88 Customer Experience Quotes to Make You Think Differently about CX

You'll find one thing common in most successful companies - the emphasis placed on customer experience. There is a great shift taking place in business amidst heavy competition - customers are becoming increasingly demanding and choosy about who to give their money to.

If you don't believe us, just take a look at these customer experience statistics!

Because of this, modern companies are transforming in ways that were previously unimagined. Things are no longer that simple due to heavy advances in technology. The ever-increasing needs of customers have forced them to take a more customer-centric approach to marketing, sales and customer service in order to delight customers.

We've come up with a list of customer experience quotes to inspire you and your team to think differently about customer experience and delight the customers of today:

1. “Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.” - Bill Gates
2. “The customer experience is the next competitive battleground.” - Jerry Gregoire
3. “There is only one boss. The customer.” - Sam Walton
4. “Every day were 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
5. “The goal as a company is to have customer service that is not just the best, but legendary.” - Sam Walton
6. "Everything starts with the customer" - Louis XIV
7. “Customer service is an opportunity to exceed your customer’s expectations.” - John Jantsch
8. “The first step in exceeding your customer's expectations is to know those expectations.” - Roy H. Williams
9. “The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.” - Mahatma Gandhi
10. “The purpose of a business is to create a customer who creates customers.” - Shiv Singh
11. "If you’re not serving the customer, your job is to be serving someone who is." - Jan Carlzon
12. "Get closer than ever to your customers. So close that you tell them what they need well before they realize it themselves." - Steve Jobs
13. “Make the customer the hero of your story.” - Ann Handley
14. "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
15. “It’s easier to love a brand when the brand loves you back.” - Seth Godin
16. “In the world of Internet Customer Service, it’s important to remember your competitor is only one mouse click away.” - Doug Warner
17. "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
18. "Customers don’t expect you to be perfect. They do expect you to fix things when they go wrong." - Donald Porter
19. "I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen." - Ernest Hemingway
20. “So, get to know your customers. Humanize them. Humanize yourself. It’s worth it.” - Kristin Smaby
21. “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
22. “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
23. “Every great business is built on friendship.” - J.C. Penney
24. “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
25. “When people call our call center, our reps don’t have scripts, and they don’t try to up-sell. They are just judged on whether they go above and beyond for the customer and really deliver a kind of personal service and emotional connection with our customers.” - Tony Hsieh
26. “Customer service is the new marketing.” - Derek Sivers
27. “Getting service right is more than just a nice to do; it’s a must do. American consumers are willing to spend more with companies that provide outstanding service — ultimately, great service can drive sales and customer loyalty.” - Jim Bush
28. “Every employee can affect your company’s brand, not just the front-line employees that are paid to talk to your customers.” - Tony Hsieh
29. “Businesses often forget about the culture, and ultimately, they suffer for it because you can’t deliver good service from unhappy employees.” - Tony Hsieh
30. “Historically, our number-one growth driver has been from repeat customers and word of mouth.” - Tony Hsieh
31. “Focusing on the customer makes a company more resilient.” - Jeff Bezos
32. “Customer service is part of a holistic customer experience that is capable of providing a critical competitive advantage in today’s increasingly cluttered and commoditized marketplace.” - Joseph Jaffe
33. “If you’re competitor-focused, you have to wait until there is a competitor doing something. Being customer-focused allows you to be more pioneering.” - Jeff Bezos
34. “People don’t always remember what you say or even what you do, but they always remember how you made them feel.” - Maya Angelou
35. “Attention is a main asset in marketing.” - Toba Beta
36. “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
37. “Repeat business or behavior can be bribed. Loyalty has to be earned.” - Janet Robinson
38. "Here is a simple but powerful rule: always give people more than what they expect to get." - Nelson Boswell
39. “It is not the employer who pays the wages. Employers only handle the money ... It is the customer who pays the wages." - Henry Ford
40. “When the customer comes first, the customer will last.” - Robert Half
41. “Setting customer expectations at a level that is aligned with consistently deliverable levels of customer service requires that your whole staff, from product development to marketing, works in harmony with your brand image.” - Richard Branson
42. “Customer service starts where customer experience fails.” – Chris Zane
