“Customers encounter disjointed and frustrating experiences while languishing on the receiving end of long holds, multiple transfers, and unsatisfactory resolutions.”
The top line from a 2025 Microsoft report – which claims customer service is broken – echoes the wider sentiments of customer trust in brands’ customer service.
As customer experience continues to be the top priority for businesses, curbing these trends and perceptions is top of many business’s agenda.
For inspiration, CX Today has compiled 67 customer service quotes from some of the most recognizable names in CX and beyond.
67 Thought-Provoking Customer Service Quotes
- “Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.” – Bill Gates, CEO of Microsoft.
- “People do not care how much you know until they know how much you care.” – Teddy Roosevelt, 26th US President.
- “People will forget what you said. They will forget what you did. But they will never forget how you made them feel.” – Maya Angelou, Poet and Civil Rights Activist.
- “Always begin with: ‘So that I can better serve you, do you mind if I ask a few questions?'” – Jodie Shaw, CMO at The Alternative Board
- “Until you understand your customers – deeply and genuinely – you cannot truly serve them.” – Rasheed Ogunlaru, Author.
- “Customer service is not a department; it’s everyone’s job.” – Ken Blanchard, Author, and Motivational Speaker.
- “It is so much easier to be nice, to be respectful, to put yourself in your customers’ shoes and try to understand how you might help them before they ask for help, than it is to try to mend a broken customer relationship.” – Mark Cuban, American Business Owner.
- “When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but creatures of emotion.” – Dale Carnegie, Writer and Teacher.
- “You don’t earn loyalty in a day. You earn loyalty day-by-day.” – Jeffrey Gitomer, Author.
- “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.
- “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.” – Jim Rohn, Author.
- “Know what your customers want most and what your company does best. Focus on where those two meet.” – Kevin Stirtz, Author.
- “The purpose of a business is to create a customer who creates customers.” – Shiv Singh, Writer.
- “When you assume negative intent, you’re angry. If you take away that anger and assume positive intent, you will be amazed.” – Indra Nooyi, Former CEO of PepsiCo.
- “The best advertising you can have is a loyal customer spreading the word about how incredible your business is.” – Shep Hyken, Motivational Speaker.
- “Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value.” – Albert Einstein, Theoretical Physicist.
- “What do we live for if not to make life less difficult for each other?” – George Eliot, Novelist
- “The world is moved not only by the mighty shoves of the heroes, but also by the aggregate of the tiny pushes of each honest worker.” – Helen Keller, Author and Speaker
- “Courteous treatment will make a customer a walking advertisement.” – James Cash Penney, Founder J.C. Penney Stores
- “We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It’s our job to make the customer experience a little bit better.” – Jeff Bezos, Executive Chairman, Amazon.
- “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 Kroc, Founder of McDonald’s
- “Good customer service costs less than bad customer service.” – Sally Gronow, Customer Manager at Welsh Water
- “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.” – Christopher McCormick, CEO of L.L Bean
- “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, Director of Management Institute University of Wisconsin
- “Quality in a service or product is not what you put into it. It is what the customer gets out of it.” – Peter Drucker, Management Consultant, Educator, and Author
- “A brand is no longer what we tell the customer it is – it is what customers tell each other it is.” – Scott Cook, Co-Founder of Intuit
- “A business absolutely devoted to service will have only one worry about profits. They will be embarrassingly large.” – Henry Ford, Founder of the Ford Motor Company
- “The sole reason we are in business is to make life less difficult for our clients.” – Matthew Odgers, Attorney
- “The only right way to run a company — and the most profitable way — is to saturate your company with the voice of the customer.” – Richard C. Whiteley, Author
- “If you’re not serving the customer, your job is to be serving someone who is.” – Jan Carlzon, former CEO of SAS
- “Customer service is the new marketing; it’s what differentiates one business from another.” – Jay Baer, Motivational Speaker
- “The goal as a company is to have customer service that is not just the best but legendary.” – Sam Walton, Founder of Wal-Mart
- “Customer service is an opportunity to exceed your customer’s expectations.” – John Jantsch, Author
- “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, Former CEO Whole Foods Market
- “To achieve consistently terrific customer service, you must hire wonderful people who believe in your company’s goals, habitually do better than the norm and will love their jobs; make sure that their ideas and opinions are heard and respected; then give them the freedom to help and solve problems for your customers.” – Richard Branson, Co-founder Virgin Group.
