satisfaction, and less-than-ideal responses to products and services can be informative for the next iteration.

12. Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft

“Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.”

While no one likes to have dissatisfied customers, Gates understands they can actually be a huge asset if companies can make improvements based on their feedback.

13. Arianna Huffington, co-founder of The Huffington Post

“Failure is not the opposite of success; it’s part of success.”

You may find that your plan might not have gone as you expected or that the research survey you conducted didn’t give you the results you were hoping for — not to worry, it’s all part of the process. You’re on your way to better CX design and experiences, by knowing what works and what doesn’t.

14. Meg Whitman, American business executive, former political candidate, and philanthropist

“The price of inaction is far greater than the cost of a mistake.”

If you’re one of those CX teams or leaders that is under pressure to make the ‘right’ decision before they act, it can be daunting to know what route to take — so much so that you end up not taking any action at all.

It’s better to start to act on good data and analysis and make a mistake, than to try and control all factors before acting. This can prevent key opportunities from passing you by, or risking your product or service becoming irrelevant in your market.

15. Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon

“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 friends.”

The accessibility of the internet and the increasing number of social media sites and review services mean that more and more people are connected.

While this opens doors for organizations to enter new markets, it also means that customers are more aware of what goes on, as it happens.

A slip up or a bad review will reach more people and could impact your brand image. Take the right steps to protect your brand online by keeping your CX at the heart of your strategy.

16. Sam Walton, founder of Walmart

“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.”

Every customer is important. One customer has the power to influence others through their reviews, become a brand ambassador through their support and keep your bottom line growing with their continued customer loyalty.

When your target customers are spending their money elsewhere, your competitors are doing something better than you or your current offering isn’t what the customer wants. If the product is right, is the customer’s experience lacking?

17. Jay Baer, founder of Convince and Convert

Social media expert Jay Baer says we must respond to all social media comments  — especially if they’re negative.

“A lack of response is a response. It’s a response that says, ‘We don’t care about you very much.’

It’s harder to respond to the negative comments, but remember on social media every interaction is public. So if people see you don’t respond, they too are likely to think you don’t care. Better to show them you care and have a public record of you putting it right than to have nothing at all."

18. Seymour Fine, author of ‘The Marketing of Ideas and Social Issues’

"When a customer complains, he is doing you a special favor; he is giving you another chance to serve him to his satisfaction. You will appreciate the importance of this opportunity when you consider that the customer's alternative option was to desert you for a competitor."

When you provide great customer service, you’re not just ensuring you make a sale — you’re actively preventing customers from going to the competition. Businesses should reframe the cost of negative experiences as potential revenue loss; rather than seeing the investment into customer service as a high cost, they should view it as a cost-effective way to increase opportunities to win over and keep customers.

19. Will Rogers, American vaudeville performer and actor

“Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment.”

Your business won’t always get it right. Company approaches aren’t infallible — there will always be a better way to meet customers’ expectations for great customer service.

Sometimes, the best business strategy is to make mistakes and learn from them. Testing out theories and approaches and seeing what works and what doesn’t is the best way to know the right path to take. Customer requirements and desires will constantly change, so sometimes it’s best to test out a theory without knowing it’ll be successful.

Business approaches can greatly influence customers’ view of your value

How you approach customer service can have a huge impact on how customers see your business. When you demonstrate that your business is empathetic, authentic and transparent - as well as living up to company promises — customers perceive your brand in a much more positive light, spending more.

Read through our top customer service quotes on the best approaches to customer care.

20. Jeanne Bliss, author of ‘Chief Customer 2.0’

“Customer experience to me is leadership bravery. The companies that are most admired are growing with their values and are choosing how they will grow and how they will not grow.”

Leaders are responsible for the livelihoods of their employees, and they should act in accordance with core values that employees and customers will respect.

At an employee level, this might look like removing practices that might inhibit employees from acting in good conscience or extending their care arrangements. Customers are aware of and treated according to the company values, which also will trickle down to the products and services.

21. Marilyn Suttle, customer service speaker and consultant

“How you think about your customer influences how you respond to them.”

You want to get to know your customers. You may send out many surveys, conduct research and have customer personas that give you deep insights into who they are. Now what?

You need to put it into practice, so ask whether your frontline employees understand it, and identify ways to help them get closer to your customers because, ultimately, they’re the ones talking to them every day so the better you equip them, the better they can deliver on expectations.

