Keep customers loyal with great customer service and they’ll be happy to promote your brand. What’s more, customer experience provides the personalization that marketers crave. Before putting money into a marketing campaign, look at what’s already being done in your inbox and maximize its value as much as possible. 19 tips to improve your customer service skills. 13 min read Whether you’re working in a customer-facing role, managing a team in a contact center or looking to improve customer experience on a company-wide level, use these customer service tips and skills to make sure you’re at the top of your game.
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Exceptional customer service has been proven to be the new competitive advantage in today’s economy.
Successful businesses today don’t ignore customer service. The power of social media and the ability for customers to voice their opinions good AND bad have given customers power in today’s economy. Customer service matters, and successful businesses know that customers need to be appreciated, cared for, and understood.
Effective, exceptional customer service is more than generating satisfaction, it creates overwhelming customer loyalty. This level of customer relationship affects the bottom line during good economic times and bad.
If your organization is setting out to deliver an exceptional customer service experience, keep these 101 best customer service quotes close by for a quick dose of inspiration in your quest to deliver great customer service that your customers deserve.
101 Best Customer Service Inspirational Quotes
Customer service is growing in importance as a competitive business differentiator heading into the new year. Here is a collection of 99 inspiring and useful customer service quotes to keep in mind:
- Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.
Bill Gates - Your customer doesn’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.
Damon Richards - Your best customers leave quite an impression. Do the same, and they won’t leave at all.
SAP Ad - You’ve got to look for a gap, where competitors in a market have grown lazy and lost contact with the readers or the viewers.
Rupert Murdoch - 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 - You are serving a customer, not a life sentence. Learn how to enjoy your work.
Laurie McIntosh - 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, MD Kwik-Fit Financial Services - When the customer comes first, the customer will last.
Robert Half - When people talk about successful retailers and those that are not so successful, the customer determines at the end of the day who is successful and for what reason.
Jerry Harvey - Whatever your business is, talk to your customers and provide them with what they want. It makes sense.
Robert Bowman, CEO Major League Baseball Advanced Media - Well done is better than well said.
Benjamin Franklin - 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, CEO Amazon.com - We don’t want to push our ideas on to customers, we simply want to make what they want.
Laura Ashley - Unless you have 100% customer satisfaction…you must improve.
Horst Schulz - Under promise and over deliver.
Toby Bloomberg - To understand the man, you must first walk a mile in his moccasin.
North American Indian Proverb - 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, Founder of Wal-Mart - 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, Ben & Jerry’s - There are no traffic jams along the extra mile.
Roger Staubach - The single most important thing to remember about any enterprise is that there are no results inside its walls. The result of a business is a satisfied customer.
Peter Drucker - The purpose of a business is to create a customer who creates customers
Shiv Singh - The nature of any human being, certainly anyone on Wall Street, is ‘the better deal you give the customer, the worse deal it is for you’.
Bernie Madoff - The most important adage and the only adage is, the customer comes first, whatever the business, the customer comes first.
Kerry Stokes - The more you engage with customers the clearer things become and the easier it is to determine what you should be doing.
John Russell, President, Harley Davidson - The longer you wait, the harder it is to produce outstanding customer service.
William H. Davidow - The interesting thing is when we design and architect a server, we don’t design it for Windows or Linux, we design it for both. We don’t really care, as long as we’re selling the one the customer wants.
Michael Dell - The goal as a company is to have customer service that is not just the best but legendary.
Sam Walton, Founder of Wal-Mart - The customer’s perception is your reality.
Kate Zabriskie, Author of: Customer Service Excellence: How to Deliver Value to Today’s Busy Customer - The customer experience is the next competitive battleground.
Jerry Gregoire, CIO, Dell Computers - 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 - 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 - 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 - Rule 1: The customer is always right. Rule 2: If the customer is ever wrong, re-read Rule 1.
Stew Leonard, CEO Stew Leonard’s - Right or wrong, the customer is always right.
Marshall Field - Revolve your world around the customer and more customers will revolve around you.
Heather Williams - 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 - Profit in business comes from repeat customers; customers that boast about your product and service, and that bring friends with them.
