All over the internet there are customer service quotes, marketing quotes and sales quotes, but rarely do we see a round-up of quotes purely based on customer experience. Customer experience as a discipline has only grown in importance, with google searches on the phrase customer experience increasing steadily in the last few years. Growth IQ author Tiffani Bova recently shared a stat that google searches of the phrase “customer experience” have nearly tripled in the last decade – and now the term hashtag #CX is at an all time high (2004-2019). Here I have compiled 101 of the top customer experience quotes, and I hope one of these quotes can inspire you in your own efforts to make your organization more customer-centric.
Customer Experience Quotes
“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 takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.” – Warren Buffett
“CXM = The art and science of coaxing lifetime loyalty from daily transactions.” – Steve Curtin
“Customer experience isn’t an expense. Managing customer experience bolsters your brand.” – Stan Phelps
“The customer’s perception is your reality.” – Kate Zabriskie
“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
“The biggest risk is not taking any risk. In a world that is changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.” – Mark Zuckerberg
“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
“There is only one boss. The customer.” – Sam Walton
“You can’t transform something you don’t understand. If you don’t know and understand what the current state of the customer experience is, how can you possibly design the desired future state?” – Annette Franz
“Make the customer the hero of your story.” – Ann Handley
“Whatever you do, do it well. Do it so well that when people see you do it, they will want to come back and see you do it again, and they will want to bring others and show them how well you do what you do.” – Walt Disney
“If you don’t care, your customer never will.” – Marlene Blaszczyk
“Always remember that everyone with whom you have a relationship has an invisible sign on their forehead that says ‘Make Me Feel Important.’ Treat them accordingly” – Eric Philip Cowell
“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 are not taking care of your customers, your competitor will.” – Bob Hooey
“Repeat business or behavior can be bribed. Loyalty has to be earned.” – Janet Robinson
“Customer experience better be at the top of your list when it comes to priorities in your organization. Customer experience is the new marketing.” – Steve Cannon
“Make your marketing so useful, people would pay for it.” – Jay Baer
“Quality in a service or product is not what you put into it. It is what the customer gets out of it.” – Peter Drucker
“Building a good customer experience does not happen by accident. It happens by design.” – Clare Muscutt
“Exceptional customer experiences are the only sustainable platform for competitive differentiation.” – Kerry Bodine
“Don’t reinvent the wheel. Focus on winning one customer at a time. Be honest and sincere. Do what’s right. There’s nothing magical about this. That’s been my guiding principle. To make it work, you have to live it every day. Make it your mindset.” — Robert Spector
“Customer experience is one of the two core pillars of customer retention; the thing is, you can’t grow if your customers don’t stick around.” – Jes Kirkwood
Customer-Focused Culture
“Innovation needs to be part of your culture. Customers are transforming faster than we are, and if we don’t catch up, we’re in trouble.” – Ian Schafer
“Excellent customer service is the number one job in any company! It is the personality of the company and the reason customers come back. Without customers there is no company!” – Connie Elder
“Our attitude towards others determines their attitude towards us.” – Earl Nightingale
“Your mission statement may be on the wall, but your core values are displayed in the attitudes of your employees.” – Elle Clarke
“If we consistently exceed the expectations of employees, they will consistently exceed the expectations of our customers.” – Shep Hyken
“So, get to know your customers. Humanize them. Humanize yourself. It’s worth it.” – Kristin Smaby
“When the customer comes first, the customer will last.” – Robert Half
“Our greatest asset is the customer! Treat each customer as if they are the only one!” – Laurice Leitao
“If you don’t appreciate your customers, someone else will.” – Jason Langella
“The most valuable resource you can give customers is your time. Listen to them to uncover their real needs. Only then can you find a way to solve their problems or meet their expectations. Treat the cause, not just the symptoms.” – Ginger Conlon
“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
“Kind words can be short and easy to speak, but their echoes are truly endless.” – Mother Teresa
“Revolve your world around the customer and more customers will revolve around you.” – Heather Williams
“You’re serving a customer, not a life sentence. Learn how to enjoy your work.” – Laurie McIntosh
“To earn the respect (and eventually love) of your customers, you first have to respect those customers. That is why Golden Rule behavior is embraced by most of the winning companies.” – Colleen Barrett
“How you think about your customer influences how you respond to them.” – Marilyn Suttle
“If people believe they share values with a company, they will stay loyal to the brand” – Howard Schultz
“Customers will never love a company until the employees love it first.” – Simon Sinek
“If you’re not serving the customer, your job is to be serving someone who is.” – Jan Carlzon
“Everyone from the CEO down to the contact center agent should know what it feels like to be a customer.” – Blake Morgan
“A good design shows respect for your customer and you’re either respectful of their time or respectful of what it is that they desire, and so it makes it a very fundamental element to everything that you do.” – Penny Wilson
“You will get all you want in life, if you help enough other people get what they want.” – Zig Ziglar
“Ease your customers’ pain.” – Hazel Edwards
Customer-Focused Leadership
“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