22. Dr. Maya Angelou, American poet, memoirist and civil rights activist

“People will soon forget what you said. They will NEVER forget how you made them feel.”

At a fundamental human level, all people want to feel safe and secure throughout their lives — whether it’s how they’re addressed, how they’re talked about, or how they’re served.

When a negative interaction occurs, the feelings people experience are more deeply internalized and remembered than those from good experiences. So make sure you’re not only focused on designing the experiences people want next, but closing experience gaps too, to prevent bad experiences overshadowing everything else.

23. Aristotle, Greek philosopher

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act but a habit.”

Aristotle remains one of the greatest minds on what makes us human. This quote highlights that ‘practice makes perfect’ and can be applied to organizations and teams that want to perform at their best every time.

How does your team implement processes and best practices that ensure the right actions happen each and every time?

24. Clare Muscutt, Chief Executive Officer of Women in CX

“Building a good customer experience does not happen by accident. It happens by design.”

Organizations and teams need to think strategically about how they want to engineer good customer service experiences.

Try useful tools like journey mapping, customer feedback surveys and market research to learn the lay of the land. But then take a step back and see how you can design experiences that matter.

25. Tony Hsieh, American Internet entrepreneur and venture capitalist

“Customer service shouldn’t be a department, it should be the entire company.”

The most successful companies operate with a customer-first culture. It’s not just the job of customer support agents to understand and respond to the customer, but everyone in the company, whether they’re customer-facing or not.

26. Jodie Shaw, Chief Marketing Officer of The Alternative Board

“Always begin with: 'So that I can better serve you, do you mind if I ask a few questions?'”

Getting the results you need from customer research can be hard. Engagement may be low or people may not want to help you. This might be down to simply not understanding what’s in it for them.

If customers have a clear understanding of why your CX research will help them, then they will be more willing to help.

27. Aimee Lucas, Senior Principal Analyst at Qualtrics XM Institute

Aimee has uncovered the six competencies and actions needed to design and deliver world-class customer experiences.

“Organizations must master these in order to build a sustainable foundation for success.

They are:

• Respond
• Enlighten
• Activate
• Realize
• Lead
• Disrupt”

How does your organization and your team explore these actions?

28.  Henry Ford, founder of the Ford Motor Company

“Most people spend more time and energy going around problems than in trying to solve them.”

Rather than figuring out the quick fixes and workarounds for issues, successful businesses detect and solve the problems that their customers are facing. Delve into why a customer complains, and figure out what changes would result in a satisfied customer, then actually make the change. The best customer service takes place behind the scenes, almost outside of customer perception, but it can make or break experiences.

29. Laozi / Lao Tzu, Chinese philosopher

"Face the simple fact before it comes involved. Solve the small problem before it becomes big."

Sometimes in the interest of short-term business outcomes, great customer service is put on the backburner. Little problems are left aside in your top level strategy because they’re not critical at that moment - but these smaller issues can add up and become larger issues, getting in the way of good customer service.

Tackling smaller issues that cause friction or irritation is important for avoiding the customer perception that you’re providing a poor service. It shouldn’t be the customer’s job to overcome little instances of irritation to get through your customer journey — you should be providing a smooth, satisfactory experience every time.

30. Christopher McCormick, CEO of L.L Bean

"A lot of people have fancy things to say about customer service, but it's just a day-in, day-out, ongoing, never-ending, persevering, compassionate kind of activity."

When you provide the best customer service, it should be the baseline. By approaching great customer care as the standard, it becomes an automatic habit for your employees, your product designers and your front-line customer care staff. It doesn’t have to be a big effort — sometimes, it’s all about small gestures and generally courteous treatment.

31. Earl Nightingale V, American author and radio host

“Our attitude towards others determines their attitude towards us.”

If a business doesn’t respect its customers’ time and effort, those customers won’t provide that same respect towards that brand. When deliveries take too long or help isn’t available, most unhappy customers will choose to leave or not buy again. By repeatedly showing customers that your brand sees them as valuable and worth the time, a satisfied customer will have the same attitude towards your business.

32. Brad Cleveland, customer experience author and motivational speaker

“There’s no technology that can be ‘The Answer’ to a better customer experience in the absence of effective strategy and planning.”

It’s not always about having the flashiest, newest technology in your tech stack. Often, it’s about planning carefully and having an adaptive, iterative business strategy. Learning from customer feedback, understanding what constitutes bad customer service and what your audience will love is frequently more effective than having expensive software that’s deployed without a plan.

