Customer service Words of Wisdom
Collected by Kate Baker, advisor with the NY SBDC office in Albany
1. The goal as a company is to have customer service that is not just the best but legendary.
Sam Walton, Founder of Wal-Mart
2. Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.
Bill Gates
3. It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.
Charles Darwin
4. It is not the employer who pays the wages. Employers only handle the money. It is the customer who pays the wages.
Henry Ford
5. Well done is better than well said.
Benjamin Franklin
6. Spend a lot of time talking to customers face to face. You’d be amazed how many companies don’t listen to their customers.
Ross Perot
7. Kind words can be short and easy to speak, but their echoes are truly endless.
Mother Teresa
8. If you do build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful.
Jeff Bezos, CEO Amazon.com
9. In the end, the customer doesn’t know, or care, if you are small or large as an organization. She or he only focuses on the garment hanging on the rail in the store.
Giorgio Armani
10. The customer experience is the next competitive battleground.
Jerry Gregoire, CIO, Dell Computers
11. Customer satisfaction is worthless. Customer loyalty is priceless.
Jeffrey Gitomer
12. Quality in a service or product is not what you put into it. It is what the client or customer gets out of it.
Peter Drucker
13. To understand the man, you must first walk a mile in his moccasin.
North American Indian Proverb
14. 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
15. Good service is good business.
Siebel Ad
16. There is a spiritual aspect to our lives – when we give we receive – when a business does something good for somebody, that somebody feels good about them!
Ben Cohen, Ben & Jerry’s
17. 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
18. One of the deep secrets of life is that all that is really worth doing is what we do for others.
Lewis Carol
19. Being on par in terms of price and quality only gets you into the game. Service wins the game.
Tony Allesandra
20. 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
21. Every great business is built on friendship.
JC Penney
22. If we do not lay out ourselves in the service of mankind whom should we serve?
John Adams
23. Rule 1: The customer is always right. Rule 2: If the customer is ever wrong, re-read Rule 1.
Stew Leonard, CEO Stew Leonard’s
24. If you’re not serving the customer, your job is to be serving someone who is.
Jan Carlzon, ex-CEO SAP Group
25. If you want to lift yourself up, lift up someone else.
Booker T. Washington
26. In the world of Internet Customer Service, it’s important to remember your competitor is only one mouse click away.
Doug Warner
27. Know what your customers want most and what your company does best. Focus on where those two meet.
Kevin Stirtz
28. Loyal customers, they don’t just come back, they don’t simply recommend you, they insist that their friends do business with you.
Chip Bell, Founder Chip Bell Group
29. Make a customer, not a sale.
Katherine Barchetti
30. If you do build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful.
Jeff Bezos, CEO Amazon.com
31. Customer service is not a department, it’s everyone’s job.
Anonymous
32. Dealing with people is probably the biggest problem you face, especially if you are in business. Yes, and that is also true if you are a housewife, architect or engineer.
Dale Carnegie
33. Make your product easier to buy than your competition, or you will find your customers buying from them, not you.
Mark Cuban
34. If you do build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful.
Jeff Bezos, CEO Amazon.com
35. The interesting thing is when we design and architect a server, we don’t design it for Windows or Linux, we design it for both. We don’t really care, as long as we’re selling the one the customer wants.
Michael Dell
36. A customer is the most important visitor on our premises, he is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him. He is not an interruption in our work. He is the purpose of it. He is not an outsider in our business. He is part of it. We are not doing him a favor by serving him. He is doing us a favor by giving us an opportunity to do so.
Mahatma Gandhi
37. When people talk about successful retailers and those that are not so successful, the customer determines at the end of the day who is successful and for what reason.
Jerry Harvey
38. It’s a very, very tough market. So unless you do a really good job, you buy the right products from the manufacturers, you service the customer, they keep coming back, they bring their friends in, it’s all about numbers, numbers, numbers.
John Ilhan
39. A lot of companies have chosen to downsize, and maybe that was the right thing for them. We chose a different path. Our belief was that if we kept putting great products in front of customers, they would continue to open their wallets.
