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When it goes well, providing great customer service is one of the most satisfying jobs on the planet. But those days where everything goes right are often outweighed by the difficult days, where there seems to be no end to the complaints, and so we need a bit of motivation to keep us going. While many customer service teams have inspirational customer service quotes on the walls of their workplace, changing them up every now and again will help to keep your team encouraged and driven. Be sure to bookmark this post so you can refer back to it on those tough days and find the right quote to put a bit more pep in your step.
Quotes to Start Your Day the Right Way
There is no end of advice from successful people about how best to start your day. Whether that is exercise and meditation or a great breakfast, starting a day of providing customer service definitely takes a positive mindset. You might be the customer service professional, or you might be the manager of a kick-ass customer service team—either way, these quotes will get your day off to a great start.
- “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” – Aristotle
- “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
- “Every day we’re saying, ‘How can we keep this customer happy? How can we get ahead in innovation by doing this?’ …because if we don’t, somebody else will.”– Bill Gates
- “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
- “Nothing is as contagious as enthusiasm.” – Samuel Taylor Coleridge
- “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
- “If you cannot do great things, do small things in a great way.” – Napoleon Hill
- “Try not to become a man of success but rather try to become a man of value.” – Albert Einstein
- “When you help others feel important, you help yourself feel important too.” – David J. Schwartz
- “What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult to each other?” – George Eliot
- “Happiness is a by-product of an effort to make someone else happy.” – Gretta Palmer
- “Biggest question: Isn’t it really ‘customer helping’ rather than customer service? And wouldn’t you deliver better service if you thought of it that way?” – Jeffrey Gitomer
- “One of the deep secrets of life is that all that is really worth the doing is what we do for others.” – Lewis Carroll
- “The only certain means of success is to render more and better service than is expected of you, no matter what your task may be.” – Og Mandino
- “You are allowed to do this, don’t worry about the rules, don’t worry about getting into trouble, your job is to take care of the customer, your job is to make that person leave happy. And you have all kinds of leeway to do that.” – John Pepper
- “You can have everything in life you want if you will just help enough other people get what they want.” – Zig Ziglar
Quotes for When You’re Building Your Brand
Starting and growing a business is hard, but earning a good reputation (and then managing to keep it!) is even harder. When your business is just past the startup stage, or you’re on a mission to grow your brand, customer service needs to continue to be central to your strategy. If you’re ever doubting how customer service feeds into the success of your business, this section is for you.
- “A brand for a company is like a reputation for a person. You earn reputation by trying to do hard things well.” – Jeff Bezos
- “The goal as a company is to have customer service that is not just the best but legendary.” – Sam Walton
- “Satisfaction is a rating. Loyalty is a brand.” – Shep Hyken
- “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
- “If people believe they share values with a company, they will stay loyal to the brand.” – Howard Schultz
- “If you are not taking care of your customer, your competitor will.” – Bob Hooey
- “In the world of internet customer service, it’s important to remember your competitor is only one mouse click away.” – Doug Warner
- “The more advocates you have, the fewer ads you have to buy.” – Dharmesh Shah
- “Your brand is what your business does, what you stand for, and how you approach your work. … Your reputation is what people remember and share about you.” – Ted Rubin
- “If you don’t care, your customer never will.” – Marlene Blaszczyk
- “A satisfied customer is the best business strategy of all.” – Michael LeBoeuf
- “Good customer service costs less than bad customer service.” – Sally Gronow
- “Customer service represents the heart of a brand in the hearts of its customers.” – Kate Nasser
Quotes When You’re Aiming for the Best Customer Service Ever
When you’ve understood the importance of great customer service, keeping your team motivated to go the extra mile (rather than just doing their job to their “normal” standards) can be tricky in the longer term. When you need to give your team (and maybe yourself!) a reminder to go above and beyond, use one of these quotes to reinvigorate the effort.