33. Anonymous

“Why is it a ‘close’ if it’s supposed to be the start of a customer relationship?”

All interactions with a customer count towards the brand-audience relationship. Rather than viewing interactions as a one-time occurrence with a definitive, financially-driven end — a ‘close’  — businesses should see each incident as part of a longer-term relationship.

Helping employees to see that the overall relationship is more important than one sale is a good way to ensure customer service is always customer-centric.

Understand your customers at their core for good customer service

It’s not a customer’s job to tell you who they are and what they want. Your business needs to understand customers at their core to correctly deliver experiences that resonate.

One of a company’s greatest assets is the data customers provide, so leverage that to ensure you’re able to provide the best customer service that’s tailored to your audience.

Here are our picks of customer service quotes to help inspire you to understand your customers better.

34. Steve Jobs, co-founder and former CEO of Apple

“Get closer than ever to your customers. So close that you tell them what they need well before they realize it themselves.”

Customer research and an insights-first culture can help you understand your customers’ needs in ways you couldn’t do without research.

If you know what your customers believe, represent, care about and want then you can design the experiences they want next, rather than focus your time firefighting and resolving bad experiences.

35. Hazel Edwards, owner of Gillian Roberts Bridal Boutique

“Ease your customers’ pain.”

Who is your customer and what is their problem? What keeps them up at night? What causes them pain in their day-to-day lives?

You don’t need to tell the customer what they need, they should be telling you that. Once you have this information, you have the ability to help them. Who wouldn’t pay money for that? Form a strong emotional connection to your customers, and you’ll have customers for life.

36. Annette Franz, internationally recognized customer experience thought leader

“You can’t transform something you don’t understand. If you don’t know and understand what the current state of the customer experience is, how can you possibly design the desired future state?”

Great customer service is not just about giving your customers what they want in that moment. It’s about understanding how your customer experience is now and what customers will want in the future.

Winning companies know they need to predict what’s coming to stay ahead of the competition. Take the temperature of your customer service on a regular basis and see where you can improve over time to ensure you’re always top of mind for your audience.

37. Harper Lee, author of ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’

“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view.”

Getting into the mindset of your customers and really understanding how they see the world is the best way to give them what they want and need. A successful sales team gives the customer not only what they’re looking for, but what they don’t realize they need.

In the same way, great customer service should anticipate what customers will require and want by getting under the skin of what frustrates them and delights them. By coming from this approach of understanding, you’re more likely to have happy customers.

38. Albert Einstein, German-born theoretical physicist

“Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value.”

Many enterprises aim to achieve the goal of financial success. However, in that pursuit of higher revenue, the purpose of the business can be lost. At its heart, a business should focus on being valuable to customers. What needs does your product or service meet? What value does your team’s output bring to the lives of your customers?

Customer service should focus more on the value of each interaction to the customer, rather than the financial outcome that can be gained. To do so, you’ll need to really get to the bottom of what customers value and how you can provide that value to them.

39. Zig Ziglar, American author and motivational speaker

“People don’t buy for logical reasons. They buy for emotional reasons.”

Customers are driven by how they feel. What does your brand do to make them feel satisfied during their experience? What emotions can you tap into to ensure your customer service hits the mark every time?

Don’t just talk the talk - walk the walk

It’s easy to tell customers you care, but it’s often much harder to prove it. Stand out among your competitors by following through on promises and ensuring that courteous treatment is just the baseline of your customer approach.

Turn your customers into a walking advertisement of your business by taking the following customer service quotes to heart.

40. Elizabeth Stokoe, British scientist and professor of social interaction, Loughborough University

“We all talk, but we don’t really know how.”

Talking is so fundamental in communicating and everyone can do it. However, knowing ‘how’ to talk to achieve a goal or get something can be tricky. Sometimes the words don’t have the desired effect.

In customer service, using the right words can help engage customers and prevent them from having a bad experience. Take the time to ensure your agents have the training they need to engage with customers in the most effective way. From expanding their knowledge about your products and services to helping to coach them based on customer feedback, there’s plenty that leadership can do to help agents get their words right.

41. Dr. Geetha Murali, Chief Executive Officer of Room to Read

“We just don't just talk. We don't just write white papers. We are implementers at our core. We deliver programs. Most of our staff is in the field, in the schools, working directly with communities. So we learn quickly. We course correct. We do it again. We know what we're good at doing and we make sure we do as much of that good as possible. It's a commitment to action.”