- “People don’t notice whether it’s winter or summer when they’re happy.” – Anton Chekhov, Playwright
- “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 Buffet, CEO of Berkshire Hathaway
- “The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.” – Mahatma Gandhi, Civil Rights Activist and Lawyer
- “Do what you do so well that they will want to see it again and bring their friends.” – Walt Disney, President, Walt Disney Company
- “We believe that customer service shouldn’t be just a department; it should be the entire company.” – Tony Hsieh, Founder and CEO of Zappos
- “No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted.” – Aesop, Greek Fabulist and Storyteller
- “Kind words can be short and easy to speak, but their echoes are truly endless.” – Mother Teresa, Saint
- “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
- “You can’t expect your employees to exceed the expectations of your customers if you don’t exceed the employees’ expectations of management.” – Howard Schultz, CEO Starbucks Coffee
- “The customer’s perception is your reality.” – Kate Zabriskie, Author
- “Customer service can be – ought to be – an intrinsically rewarding profession.” – Peggy Carlaw; Vasudha K. Deming, The Big Book of Customer Service Training Games
- “The only purpose of ‘customer service’ is to change feelings.” – Seth Godin, Author
- “There are no traffic jams on the extra mile.” – Roger Staubach, NFL Hall of Famer
- “Success is not defined by the ability to have no complaints, it is defined by the ability to deal with them.” — Mikkel Svane, Founder and CEO of Zendesk
- “Ask your customers to be part of the solution, and don’t view them as part of the problem.” – Alan Weiss, Ph.D., Consultant, Speaker, and Author
- “In the world of Internet Customer Service, it’s important to remember your competitor is only one mouse click away.” – Douglas A. Warner III, American Banker
- “After-sales service is more important than assistance before sales. It is though such service that one gets permanent customers.” – Kōnosuke Matsushita, Founder of Panasonic
- “If you are tuned out of your own emotions, you will be poor at reading them in other people.” – Daniel Goleman, Ph.D., Author
- “You need to get to the future, ahead of your customers, and be ready to greet them when they arrive.” – Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce
- “The customer is often wrong, but it’s our job to help them become right.” – Jeff Toister, CX Author and Trainer
- “Satisfaction is a rating. Loyalty is a brand.” – Shep Hyken, CX Author
- “We don’t want to push our ideas on to customers, we simply want to make what they want.” — Laura Ashley, Fashion Designer and Businesswoman
- “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, Author
- “We have entered the era of the customers. Today, providing customers with outstanding customer service is essential to building loyal customers and a long-lasting brand.” – Jerry Gregoire, Chairman of Redbird Flight Simulations, Inc
- “Moving customers from intellectual loyalty to emotional loyalty is the name of the game in customer success.” – Arti Patel, Journalist
- “If you are not taking care of your customers, your competitor will.” – Bob Hooey, Author
- “Building a good customer experience does not happen by accident. It happens by design.” – Clare Muscutt, Founder and CEO of Women in CX
- “The best advertising you can have is a loyal customer spreading the word about how incredible your business is.” – Shep Hyken, Motivational Speaker
- “A satisfied customer is the best business strategy of all.” – Michael LeBoeuf, Author
- “Customer service is the new marketing.” – Derek Sivers, Author
- “Customer service is about empathy. It’s about understanding the customer’s needs and meeting them.” – Damon Richard, Customer Care Expert
- “Customer service is the experience we deliver to our customer. It’s the promise we keep to the customer. It’s how we follow through for the customer. It’s how we make them feel when they do business with us.” – Shep Hyken, Motivational Speaker
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