- “Customers who are merely satisfied remain your customers only as long as everything goes their way.” – Chip Bell
- “Being on par in terms of price and quality only gets you into the game. Service wins the game.” – Tony Alessandra
- “Excellent businesses don’t believe in excellence, only in constant improvement and constant change.” – Tom Peters
- “Any company designed for success in the 20th century is doomed to failure in the 21st.”– David S. Rose
- “The key is to set realistic expectations, then exceed them, preferably in unexpected and helpful ways.” – Richard Branson
- “Service, in short, is not what you do, but who you are. It's a way of living that you need to bring to everything you do if you're to bring it to your customer interactions.” – Betsy Sanders
- “The purpose of a business is to get and keep a customer.” – Theodore Levitt
- “Customer experience is the next competitive battleground. It’s where business is going to be won or lost.” – Tom Knighton
- “In a world where products and services are becoming more and more commoditized, customer experience is the only true differentiator.” – Annette Franz
- “The best performers set goals that are not about the outcome but about the process of reaching the outcome.” – Geoff Colvin
- “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
- “It is not your customer’s job to remember you. It is your obligation and responsibility to make sure they don’t have a chance to forget you.” – Patricia Fripp
- “Here is the simple but powerful rule … always give people more than they expect to get.” – Nelson Boswell
Quotes for When You’re Facing a Tricky Customer
You won’t be in customer service for long before you encounter a customer who is less than easy to satisfy. Whether your business has messed up, a product has fallen short of expectations, or your customer is being unreasonable (because the customer isn’t always right!) then you might need a bit of encouragement. If that’s the case today, then these customer service quotes will help you to remember how to take a deep breath, and to carry on.
- “Our attitude towards others determines their attitude towards us.” – Earl Nightingale
- “How you think about your customer influences how you respond to them.” – Marilyn Suttle
- “When you serve the customer better, they always return on your investment.” – Kara Parlin
- “Great customer service doesn’t mean that the customer is always right, it means that the customer is always honored.” – Chris LoCurto
- “Customers don’t expect you to be perfect. They do expect you to fix things when they go wrong.” – Donald Porter
- “When you assume negative intent, you're angry. If you take away that anger and assume positive intent, you will be amazed. Your emotional quotient goes up because you are no longer almost random in your response.” – Indra Nooyi
- “It's through vulnerability that human beings create connections. The more vulnerable we can be with one another, the more that we'll trust one another and the more we'll be able to collaborate effectively.” – Neil Blumenthal
- “The magic ‘mind reading’ anticipatory service phrase is: ‘If that was me, what would I want?'” – Steve Cokkinias
- “Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply.” – Stephen R. Covey
- “When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but with creatures of emotion.” – Dale Carnegie
- “What looks like resistance is often a lack of clarity.” – Dan Heath
- “Thank your customer for complaining and mean it. Most will never bother to complain. They’ll just walk away.” – Marilyn Suttle
- “The most important thing in communication is to hear what is not said.” – Peter Drucker
- “When a customer complains, he is doing you a special favor; he is giving you another chance to serve him to his satisfaction. You will appreciate the importance of this opportunity when you consider that the customer’s alternative option was to desert you for a competitor.” – Seymour Fine
- “Virtually nothing else is as important as how one is made to feel in any business transaction. Hospitality exists when you believe the other person is on your side.” – Danny Meyer
- “Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.” – Bill Gates
- “If the shopper feels like it was poor service, then it was poor service. We are in the customer perception business.” – Mark Perrault
- “Always have an attitude of gratitude.” – James R. Nowlin
- “Treat the customer like you would want to be treated. Period.” – Brad Schweig
Quotes for the End of a Long Day, Week, or Month
During peak sales periods, or simply after a tough day, you need encouragement and a reason to carry on. Those times will come and go, but when you need to be able to carry on, these quotes will help strengthen your resolve for the next day.