Geeta says that action and a focus on delivery to match her ambition is how Room to Read became a global brand.

The focus on delivery, and perfecting the delivery with course correcting, learning and making adjustments, is something that any CX delivery team can implement. Keep a firm view of your goals and be ambitious.

42. Marco Bizzarrik, former President and CEO of Gucci

"An authentic and honest brand narrative is fundamental today; otherwise, you will simply be edited out."

Staying authentic and true to your brand and the promises you make to your customers can help you avoid sloppy customer service. When expectations aren’t met or promises are broken, unhappy customers will leave and find another business that they feel takes care of their interests.

Don’t just talk about how you treat customers. Follow through on the brand promises that lured those customers to your business in the first place - otherwise, your mission statement is just describing a nice intention.

43. Simon Mainwaring, author of ‘We First: How Brands and Consumers Use Social Media to Build a Better World’

"The keys to brand success are self-definition, transparency, authenticity and accountability."

The best business strategy is to reassure customers that they can trust you. In a world where artificial intelligence (AI) and extensive data-gathering is common, customers are looking to brands to assure them that their trust is warranted. By being demonstrably authentic, transparent and accountable — not just saying that you are in your mission statement — your business can build a strong foundation of brand trust.

44. Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Group

“The key is to set realistic customer expectations, and then not to just meet them, but exceed them — preferably in unexpected and helpful ways.”

It’s no good lying to your customers about what you can offer them — they’ll soon find out, and be very vocal about it. Setting realistic customer expectations about the service they can receive, and following through on those promises, is key for customer retention.

Even better than meeting expectations is to go beyond. How can you thrill your customers? What would make their experience not just good, but memorable?

Your employees’ experiences matter too

Real service begins within your business. How will you encourage your team to provide better service, when you’re not offering them a great service to start with?

Your greatest asset is your team. Invest in their interest and listen closely to their feedback to ensure you’re empowering them to fulfill their responsibilities towards your customers.

Here are our top customer service quotes on employee approaches.

45. J.W. Marriott, former chairman of the Board at Marriott International

"Take care of associates and they'll take care of your customers.”

There’s an undeniable link between employee experience and customer experience. Happier employees go on to provide better support to customers, who have a better experience overall.

According to Gallup, highly engaged workplaces saw a 10% increase in customer ratings and a 20% increase in sales.

46. Shep Hyken, keynote speaker on customer service

“If we consistently exceed the expectations of employees, they will consistently exceed the expectations of our customers.”

Your frontline staff are the face of your business. They’re the ones solving your customers’ issues, reassuring them that they will receive a great product or service. It makes sense, then, to treat those who represent your business with care.

The employee experience begins at the first encounter — how you hire employees, onboard them and outline their future with the business is as important as how you treat them ongoing. Employees’ expectations should be met and even exceeded to ensure that they are happy in their roles, and that they can pass on that joy for their job to your customers.

47. William Clement Stone, American businessman

“Sales are contingent upon the attitude of the salesman, not the attitude of the prospect.”

Much like sales, customer service interactions can be made or broken by the attitude of your employees. Even if a customer is approaching your customer service team with a frustrated or angry attitude, the right response can transform the interaction from negative to positive.

Ensuring you’re providing your employees with the right support and ensuring they are happy in their roles can go a long way to changing the dynamic between customer and staff member.

48. Tim Fargo, American author and keynote speaker

“Leadership is service, not position.”

Great leadership enables your team to achieve great things. Your leadership should reflect how you want your employees to approach customer service; with an empathetic, open mind, where you assume positive intent and understand how to connect with the other person.

Caring is critical

Providing products or services for customers isn’t just about fulfilling a need - it’s often about transforming lives.

Here are some final inspirational customer service quotes to get you thinking about the “why” behind providing great customer service.

49. Winston Churchill, former British Prime Minister

“We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.”

It’s important to remember the bigger picture when thinking about customer service. Even if the product your company sells can seem trivial, you’re meeting customers’ needs - and the experience you provide might be one your customer remembers for a lifetime.

Successful businesses help their employees, product developers and other team members to remember that customer service is about human connection above all else.

50. George R. Bach, clinical psychologist and founder of the Institute of Group Psychotherapy

“Caring has the gift of making the ordinary special.”

Provide something extra for your customers, and they’ll come back for the same experience again. Demonstrating care in every interaction with your customer base - from selling a product to fielding a complaint, from your social media advertising to your website design - means that your customer service becomes special.