Steve Jobs
40. 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 Krock
41. 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
42. The nature of any human being, certainly anyone on Wall Street, is ‘the better deal you give the customer, the worse deal it is for you’.
Bernie Madoff…
43. We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It’s our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.
Jeff Bezos, CEO Amazon.com
44. You’ve got to look for a gap, where competitors in a market have grown lazy and lost contact with the readers or the viewers.
Rupert Murdoch
45. In our way of working, we attach a great deal of importance to humility and honesty; With respect for human values, we promise to serve our customers with integrity.
Azim Premji
46. Customers don’t always know what they want. The decline in coffee-drinking was due to the fact that most of the coffee people bought was stale and they weren’t enjoying it. Once they tasted ours and experienced what we call “the third place”.. a gathering place between home and work where they were treated with respect.. they found we were filling a need they didn’t know they had.
Howard Schultz, Chairman and CEO Starbucks
47. Don’t try to tell the customer what he wants. If you want to be smart, be smart in the shower. Then get out, go to work and serve the customer!
Gene Buckley, President Sikorsky Aircraft
48. The most important adage and the only adage is, the customer comes first, whatever the business, the customer comes first.
Kerry Stokes
49. I won’t complain. I just won’t come back
Brown & Williamson Tobacco Ad
50. Customer service is just a day in, day out ongoing, never ending, unremitting, persevering, compassionate, type of activity.
Leon Gorman, CEO L.L.Bean
51. Every company’s greatest assets are its customers, because without customers there is no company.
Michael LeBoeuf, Author of: How to Win Customers and Keep Them for Life
52. Excellent firms don’t believe in excellence – only in constant improvement and constant change.
Tom Peters
53. Friendly makes sales – and friendly generates repeat business.
Jeffrey Gitomer
54. Service, in short, is not what you do, but who you are. It is a way of living that you need to bring to everything you do, if you are to bring it to your customer interactions
Betsy Sanders
55. 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
56. Here is a simple but powerful rule: always give people more than what they expect to get.
Nelson Boswell
57. Customers today want the very most and the very best for the very least amount of money, and on the best terms. Only the individuals and companies that provide absolutely excellent products and services at absolutely excellent prices will survive.
Brian Tracy
58. It helps a ton when you learn people’s names and don’t butcher them when trying to pronounce them.
Jerry Yang
59. Statistics suggest that when customers complain, business owners and managers ought to get excited about it. The complaining customer represents a huge opportunity for more business.
Zig Ziglar
60. I don’t do business with those who don’t make a profit because they can’t give the best service.
Richard Bach
61. If you don’t genuinely like your customers, chances are they won’t buy.
Thomas Watson, former CEO IBM
62. Merely satisfying customers will not be enough to earn their loyalty. Instead, they must experience exceptional service worthy of their repeat business and referral. Understand the factors that drive this customer revolution.
Rick Tate
63. Men are rich only as they give. He who gives great service gets great rewards.
Elbert Hubbard
64. Our mission statement about treating people with respect and dignity is not just words but a creed we live by every day. 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
65. People expect good service but few are willing to give it.
Robert Gateley
66. Revolve your world around the customer and more customers will revolve around you.
Heather Williams
67. The customer’s perception is your reality.
Kate Zabriskie, Author of: Customer Service Excellence: How to Deliver Value to Today’s Busy Customer
68. Do what you do so well that they will want to see it again and bring their friends.
Walt Disney
69. He profits, most who serves best.
Arthur F. Sheldon
70. The longer you wait, the harder it is to produce outstanding customer service.
William H. Davidow
71. The single most important thing to remember about any enterprise is that there are no results inside its walls. The result of a business is a satisfied customer.
Peter Drucker
72. When the customer comes first, the customer will last.
Robert Half
73. Right or wrong, the customer is always right.
Marshall Field
74. Under promise and over deliver.
Toby Bloomberg
75. Profit in business comes from repeat customers; customers that boast about your product and service, and that bring friends with them.
