Providing excellent customer service has always been a top priority for companies, and it has never been as important as in 2022.
Research suggests that customer trust in brands is declining and over 50 percent believe that customer service is getting worse.
As such, many leaders are seeking inspiration from experts, industry luminaries, and top thinkers on how to improve customer service.
To help, here is a set of the best customer service quotes that motivate, inform, and inspire.
50 Thought-Provoking Customer Service Quotes
- “Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.” – Bill Gates
- “People do not care how much you know until they know how much you care.” – Teddy Roosevelt
- “People will forget what you said. They will forget what you did. But they will never forget how you made them feel.” – Maya Angelou
- “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
- “Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value.” – Albert Einstein
- “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
- “Face the simple fact before it becomes involved. Solve the small problem before it becomes big.” – Lao Tzu, Philosopher
- “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
- “Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work.” – Steve Jobs
- “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
- “It’s not the customer’s job to know what they want.” – Steve Jobs
- “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
- “Do what you do so well that they will want to see it again and bring their friends.” – Walt Disney
- “We believe that customer service shouldn’t be just a department; it should be the entire company.” – Tony Hsieh, Founder and CEO of Zappos
- “The sole reason we are in business is to make life less difficult for our clients.” – Matthew Odgers, Attorney
- “No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted.” – Aesop, Greek Fabulist and Storyteller
- “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
- “Kind words can be short and easy to speak, but their echoes are truly endless.” – Mother Teresa
- “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
- “Customers will never love a company until the employees love it first.” – Simon Sinek, Author
- “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
- “Make a customer, not a sale.” – Katherine Barchetti, Former Owner of K. Barchetti Shops
- “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
- “Quality is remembered long after the price is forgotten.” – Gucci family slogan
- “The more advocates you have, the fewer ads you have to buy.” – Dharmesh Shah, Co-founder and CTO of HubSpot
- “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
Looking for more words of wisdom to improve customer experiences? Check out our CX market guide.
