Customer Service

44 Hand-Picked Customer Service Quotes To Inspire Your Team

Josh Spilker

May 18, 2024

Customer support and service have become paramount in almost every business.

They are the cornerstones of building strong customer relationships, ensuring loyalty, and driving business success. To underscore the significance of exceptional customer service, we’ve compiled a collection of 44 insightful quotes from renowned thought leaders, entrepreneurs, and experts in various fields.

These quotes encapsulate the essence of customer-centricity, emphasizing that customers are not merely transactions but valued partners in the journey to success.

See 21 hand-picked knowledge quotes ➡️

From industry titans like Bill Gates and Sam Walton to modern disruptors like Jeff Bezos and Tony Hsieh, these voices echo a universal truth: exceptional customer service is a catalyst for growth and sustainability.

Drop one of these quotes into your next presentation or start off a discussion with your customer-facing teams.

Top quotes for customer support, customer success, and customer service

1. “Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.” – Bill Gates, Microsoft co-founder
2.  “Customers don’t expect you to be perfect. They do expect you to fix things when they go wrong.” – Donald Porter, British Airways
3. “Customer service should not be a department. It should be the entire company.” – Tony Hsieh, Former CEO of Zappos
4. “Satisfaction is a rating. Loyalty is a brand.” – Shep Hyken, customer service expert
5. “The key is to set realistic customer expectations and then not to just meet them, but to exceed them—preferably in unexpected and helpful ways.” – Richard Branson, Virgin Group founder
6. “Your customer doesn’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.” – Damon Richards, customer service speaker
7. “Customers will never love a company until the employees love it first.” – Simon Sinek, author and speaker
8. “Customers buy on emotion and justify with logic.” – Anon
9. “To keep a customer demands as much skill as to win one.” – American Proverb
10. “The goal as a company is to have customer service that is not just the best but legendary.” – Sam Walton, Walmart founder
11. “Customer service is not a department, it’s everyone’s job.” – Anonymous
12. “Good customer service costs less than bad customer service.” – Sally Gronow, customer service expert
13. “Customer service is just a day in, day out ongoing, never-ending, unremitting, persevering, compassionate, type of activity.” – Leon Gorman, L.L. Bean
14. “You are serving a customer, not a life sentence. Learn how to enjoy your work.” – Laurie McIntosh
15. “Customer service isn’t about telling people how awesome you are, it’s about creating stories that do the talking for you.” – Anon
16. “The best customer service is if the customer doesn’t need to call you, doesn’t need to talk to you. It just works.” – Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon
17. “Always do more than is required of you.” – George S. Patton
18. “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, author
19. “The purpose of a business is to create a customer who creates customers.” – Shiv Singh, author
20. “Customers may forget what you said, but they will never forget how you made them feel.” – Warren Buffett, investor
21. “A customer is the most important visitor on our premises. He is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him.” – Commonly attributed to Mahatma Gandhi
22. “Customer service is the new marketing.” – Derek Sivers, entrepreneur
23. “One customer well taken care of could be more valuable than $10,000 worth of advertising.” – Jim Rohn
24. “A satisfied customer is the best business strategy of all.” – Michael LeBoeuf, author
25. “The customer’s perception is your reality.” – Kate Zabriskie, author
26. “Customers are the lifeblood of any business.” – Chris Corrigan, consultant
27. “Treat the customer like you would want to be treated. Period!” – Brad Schweig
28. “It is not the employer who pays the wages. Employers only handle the money. It is the customer who pays the wages.” – Henry Ford, founder of Ford Motor Co.
29. “It’s not about having the right opportunities. It’s about handling the opportunities right.” – Mark Hunter, author
30. “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, Walmart founder
31. “Great customer service doesn’t mean that the customer is always right, it means that the customer is always honored.” – Chris LoCurto, business coach
32. “The customer experience is the next competitive battleground.” – Jerry Gregoire, former CIO of Dell
33. “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
34. “The more you sweat in peace, the less you bleed in war.” – Norman Schwarzkopf, former U.S. General
35. “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, author
36. “Customers don’t care about your solutions. They care about their problems.” – Anon
37. “Your customer’s perception is your reality.” – Kate Zabriskie, author
38. “Customer service is the experience we deliver to our customer. It’s the promise we keep to the customer. It’s how we follow through for the customer. It’s how we make them feel when they do business with us.” – Shep Hyken
39. “Every great business is built on friendship.” – JC Penney
40. “The customer experience is not a department, it’s everyone’s job.” – Anon
41. “Customer service is the new marketing.” – Derek Sivers, entrepreneur
42. “The purpose of a business is to create a customer who creates customers.” – Shiv Singh, author
43. “Customer satisfaction is worthless. Customer loyalty is priceless.” – Jeffrey Gitomer, author
44. “Don’t find customers for your products, find products for your customers.” – Seth Godin, author

After reading through this list, It’s clear that customer-centricity is not just a strategy—it’s a mindset that fuels business excellence. The voices of industry leaders and visionaries remind us that exceptional customer service is a powerful force that goes beyond industries and timeframes.

As you use the wisdom from these quotes, we hope your dedication to exceptional customer support become a fundamental part of your company’s culture. By doing this, aim not just to meet but to surpass your customers’ expectations.

For help on helping your customer support team communicate better between your different departments and teams, check out Tettra as your internal knowledge base.

Use Tettra for your internal knowledge base

With Tettra, your customer support teams will have:

1. Efficient Knowledge Access: Tettra empowers customer support teams with quick and efficient access to essential knowledge. It provides a centralized source of truth, ensuring that support agents can access the right information when they need it. This leads to faster issue resolution and improved customer satisfaction.
2. AI-Assisted Search: Tettra’s AI assistant, Kai, enables support teams to find answers instantly. Even the most seasoned reps don’t need to memorize every detail; they can simply ask Kai for assistance, whether within Tettra or Slack. This accelerates response times and reduces the burden of knowledge retention.
3. Content Verification: Tettra includes a content verification tool that helps maintain the accuracy of the knowledge base. By reminding page owners to review and update documents regularly, Tettra ensures that the information provided to customers is always current and reliable.
4. Centralized Support Resources: Tettra serves as a command center for vital support resources. It allows support teams to link directly to documentation, guides, product updates, and more, all within one unified platform. This streamlines support processes and ensures that teams have easy access to the resources they need to assist customers effectively.

Create your free internal knowledge base with Tettra.