W. Edwards Deming - People expect good service but few are willing to give it.
Robert Gateley - Our mission statement about treating people with respect and dignity is not just words but a creed we live by every day. You can’t expect your employees to exceed the expectations of your customers if you don’t exceed the employees’ expectations of management.
Howard Schultz, CEO Starbucks Coffee - Only a life lived in the service to others is worth living.
Albert Einstein - One of the deep secrets of life is that all that is really worth doing is what we do for others.
Lewis Carol - Nothing is so contagious as enthusiasm.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 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 - Men are rich only as they give. He who gives great service gets great rewards.
Elbert Hubbard - Make your product easier to buy than your competition, or you will find your customers buying from them, not you.
Mark Cuban - Make a customer, not a sale.
Katherine Barchetti - 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, Founder Chip Bell Group - Know what your customers want most and what your company does best. Focus on where those two meet.
Kevin Stirtz - Kind words can be short and easy to speak, but their echos are truly endless.
Mother Teresa - It’s much harder to provide a great customer service than I would have ever realised. It’s much more art than science in some of these other areas and not just about the facts but about how you are conveying them.
David Yu, Chief Operating Officer, Betfair - It’s a very, very tough market. So unless you do a really good job, you buy the right products from the manufacturers, you service the customer, they keep coming back, they bring their friends in, it’s all about numbers, numbers, numbers.
John Ilhan - It starts with respect. If you respect the customer as a human being, and truly honor their right to be treated fairly and honestly, everything else is much easier.
Doug Smith - It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.
Charles Darwin - It is not the employer who pays the wages. Employers only handle the money. It is the customer who pays the wages.
Henry Ford - It helps a ton when you learn people’s names and don’t butcher them when trying to pronounce them.
Jerry Yang - In the world of Internet Customer Service, it’s important to remember your competitor is only one mouse click away.
Doug Warner - In the end, the customer doesn’t know, or care, if you are small or large as an organisation. She or he only focuses on the garment hanging on the rail in the store.
Giorgio Armani - In our way of working, we attach a great deal of importance to humility and honesty; With respect for human values, we promise to serve our customers with integrity.
Azim Premji - If you’re not serving the customer, your job is to be serving someone who is.
Jan Carlzon, ex-CEO SAP Group - 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 Krock - If you want to lift yourself up, lift up someone else.
Booker T. Washington - If you make customers unhappy in the physical world, they might each tell 6 friends. If you make customers unhappy on the Internet, they can each tell 6,000 friends
Jeff Bezos, CEO Amazon.com - If you don’t genuinely like your customers, chances are they won’t buy.
Thomas Watson, former CEO IBM - If you do build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful.
Jeff Bezos, CEO Amazon.com - If you do build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful.
Jeff Bezos, CEO Amazon.com - 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 - If you do build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful.
Jeff Bezos, CEO Amazon.com - If we keep doing what we’re doing, we’re going to keep getting what we’re getting.
Stephen Covey - If we do not lay out ourselves in the service of mankind whom should we serve?
John Adams - I won’t complain. I just won’t come back
Brown & Williamson Tobacco Ad - I don’t do business with those who don’t make a profit because they can’t give the best service.
Richard Bach - Here is a simple but powerful rule: always give people more than what they expect to get.
Nelson Boswell - He profits, most who serves best.
Arthur F. Sheldon - Good service is good business.
Siebel Ad - Good leaders must first become good servants.
Robert Greenleaf - Good customer service costs less than bad customer service.
Sally Gronow, Welsh Water - Friendly makes sales – and friendly generates repeat business.
Jeffrey Gitomer - 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 - Excellent firms don’t believe in excellence – only in constant improvement and constant change.
Tom Peters - Everyone in an organization should be involved with customer service, not only are they feeling the customer but they are getting a feeling for what’s not working.
Penny Handscomb - Every great business is built on friendship.
JC Penney - 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 - Every company’s greatest assets are its customers, because without customers there is no company.
Michael LeBoeuf, Author of: How to Win Customers and Keep Them for Life - Every client you keep, is one less that you need to find.
