9 Inspiring Quotes on Customer Service

Without customers a company cannot exist. This basic truth should be enough to convince anyone about the importance of good customer service .

Yet you might not feel that way when you just had a long day talking to customers, maybe not all of them treating you as friendly as they should . On days like these you need a dose of inspiration to keep on going, a few reminders that you are doing important work.

Many great thinkers have puzzled about the very nature of customer service and have presented their thoughts in beautifully structured quotes. So we'd like to share with you our favorite 9 customer service quotes that have inspired us throughout the years. These should give you the necessary energy boost for your next customer encounter.

The customer’s perception is your reality.

Kate Zabriskie

This quote from business-training ace Kate Zabriskie teaches us how fundamental the overall mindset is in customer service. It defines the customer as a great source of knowledge about your own enterprise. Any feedback in that sense is not an issue to be resolved, but an invitation to improve.

Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.

Bill Gates

No wonder he's such a wise man. Same as Zabriskie, Microsoft-founder Bill Gates first and foremost pictures customers as a stock of hints on how to get better as a company. He specifically suggests a reinterpretation of unpleased customers into a positive occurence, meaning: Next time you’ve failed to satisfy a customer, explore the reasons and do better on your next one - instead of banging your head against the desk.

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

If you ever fell in love with a brilliant film or terrific music album, you probably know that desire to make your friends enjoy the same experience. A customer you convinced to return will ideally generate new leads. You get the idea. But just to be clear, it means some people will go and advertise your company for free .

There are no traffic jams along the extra mile.

Roger Staubach

Roger Staubach was a professional football player, one of the best in the game, and later on became a major business leader. We love his quote for two reasons: It does not only motivate us to go beyond what is expected or seems enough, but also reminds us to embrace good advice from anyone, ultimately including our customers.

Your customer doesn’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.

Damon Richards

A tricky one at first sight but definitely worth reading out loud and putting up on the wall. The ultimate, catchy reminder to keep it simple, not to brag with insight on the topic if you haven’t proved your appreciation for the one asking you for support. “Customer service” says it: first the customer, then the service.

Being on par in terms of price and quality only gets you into the game. Service wins the game.

Tony Allesandra

An important quote which can only grow in importance with global markets shaping universal prices. Not only don’t you have to underprice your competition but most likely you cannot do so anyway. As it is, customer service is the one major set screw for relevance apart from the quality of your actual product.

Good customer service costs less than bad customer service.

Sally Gronow

Sally Gronow allegedly and prominently delivered this simple “equation” first. Sometimes memorable quotes are not more than common sense translated in straightforward style. This one seems so obvious because it is so true. The myth of customer service being an unnecessary expense has been out there for quite some time, haunting ignorant managers. Telling from the amount of companies that treat their customer service departments stepmother-like, the myth hasn’t lost much of its spell.

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 favour by serving him. He is doing us a favor by giving us an opportunity to do so.

Mahatma Gandhi

To be fair, I too did raise an eyebrow when reading Gandhi’s name beneath to this one. Despite all that he has done, the man just didn’t strike me as a business guru. Upon further reading one finds that the likes of L.L. Bean, Ray Noyes, Paul T. Babson, Kenneth B. Elliott and the Great Western Fuel Company have also been connected to this quote. No matter who this came from exactly, it is genuinely brilliant. Not as quick and catchy as the rest, but as comprehensive and clever as it can get.

Inspire your team

At Userlike , we make use of these and a bunch of same-spirited quotes to inspire the service operators in the Chat Panel. That is where, for us, customer service starts. And that is why we made them rotate in the Chat Panel in default no chat view for any operator. So their idle time can be used for reflexion or simply for reminding them of the significance of their job.