- “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
- “We need to accept that we won’t always make the right decisions, that we’ll screw up royally sometimes—understanding that failure is not the opposite of success, it’s part of success.” – Arianna Huffington
- “Don’t dwell on what went wrong. Instead, focus on what to do next. Spend your energies on moving forward toward finding the answer.” – Denis Waitley
- “You don’t earn loyalty in a day. You earn loyalty day by day.” – Jeffrey Gitomer
- “If you have a job without aggravations, you don’t have a job.” – Malcolm Forbes
- “Success is the sum of small efforts, repeated day in and day out.” – Robert Collier
- “Excellent firms don’t believe in excellence—only in constant improvement and constant change.” – Tom Peters
Quotes for Customer Service Managers
Taking the role of customer service manager, or team leader, can be an even bigger challenge than that of the customer service representative. Not only are you supporting your team and doing many of the tasks they are, but you’re also dealing with the extra responsibilities of escalated tickets and keeping your team on track, both in terms of their workload and their mental health. Whether you’ve just stepped up into that supervisory role, or you’re thinking about how you can do your job a bit better, these quotes are for you.
- “Leaders must exemplify integrity and earn the trust of their teams through their everyday actions.” – Marilyn Hewson
- “Of course, it is not the employer who pays wages. He only handles the money. It is the product that pays wages and it is the management that arranges the production so that the product may pay the wages.” – Henry Ford
- “Customers will never love a company until the employees love it first.” – Simon Sinek
- “Building a good customer experience does not happen by accident. It happens by design.” – Clare Muscutt
- “Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.” – Peter Drucker
- “Customer service shouldn't just be a department, it should be the entire company.” – Tony Hsieh
- “The customer’s perception is your reality.” – Kate Zabriskie
- “Look after the customers and the business will take care of itself.” – Ray Kroc
- “Focus on your customers and lead your people as though their lives depend on your success.” – Warren Buffett
- “Motivation comes from working on things we care about. It also comes from working with people we care about.” – Sheryl Sandberg
- “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
- “Your culture is how your company makes decisions when you’re not there. It’s the set of assumptions your employees use to resolve the problems they face every day. It’s how they behave when no one is looking. If you don’t methodically set your culture, then two-thirds of it will end up being accidental, and the rest will be a mistake.” – Ben Horowitz
- “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
- “Important achievements require clear focus, all-out effort, and a bottomless trunk full of strategies.” – Carol S. Dweck
- “As a leader it is important to not just see your own success. But focus on the success of others.” – Sundar Pichai
- “The magic formula that successful businesses have discovered is to treat customers like guests and employees like people.” – Tom Peters
- “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
- “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
- “A business absolutely devoted to service will have only one worry about profits. They will be embarrassingly large.” – Henry Ford
Quotes About the Outcome of Great Customer Service
If you’re looking at improving your customer service, then you’ve almost certainly understood why you need to do so. Sometimes, though, it is worth revisiting those reasons, or sharing them with your team, to help channel that energy back into the team. Whether you need to demonstrate the necessity of providing outstanding customer service to avoid the negative consequences, or you need an incentive, these are the quotes for you.
- “Customers who love you will market for you more powerfully than you can possibly market yourself.” – Jeanne Bliss
- “A brand is no longer what we tell the consumer it is—it is what consumers tell each other it is.” – Scott Cook
- “Courteous treatment will make a customer a walking advertisement.” – J. C. Penney
- “It takes months to find a customer… seconds to lose one.” – Vince Lombardi
- “I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” – Maya Angelou
- “One customer well taken care of could be more valuable than $10,000 worth of advertising.”– Jim Rohn
- “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
- “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
- “If you love what you’re doing and you always put the customer first, success will be yours.” – Ray Kroc
- “When the customer comes first, the customer will last.” – Robert Half
- “Whether it’s a bored demeanor, a dismissive look or just plain rude behavior, sloppy customer service spells disaster faster than just about any other business transgression.” – Lauren Simonds
- “Men are rich only as they give. He who gives great service gets great rewards.” – Elbert Hubbard
- “In the long arc of time, you are only relevant if customers love you.” – Tim Cook
- “Although your customers won’t love you if you give bad service, your competitors will.” – Kate Zabriskie
Our Final Thoughts
Finding a great team that can provide your customers with outstanding service is one of the best investments that you can make in your business. When you’ve found your team, keeping them motivated in their work (and keeping them happy) can be just as tough as finding those great employees in the first place! No matter how great the support tools you provide your team with, customer service will always be a challenge, so using these inspirational quotes will help keep you and your team on the right track.