Nigel Sanders - 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, President Sikorsky Aircraft - Do what you do so well that they will want to see it again and bring their friends.
Walt Disney - 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 - Customers today want the very most and the very best for the very least amount of money, and on the best terms. Only the individuals and companies that provide absolutely excellent products and services at absolutely excellent prices will survive.
Brian Tracy - Customers don’t expect you to be perfect. They do expect you to fix things when they go wrong.
Donald Porter, V.P. British Airways - Customers don’t always know what they want. The decline in coffee-drinking was due to the fact that most of the coffee people bought was stale and they weren’t enjoying it. Once they tasted ours and experienced what we call “the third place”.. a gathering place between home and work where they were treated with respect.. they found we were filling a need they didn’t know they had.
Howard Schultz, Chairman and CEO Starbucks - Customer service is not a department, it’s everyone’s job.
Anonymous - Customer service is not a department, it’s everyone’s job.
Anonymous - Customer service is just a day in, day out ongoing, never ending, unremitting, persevering, compassionate, type of activity.
Leon Gorman, CEO L.L.Bean - Customer satisfaction is worthless. Customer loyalty is priceless.
Jeffrey Gitomer - Being on par in terms of price and quality only gets you into the game. Service wins the game.
Tony Allesandra - An ounce of loyalty is worth a pound of cleverness.
Elbert Hubbard - A shoe without sex appeal is like a tree without leaves. Service without emotion is like a shoe without sex appeal.
Anonymous - A lot of companies have chosen to downsize, and maybe that was the right thing for them. We chose a different path. Our belief was that if we kept putting great products in front of customers, they would continue to open their wallets.
Steve Jobs - A little experience often upsets a lot of theory.
S. Parkes Cadman - The customer is NOT always right, but they are ALWAYS the customer.
Don Gallegos - Customers don’t care about your policy, they care about ACTION.
Flavio Martins, VP DigiCert, Inc.
Rumi, the ancient Sufi mystic and poet, used to write: “If you desire healing, let yourself fall ill, let yourself fall ill”. I like this quote. In my understanding, it means that in order to experience true health, which is our natural state, we need to undergo a certain cleaning. We need to remove things which don’t belong to the natural state, which become barriers to our experiencing it.
I think this wisdom can be applied to all aspects of our life. When I try to apply it to my work and my aspiration to create a perfect customer experience, I realize that a perfect experience doesn’t need to be created. More often than not, to make our customers happy we just need to remove things which stand in the way of effective and positive communication between us as companies and our clients. In a way, it could also be called a cleaning process, or healing process. And the first step is, to recognize these barriers which obstruct the ideal experience, or to let yourself as a company fall ill, which means allowing space for mistakes and for their recognition.
Below are 10 most common and most significant mistakes which Provide Support team recognizes in our own interaction with clients and which we are trying to avoid. I hope some of these points will drive your attention where perhaps it is most needed at the moment and will help your customers to have a truly outstanding experience with your company.
1. Indifference
How a customer service agent is approaching a client, his/her attitude toward the client is extremely important. It may seem that some technical aspects of how support is being offered have bigger impact. However, in my experience, the quality of a personal interaction between the agent and the customer always has bigger contribution to how customer evaluates his experience. This is also confirmed by the results of Genesys Global Survey, which show the 78% of customers say that competent customer service reps are most responsible for a happy customer experience.
In my opinion, indifference lies at the root of all other barriers to a great customer experience. It is what nurtures slacking and creates a negative impression in customers, that’s why I put it as the first and the most significant barrier to outstanding customer experience. I recommend reading these 2 posts here and here if you would like to dig into this problem deeper and how you can solve it.
2. Inattention
The natural consequence of indifference, inattention to the voice of the customer also creates a negative impact and make the customers feel as if their business is unimportant to you. Customers want to be heard no matter whether they use live chat or phone to contact you. Not only they expect you to understand their problem and offer a solution, but they also want you to hear their feedback, their complaints, compliments and suggestions. They want you to notice what they say, react to it and respond.
