100 Excellent Customer Service Quotes

Every good company wants to provide excellent customer service, but it’s not always easy to balance that with other business needs and goals. Sometimes, it can help to get inspiration from what others have found to be true.

That’s why we’ve asked customer service experts to share their best motivational customer service quotes that their teams lives by. The list contains quotes from public figures, as well as personal customer quotes that our industry experts and trusted consultants panel have developed.

So why not motivate your teams by making sure that you hang some of these inspirational customer service quotes on the walls of your contact centre…

1. “There are no traffic jams along the extra mile.” – Roger Staubach

2. “Satisfaction is a rating. Loyalty is a brand.” – Shep Hyken

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

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

5. “Make a customer, not a sale.” – Katherine Barchetti

6. “There is place in the world for any business that takes care of its customers – after the sale.” – Harvey MacKay

7. “You’ll never have a product or price advantage again. They can be too easily duplicated. But a strong customer service culture cannot be copied.” – Jerry Fritz

8. “Our attitude towards others determines their attitude towards us.” – Earl Nightingale

9. “How you think about your customer influences how you respond to them.” – Marilyn Suttle

10. “If people believe they share values with a company, they will stay loyal to the brand” – Howard Schultz

11. “People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.” – Theodore Roosevelt

12. “It is not the employer who pays the wages. Employers only handle the money. It is the customer who pays the wages.” – Henry Ford

13. “A brand is no longer what we tell the customer it is – it is what customers tell each other it is.” – Scott Cook

14. “Customers will never love a company until the employees love it first.” – Simon Sinek

15. “If you are not taking care of your customer, your competitor will.” – Bob Hooey

16. “Nothing is so contagious as enthusiasm.” – Samuel Taylor Coleridge

17. “Being on par in terms of price and quality only gets you into the game. Service wins the game.” – Tony Alessandra

18.  “When you serve the customer better, they always return on your investment.” – Kara Parlin

19. “Ask your customers to be part of the solution, and don’t view them as part of the problem.” – Alan Weiss

20. “Courteous treatment will make a customer a walking advertisement.” – J. C. Penny

21. “It takes months to find a customer… seconds to lose one.” –  Vince Lombardi

22. “Be genuine. Be remarkable. Be worth connecting with.” – Seth Godin

23. “The customer is why we are here. If we take good care of them, they’ll give us good reason to come back.” – Jenny McKenzie

24. “Great customer service doesn’t mean that the customer is always right, it means that the customer is always honoured.” – Chris LoCurto

25. “Kind words can be short and easy to speak, but their echoes are truly endless.” – Mother Teresa

26. “Customers who are merely satisfied remain your customers only as long as everything goes their way.” – Chip Bell

27. “A brand for a company is like a reputation for a person. You earn reputation by trying to do hard things well.” – Jeff Bezos

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

29. “Customers don’t expect you to be perfect. But they do expect you to fix things when they go wrong.” – Donald Porter

30. “People will soon forget what you said. They will NEVER forget how you made them feel.” – Dr Maya Angelou

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

32. “Companies designed for success in the 20th century won’t be successful in the 21st”– Kevin Howard

33. “One customer well taken care of could be more valuable than $10,000 worth of advertising.”– Jim Rohn

34. “Management is doing thing right; leadership is doing the right things.” – Peter Drucker

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

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

37. “The more you engage with customers, the clearer things become and the easier it is to determine what you should be doing.” – John Russell

38. “Every day we’re saying, ‘How can we keep the customer happy? How can we get ahead in innovation by doing this?’… because if we don’t, somebody else will.”– Bill Gates

39. “The purpose of a business is to create and keep customers.” – Theodore Levitt

40. “If you’re not serving the customer, your job is to be serving someone who is.” – Jan Carlzon

41. “Customer experience is the next competitive battleground. It’s where business is going to be won or lost.” – Tom Knighton

42. “The customer’s perception is your reality.” – Kate Zabriskie

43. “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

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

45. “After-sales service is more important than assistance before sales. It is though such service that one gets permanent customers.” – Kōnosuke Matsushita

46. “Success is the sum of small efforts, repeated day in and day out.” – Robert Collier

47. “Revolve your world around the customer and more customers will revolve around you.” – Heather Williams

48. “Consumers are statistics. Customers are people.” – Stanley Marcus

49. “The magic ‘mind reading’ anticipatory service phrase is: ‘If that was me, what would I want?'” – Steve Cokkinias

50. “Understanding what customers do allows you to predict what they will do next.” – Colin Shaw

51. “One thing talk can’t accomplish, however, is communication. This is because everybody’s talking too much to pay attention to what anyone else is saying.” – P. J. O’Rourke

52. “Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply.” – Stephen R. Covey

53. “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics.” – Benjamin Disraeli

54. “Look after the customer and the business will take care of itself.” – Ray Kroc