W. Edwards Deming
76. Your customer doesn’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.
Damon Richards
77. Every client you keep, is one less that you need to find.
Nigel Sanders
78. If you make customers unhappy in the physical world, they might each tell 6 friends. If you make customers unhappy on the Internet, they can each tell 6,000 friends
Jeff Bezos
79. The purpose of a business is to create a customer who creates customers
Shiv Singh
80. It’s much harder to provide a great customer service than I would have ever realized. It’s much more art than science in some of these other areas and not just about the facts but about how you are conveying them.
David Yu, Chief Operating Officer, Betfair
81. Nothing is so contagious as enthusiasm.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
82. Only a life lived in the service to others is worth living.
Albert Einstein
83. Good customer service costs less than bad customer service.
Sally Gronow, Welsh Water
84. Whether you are big or small, you cannot give good customer service if your employees don’t feel good about coming to work.
Martin Oliver, MD Kwik-Fit Financial Services
85. If we keep doing what we’re doing, we’re going to keep getting what we’re getting.
Stephen Covey
86. Everyone in an organization should be involved with customer service, not only are they feeling the customer but they are getting a feeling for what’s not working.
Penny Handscomb
87. There are no traffic jams along the extra mile.
Roger Staubach
88. Good leaders must first become good servants.
Robert Greenleaf
89. We don’t want to push our ideas on to customers, we simply want to make what they want.
Laura Ashley
90. A shoe without sex appeal is like a tree without leaves. Service without emotion is like a shoe without sex appeal.
Anonymous
91. A little experience often upsets a lot of theory.
S. Parkes Cadman
92. Whatever your business is, talk to your customers and provide them with what they want. It makes sense.
Robert Bowman, CEO Major League Baseball Advanced Media
93. You are serving a customer, not a life sentence. Learn how to enjoy your work.
Laurie McIntosh
94. Your best customers leave quite an impression. Do the same, and they won’t leave at all.
SAP Ad
95. Unless you have 100% customer satisfaction…you must improve.
Horst Schulz
96. It starts with respect. If you respect the customer as a human being, and truly honor their right to be treated fairly and honestly, everything else is much easier.
Doug Smith
97. An ounce of loyalty is worth a pound of cleverness.
Elbert Hubbard
98. Customer service is not a department, it’s everyone’s job.
Anonymous
99. 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.
Sam Walton, Founder of Wal-Mart
1. The goal as a company is to have customer service that is not just the best but legendary.
Sam Walton, Founder of Wal-Mart
2. Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.
Bill Gates
3. It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.
Charles Darwin
4. It is not the employer who pays the wages. Employers only handle the money. It is the customer who pays the wages.
Henry Ford
5. Well done is better than well said.
Benjamin Franklin
6. Spend a lot of time talking to customers face to face. You’d be amazed how many companies don’t listen to their customers.
Ross Perot
7. Kind words can be short and easy to speak, but their echoes are truly endless.
Mother Teresa
8. If you do build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful.
Jeff Bezos, CEO Amazon.com
9. In the end, the customer doesn’t know, or care, if you are small or large as an organization. She or he only focuses on the garment hanging on the rail in the store.
Giorgio Armani
10. The customer experience is the next competitive battleground.
Jerry Gregoire, CIO, Dell Computers
11. Customer satisfaction is worthless. Customer loyalty is priceless.
Jeffrey Gitomer
12. Quality in a service or product is not what you put into it. It is what the client or customer gets out of it.
Peter Drucker
13. To understand the man, you must first walk a mile in his moccasin.
North American Indian Proverb
14. 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
15. Good service is good business.
Siebel Ad
16. There is a spiritual aspect to our lives – when we give we receive – when a business does something good for somebody, that somebody feels good about them!
Ben Cohen, Ben & Jerry’s
17. 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
18. One of the deep secrets of life is that all that is really worth doing is what we do for others.
Lewis Carol
19. Being on par in terms of price and quality only gets you into the game. Service wins the game.
Tony Allesandra
20. 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
21. Every great business is built on friendship.
JC Penney
22. If we do not lay out ourselves in the service of mankind whom should we serve?
John Adams
23. Rule 1: The customer is always right. Rule 2: If the customer is ever wrong, re-read Rule 1.
Stew Leonard, CEO Stew Leonard’s
24. If you’re not serving the customer, your job is to be serving someone who is.
Jan Carlzon, ex-CEO SAP Group
25. If you want to lift yourself up, lift up someone else.
Booker T. Washington
26. In the world of Internet Customer Service, it’s important to remember your competitor is only one mouse click away.
Doug Warner
27. Know what your customers want most and what your company does best. Focus on where those two meet.
Kevin Stirtz
28. Loyal customers, they don’t just come back, they don’t simply recommend you, they insist that their friends do business with you.
