Customer service excellence has always been and will always be one of the critical competitive advantages for any business. Here are 40 quotes supporting this premise.
Make a customer, not a sale. ~ Katherine Barchetti
The goal as a company is to have customer service that is not just the best but legendary. ~ Sam Walton
You are serving a customer, not a life sentence. Learn how to enjoy your work. ~ Laurie McIntosh
Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning. ~ Bill Gates
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
The customer experience is the next competitive battleground. ~ Jerry Gregoire
Your customer doesn’t care how much you know until they know how much you care. ~ Damon Richards
Kind words can be short and easy to speak, but their echos 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
Good service is good business. ~ Siebel Ad
The more you engage with customers the clearer things become and the easier it is to determine what you should be doing. ~ John Russell
Being on par in terms of price and quality only gets you into the game. Service wins the game. ~ Tony Allesandra
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
Every great business is built on friendship. ~ JC Penney
If you’re not serving the customer, your job is to be serving someone who is. ~ Jan Carlzon
In the world of Internet Customer Service, it’s important to remember your competitor is only one mouse click away. ~ Doug Warner
Know what your customers want most and what your company does best. Focus on where those two meet. ~ Kevin Stirtz
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
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
Make your product easier to buy than your competition, or you will find your customers buying from them, not you. ~ Mark Cuban
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
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
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
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
Customer service is just a day in, day out ongoing, never ending, unremitting, persevering, compassionate, type of activity. ~ Leon Gorman
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
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
Here is a simple but powerful rule: always give people more than what they expect to get. ~ Nelson Boswell
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
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
The customer’s perception is your reality. ~ Kate Zabriskie
He profits most who serves best. ~ Arthur F. Sheldon
The longer you wait, the harder it is to produce outstanding customer service. ~ William H. Davidow
Profit in business comes from repeat customers; customers that boast about your product and service, and that bring friends with them. ~ W. Edwards Deming
The purpose of a business is to create a customer who creates customers. ~ Shiv Singh
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 are no traffic jams along the extra mile. ~ Roger Staubach
Your best customers leave quite an impression. Do the same, and they won’t leave at all. ~ SAP Ad
Get closer than ever to your customers. So close that you tell them what they need well before they realize it themselves. ~ Steve Jobs
Customer service is not a department, it’s everyone’s job. ~ Anonymous
Originally posted in Forbes