55. “If you are tuned out of your own emotions, you will be poor at reading them in other people.” – Daniel Goleman

56. “Focus on your customer and lead your people as though their lives depend on your success.” – Warren Buffett

57. “You need to get to the future, ahead of your customers, and be ready to greet them when they arrive.” – Marc Benioff

58. “When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but creatures of emotion.” – Dale Carnegie

59. “Greatness is not a function of circumstance. Greatness, it turns out, is largely a matter of conscious choice, and discipline.” – James C. Collins

60. “Motivation comes from working on things we care about. It also comes from working with people we care about.” – Sheryl Sandberg

61. “We must learn what customers really want, not what they say they want or what we think they should want.” – Eric Ries

62. “If you cannot do great things, do small things in a great way.” – Napoleon Hill

63. “You can choose courage or you can choose comfort. You cannot have both.” – Brené Brown

64. “Failure is not the opposite of success; it’s part of success.” – Arianna Huffington

65. “In the long arc of time, you are only relevant if customers love you.” – Tim Cook

66. “Body language and tone of voice – not words – are our most powerful assessment tools.” – Christopher Voss

67. “The idea is to go from numbers to information to understanding.” – Hans Rosling

68. “Expecting people to reflect the productivity patterns of machinery is crazy if we also expect them to be creative, present and engaged.” – Martin Hill-Wilson

69. “My definition of ‘innovative’ is providing value to the customer.” – Mary Barra

70. “Culture in a company is: how do people behave when you’re not looking.” – Ben Horowitz

71. “Customer service shouldn’t just be a department, it should be the entire company.” – Tony Hsieh

72. “Leaders must exemplify integrity and earn the trust of their teams through their everyday actions.” – Marillyn Hewson

73. “If you wonder what getting and keeping the right employees has to do with getting and keeping the right customers, the answer is everything.” – Frederick Reichheld

74. “Stop doing dumb things to customers.” – Peter Massey

75. “The rules of customer experience management haven’t changed all that much. You still need to be proactive, preventative and personal.” – John Goodman

76. “Customer service is the new marketing, it’s what differentiates one business from another.” – Jay Baer

77. “Companies must realize that they are no longer competing against the guy down the street… they’re competing with every other experience a customer has.” – Dan Gingiss

78. “We all talk, but we don’t really know how.” – Elizabeth Stokoe

79. “The customer is often wrong, but it’s our job to help them become right.” – Jeff Toister

80. “Customer experiences that eliminate confusion, uncertainty and anxiety reap the rewards, generating a competitive advantage, loyalty and a peerless brand image.” – Matt Watkinson

81. “I think of customer service as an offence and not a defence.” – Gary Vaynerchuk

82. “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

83. “In a world where products and services are becoming more and more commoditized, customer experience is the only true differentiator.” – Annette Franz

84. “The aim is to get someone to want to buy quickly. Without thinking too much about it.” – Robert B. Cialdini

85. “Unless you have a vision, you haven’t begun to do the practice that makes you great.” – Angela Duckworth

86. “Service, in short, is not what you do, but who you are.” – Betsy Sanders

87. “The best form of customer service is self-service. Constantly empower customers to get their own answers themselves.” – Dan Pena

88. “Important achievements require a clear focus, all-out effort, and a bottomless trunk full of strategies.” – Carol S. Dweck

89. “Customer service, they say, is dead. Actually, it isn’t. It’s just hiding behind a call centre in Manila.” – Timothy Noah

90. “The best performers set goals that are not about the outcome but about the process of reaching the outcome.” – Geoff Colvin

91. “Customers who love you will market for you more powerfully than you can possibly market yourself.” – Jeanne Bliss

92. “Every single debate about every single decision was framed around doing the right thing for the customer.” – Ronan Dunne

93. “Sell good merchandise at a reasonable profit, treat your customers like human beings and they’ll always come back for more.” – L.L. Bean

94. “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

95. “A brand is what a business does, reputation is what people remember.” – Ted Rubin

96. “Customer service is just a day in, day out ongoing, never ending, unremitting, persevering, compassionate, type of activity.” – Leon Gorman

97. “The price of inaction is far greater than the cost of a mistake.” – Meg Whitman

98. “As a leader, it is important to not just see your own success but focus on the success of others.” – Sundar Pichai

99. “Customers don’t care about your policies. Find and engage the need. Tell the customer what you can do.” – Alice Sesay Pope

To find contact centre-specific service quotes, read our page: Top 25 Call Centre Motivational Quotes

For more thought-provoking customer service guidance, read our articles:

• The Top 10 Customer Service Strategies That Stand the Test of Time
• How to Achieve Excellent Customer Service Through Coaching
• What “Going the Extra Mile” REALLY Means in Customer Service

Author: Rachael Trickey
Reviewed by: Jo Robinson