Chip Bell, Founder Chip Bell Group
29. Make a customer, not a sale.
Katherine Barchetti
30. If you do build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful.
Jeff Bezos, CEO Amazon.com
31. Customer service is not a department, it’s everyone’s job.
Anonymous
32. Dealing with people is probably the biggest problem you face, especially if you are in business. Yes, and that is also true if you are a housewife, architect or engineer.
Dale Carnegie
33. Make your product easier to buy than your competition, or you will find your customers buying from them, not you.
Mark Cuban
34. If you do build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful.
Jeff Bezos, CEO Amazon.com
35. The interesting thing is when we design and architect a server, we don’t design it for Windows or Linux, we design it for both. We don’t really care, as long as we’re selling the one the customer wants.
Michael Dell
36. A customer is the most important visitor on our premises, he is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him. He is not an interruption in our work. He is the purpose of it. He is not an outsider in our business. He is part of it. We are not doing him a favor by serving him. He is doing us a favor by giving us an opportunity to do so.
Mahatma Gandhi
37. When people talk about successful retailers and those that are not so successful, the customer determines at the end of the day who is successful and for what reason.
Jerry Harvey
38. It’s a very, very tough market. So unless you do a really good job, you buy the right products from the manufacturers, you service the customer, they keep coming back, they bring their friends in, it’s all about numbers, numbers, numbers.
John Ilhan
39. A lot of companies have chosen to downsize, and maybe that was the right thing for them. We chose a different path. Our belief was that if we kept putting great products in front of customers, they would continue to open their wallets.
Steve Jobs
40. 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 Krock
41. 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
42. The nature of any human being, certainly anyone on Wall Street, is ‘the better deal you give the customer, the worse deal it is for you’.
Bernie Madoff…
43. We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It’s our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.
Jeff Bezos, CEO Amazon.com
44. You’ve got to look for a gap, where competitors in a market have grown lazy and lost contact with the readers or the viewers.
Rupert Murdoch
45. In our way of working, we attach a great deal of importance to humility and honesty; With respect for human values, we promise to serve our customers with integrity.
Azim Premji
46. Customers don’t always know what they want. The decline in coffee-drinking was due to the fact that most of the coffee people bought was stale and they weren’t enjoying it. Once they tasted ours and experienced what we call “the third place”.. a gathering place between home and work where they were treated with respect.. they found we were filling a need they didn’t know they had.
Howard Schultz, Chairman and CEO Starbucks
47. Don’t try to tell the customer what he wants. If you want to be smart, be smart in the shower. Then get out, go to work and serve the customer!
Gene Buckley, President Sikorsky Aircraft
48. The most important adage and the only adage is, the customer comes first, whatever the business, the customer comes first.
Kerry Stokes
49. I won’t complain. I just won’t come back
Brown & Williamson Tobacco Ad
50. Customer service is just a day in, day out ongoing, never ending, unremitting, persevering, compassionate, type of activity.
Leon Gorman, CEO L.L.Bean
51. Every company’s greatest assets are its customers, because without customers there is no company.
Michael LeBoeuf, Author of: How to Win Customers and Keep Them for Life
52. Excellent firms don’t believe in excellence – only in constant improvement and constant change.
Tom Peters
53. Friendly makes sales – and friendly generates repeat business.
Jeffrey Gitomer
54. Service, in short, is not what you do, but who you are. It is a way of living that you need to bring to everything you do, if you are to bring it to your customer interactions
Betsy Sanders
55. 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
56. Here is a simple but powerful rule: always give people more than what they expect to get.
Nelson Boswell
57. Customers today want the very most and the very best for the very least amount of money, and on the best terms. Only the individuals and companies that provide absolutely excellent products and services at absolutely excellent prices will survive.