3. Lack of commitment
To Make Customers Happy Don't Skimp On Customer Service 1-800
A lot of the times a customer’s issue requires a follow up. I’ve seen many cases like this that a customer service agent and a company as a whole do not have the necessary commitment to lead the customer to the end and ensure that his problem is solved and the customer is satisfied.
Perhaps it is even worth having a separate person in your team who would be dedicated to the monitoring of this situation and making sure that follow up with customers is performed where it is needed.
4. Poor team work
Some of the more complicated customer service issues imply a second interaction. It may happen that the customer was served perfectly well during the first one, but when his issue is escalated to another person, or he gets in touch with another team member during a second interaction, he experiences disappointment. The need to explain the issue a second or third time, or sometimes different answers, different interpretations of the company policy given by agents, can greatly diminish customer experience.
Make sure that your team is strong and gives consistent experience to the customer. All members of the team should work in cooperation, every link of the chain supporting the next one. Unite your people by inspiring them to give their best to clients.
5. Overworking
A few customers shared with me that whenever they contact support, a lot of the times their problem is interpreted to be larger than it is. In fact, 80% of the customer service issues concern the basics of your product or service. They don’t require any special skill or knowledge or even investigation on the part of the agent.
Overworking the problem can be as damaging as underworking it. Good knowledge of the product or service, attention to the customer’s explanation of the issue and some degree of intuitiveness will help the agent to see the real scope of the problem and give the fastest and the simplest solution.
6. Scripted communication
Customers desire authenticity and dislike overly scripted service. Many companies, unfortunately, deviate into scripted communication with their clients. Partly, it happens because it is easier for companies like this. It also happens because companies don’t trust the discretion of their employees that they can sort out the client’s problem. So they give them canned responses to send to customers.
To break this vicious circle, as a company you need to have trust in your people and their potential, their interest to be of help to you and the customers. And secondly, you need to inspire them. Inspire them to trust in themselves and be creative. Creativity is hardly needed when communication happens in the present moment, when it is not prepared in advance. How to inspire creativity in your agents, read on in my other post here.
To Make Customers Happy Don't Skimp On Customer Service Phone Number
7. Inconvenient access to support
Technical aspects, of course, also matter in the customer experience. You need to make sure your clients have easy access to support when it is needed. They will highly appreciate the convenience.
How can you ensure easy access to support? Put yourself into your clients’ shoes and browse your website. See if you can find the contact options on your website and all of them are working and your agents are responding. Taking care of the technical side of it is not so difficult, but it also takes some time and dedication.
8. Lack of customer personal data or insufficient use of it
Customers find it important that the company has access to their previous transaction history and their personal details. Recent CX Act’s research revealed that the degree to which customers’ information is used by the company to provide a personalized solution is in direct correlation with the degree to which customers perceive their support interaction as quick and easy.
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Not collecting any customer information, as well as collecting but not making use of it is equally damaging to how customers perceive your support. Make sure that you are asking your customers only that information which is needed and you are using it to the maximum to provide better service to them.
9. Low first call resolution rate
Statistically, if customers get a solution to their problem in the first call, 92% are likely to continue using the company, 86% are likely to recommend the brand, 88% are likely to spread positive word of mouth about the brand. This leads to much higher levels of loyalty and advocacy, better perception of your company. There are way too many benefits to low first call resolution to ignore this factor. Check out our nice infographics on how to measure and improve your first call resolution.
10. Delayed response
Nobody likes waiting. Long hold times are one of the most frequent cause of complaint and dissatisfaction by customers. This seems like the easiest thing to fix. However, many companies still overlook this important aspect of good service as fast reaction to a customer service request. It is like getting back to basics in customers service, that’s why I put this factor at the end of my list.
There is a lot of work ahead to eliminate all the above mentioned barriers and allow the perfect customer experience to happen. Perhaps, your company has already overcome these and is struggling with some other issues?
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Have your voice in the comments and let us know what other barriers to outstanding customer service you think are significant and important to overcome in your business.
To Make Customers Happy Don't Skimp On Customer Service Video
- How Not to Lose Customers in the Busy Holiday Season - December 6, 2018
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- Don’t Give Your Customers a Reason To Leave - August 22, 2018