“Successful people are always looking for opportunities to help others. Unsuccessful people are always asking, ‘What’s in it for me?’ – Brian Tracy
“Your customer doesn’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.” – Damon Richards
“When you serve the customer better, they always return on your investment.” – Kara Parlin
“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
“Worry about being better; bigger will take care of itself. Think one customer at a time and take care of each one the best way you can.” –Gary Comer
“People do not care how much you know until they know how much you care.” – Teddy Roosevelt
“The Customer: Someone that indirectly pays for your food, clothes, and vacations. Be nice to them.” — Gene Caballero
“The customer tells us how to stay in business, best that we listen.” – Pamela Nelson
“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 Kroc
“If you don’t have anybody in the room to look up to then you have to be the one.” – Jeannie Walters
“If you’re not connecting with the people in your organization, you’ll never deliver the experience that you want for your customers.” – Lynn Skoczelas
“Being in a curiosity mindset means being fascinated by your customers and their reactions.” – Jake Knapp
“Leaders foster collaboration by building trust and facilitating relationships. They strengthen others by increasing self-determination and developing competence.” – Deb Calvert
“Treat the customer like you would want to be treated. Period!” – Brad Schweig
“Never lose sight of customers. Always be focusing on meeting their needs and expectations.” – Sue Duris
Customer Service
“It is not the employer who pays the wages. Employers only handle the money … It is the customer who pays the wages.” – Henry Ford
“Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.” – Bill Gates
“Courteous treatment will make a customer a walking advertisement.” – J.C. Penney
“Good customer service costs less than bad customer service.” – Sally Gronow
“Customer service shouldn’t just be a department, it should be the entire company.” – Tony Hsieh
“Customer service is an opportunity to exceed your customer’s expectations.” – John Jantsch
“The purpose of a business is to create a customer who creates customers.” – Shiv Singh
“Customers don’t expect you to be perfect. They do expect you to fix things when they go wrong.” – Donald Porter
“It is so much easier to be nice, to be respectful, to put yourself in your customer’s’ shoes and try to understand how you might help them before they ask for help, than it is to try to mend a broken customer relationship.” – Mark Cuban
“Only once customer service has become habitual will a company realize its true potential.” — Than Merrill
“Customers don’t care about your policies. Find and engage the need. Tell the customer what you can do.” – Alice Sesay Pope
“Always keep in mind the old retail adage: Customers remember the service a lot longer than they remember the price.” – Lauren Freedman
“Here is a powerful yet simple rule. Always give people more than they expect to get.” – Nelson Boswell
“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
“The customer is always right.” – Harry Gordon Selfridge
“A lot of people have fancy things to say about customers service, but it’s just a day-in, day-out, ongoing, never-ending, persevering, compassionate kind of activity.” – Christopher McCormick
“We have entered the era of the customers. Today, providing customers with outstanding customer service is essential to building loyal customers and a long-lasting brand.” – Jerry Gregoire
“Great customer service doesn’t mean that the customer is always right, it means that the customer is always honored.” – Chris LoCurto
Customer Focused Marketing
“We don’t want to push our ideas on to customers, we simply want to make what they want.” – Laura Ashley
“Instead of focusing on the competition, focus on the customer.” – Scott Cook
“The more advocates you have, the fewer ads you have to buy.” – Dharmesh Shah
“The first step in exceeding your customer’s expectations is to know those expectations.” – Roy H. Williams
“Get closer than ever to your customers. So close that you tell them what they need well before they realize it themselves.” – Steve Jobs
“Make a customer, not a sale.” – Katherine Barchetti
“Satisfied customer is the best source of advertisement” – G.S. Alag
“The way to a customer’s heart is much more than a loyalty program. Making customer evangelists is about creating experiences worth talking about.” – Valeria Maltoni
“No amount of advertising can repair the damage done by failing to properly address a customer’s concern.” – Albert Schindler
“If you make a sale, you make a living. If you make an investment of time and good service in a customer, you can make a fortune.” – John Rohn
“Customers who love you will market for you more powerfully than you can possibly market yourself.” – Jeanne Bliss
“Your target customers have to love you more than they hate change. And people really hate change.” – Erika Hall
“Want your users to fall in love with your designs? Fall in love with your users. That’s how users become excited about designs — being desired is very seductive.” – Dana Chisnell
“Marketing is not the art of finding clever ways to dispose of what you make. It is the art of creating genuine customer value.” – Philip Kotler
“If you want to be a good brand and have a value exchange with the customer… you’ve got to have the listening mechanisms that can catch up to the customer as well.” – Kelly Soligon
“People don’t just buy your products that they can see; they buy your attitude that they can sense” – Roxanne Emmerich
“It is not your customer’s job to remember you, it is your obligation and responsibility to make sure they don’t have the chance to forget you.” – Patricia Fripp
“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
“Just having satisfied customers isn’t good enough anymore. If you really want a booming business, you have to create raving fans.” – Ken Blanchard
“Happy customers are your biggest advocates and can become your most successful sales team.” – Lisa Masiello
Blake Morgan is a keynote speaker, futurist and author of two books, “The Customer Of The Future” and “More Is More.” Sign up for her weekly customer experience newsletter here.