Brian Tracy
58. It helps a ton when you learn people’s names and don’t butcher them when trying to pronounce them.
Jerry Yang
59. Statistics suggest that when customers complain, business owners and managers ought to get excited about it. The complaining customer represents a huge opportunity for more business.
Zig Ziglar
60. I don’t do business with those who don’t make a profit because they can’t give the best service.
Richard Bach
61. If you don’t genuinely like your customers, chances are they won’t buy.
Thomas Watson, former CEO IBM
62. Merely satisfying customers will not be enough to earn their loyalty. Instead, they must experience exceptional service worthy of their repeat business and referral. Understand the factors that drive this customer revolution.
Rick Tate
63. Men are rich only as they give. He who gives great service gets great rewards.
Elbert Hubbard
64. Our mission statement about treating people with respect and dignity is not just words but a creed we live by every day. 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
65. People expect good service but few are willing to give it.
Robert Gateley
66. Revolve your world around the customer and more customers will revolve around you.
Heather Williams
67. The customer’s perception is your reality.
Kate Zabriskie, Author of: Customer Service Excellence: How to Deliver Value to Today’s Busy Customer
68. Do what you do so well that they will want to see it again and bring their friends.
Walt Disney
69. He profits, most who serves best.
Arthur F. Sheldon
70. The longer you wait, the harder it is to produce outstanding customer service.
William H. Davidow
71. The single most important thing to remember about any enterprise is that there are no results inside its walls. The result of a business is a satisfied customer.
Peter Drucker
72. When the customer comes first, the customer will last.
Robert Half
73. Right or wrong, the customer is always right.
Marshall Field
74. Under promise and over deliver.
Toby Bloomberg
75. Profit in business comes from repeat customers; customers that boast about your product and service, and that bring friends with them.
W. Edwards Deming
76. Your customer doesn’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.
Damon Richards
77. Every client you keep, is one less that you need to find.
Nigel Sanders
78. If you make customers unhappy in the physical world, they might each tell 6 friends. If you make customers unhappy on the Internet, they can each tell 6,000 friends
Jeff Bezos
79. The purpose of a business is to create a customer who creates customers
Shiv Singh
80. It’s much harder to provide a great customer service than I would have ever realized. It’s much more art than science in some of these other areas and not just about the facts but about how you are conveying them.
David Yu, Chief Operating Officer, Betfair
81. Nothing is so contagious as enthusiasm.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
82. Only a life lived in the service to others is worth living.
Albert Einstein
83. Good customer service costs less than bad customer service.
Sally Gronow, Welsh Water
84. Whether you are big or small, you cannot give good customer service if your employees don’t feel good about coming to work.
Martin Oliver, MD Kwik-Fit Financial Services
85. If we keep doing what we’re doing, we’re going to keep getting what we’re getting.
Stephen Covey
86. Everyone in an organization should be involved with customer service, not only are they feeling the customer but they are getting a feeling for what’s not working.
Penny Handscomb
87. There are no traffic jams along the extra mile.
Roger Staubach
88. Good leaders must first become good servants.
Robert Greenleaf
89. We don’t want to push our ideas on to customers, we simply want to make what they want.
Laura Ashley
90. A shoe without sex appeal is like a tree without leaves. Service without emotion is like a shoe without sex appeal.
Anonymous
91. A little experience often upsets a lot of theory.
S. Parkes Cadman
92. Whatever your business is, talk to your customers and provide them with what they want. It makes sense.
Robert Bowman, CEO Major League Baseball Advanced Media
93. You are serving a customer, not a life sentence. Learn how to enjoy your work.
Laurie McIntosh
94. Your best customers leave quite an impression. Do the same, and they won’t leave at all.
SAP Ad
95. Unless you have 100% customer satisfaction…you must improve.
Horst Schulz
96. It starts with respect. If you respect the customer as a human being, and truly honor their right to be treated fairly and honestly, everything else is much easier.
Doug Smith
97. An ounce of loyalty is worth a pound of cleverness.
Elbert Hubbard
98. Customer service is not a department, it’s everyone’s job.
Anonymous
99. 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.
Sam Walton, Founder of Wal-Mart
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