43. “The future of communicating with customers rests in engaging with them through every possible channel: phone, email, chat, Web, and social networks. Customers are discussing a company's products and brand in real time. Companies need to join the conversation.” - Marc Benioff
44. “You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work back toward the technology, not the other way around.” - Steve Jobs
45. “I think it's very important to have a feedback loop, where you're constantly thinking about what you've done and how you could be doing it better.” - Elon Musk
46. “Every company’s greatest assets are its customers, because without customers there is no company.” - Michael LeBoeuf
47. “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
48. “One of the greatest gifts you can give to anyone is the gift of attention.” – Jim Rohn
49. "When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but creatures of emotion." - Dale Carnegie
50. “If you don’t care, your customer never will.” - Marlene Blaszczyk
51. “Don’t find customers for your products, find products for your customers.” - Seth Godin
52. “Open, honest communication is the best foundation for any relationship, but remember that at the end of the day it’s not what you say or what you do, but how you make people feel that matters the most.” - Tony Hsieh
53. “The only purpose of customer service…is to change feelings.” - Seth Godin
54. “People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care.” - Theodore Roosevelt
55. “We take most of the money that we could have spent on paid advertising and instead put it back into the customer experience. Then we let the customers be our marketing.” - Tony Hsieh
56. “The more you engage with customers the clearer things become and the easier it is to determine what you should be doing.” - John Russell
57. “If we consistently exceed the expectations of employees, they will consistently exceed the expectations of our customers.” - Shep Hyken
58. “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
59. “Make a customer, not a sale.” – Katherine Barchetti
60. “Any customer that walks away, disrespected and defeated, represents tens of thousands of dollars out the door, in addition to the failure of a promise the brand made in the first place. You can’t see it but it’s happening, daily.” - Seth Godin
61. “Always keep in mind the old retail adage: Customers remember the service a lot longer than they remember the price.” - Lauren Freedman
62. “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
63. “To succeed in business you need to be original, but you also need to understand what your customers want.” - Richard Branson
64. “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
65. “The customer’s perception is your reality.” – Kate Zabriskie
66. “If there’s one reason we have done better than of our peers in the Internet space over the last six years, it is because we have focused like a laser on customer experience, and that really does matter, I think, in any business. It certainly matters online, where word of mouth is so very, very powerful.” — Jeff Bezos
67. "Always do more than is required of you." – George Patton
68. “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 
69. “Customer service represents the heart of a brand in the hearts of its customers” - Kate Nasser
70. “Customers often know more about your products than you do. Use them as a source of inspiration and ideas for product development.” – David J. Greer
71. “Kind words can be short and easy to speak, but their echoes are truly endless.” – Mother Teresa
72. “Make your product easier to buy than your competition, or you will find your customers buying from them, not you.” - Mark Cuban
73. “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
74. “Don’t find customers for your products, find products for your customers.” - Seth Godin
75. “The easiest and most powerful way to increase customer loyalty is really very simple. Make your customers happy.” - Kevin Stirtz
76. “We have entered the era of the customer. Today, providing customers with outstanding customer service is essential to building loyal customers and a long lasting brand.” - Jerry Gregoire
77. “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
78. “Courteous treatment will make a customer a walking advertisement.” - J.C. Penny
79. “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
80. “Our greatest asset is the customer! Treat each customer as if they are the only one!” - Laurice Leitao
81. “Know what your customers want most and what your company does best. Focus on where those two meet.” - Kevin Stirtz
82. "The most important thing in communication is hearing what isn’t said." - Peter Drucker
83. "As you’ve noticed, people don’t want to be sold. What people do want is news and information about the things they care about." - Larry Weber
84. "You never get a second chance to make a first impression." – Will Rogers
85. “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
86. “The best advertising you can have is a loyal customer spreading the word about how incredible your business is.” - Shep Hyken
87. “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
88. “The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.” - Peter Drucker

Do you know other customer experience quotes we can add to this list? Did we miss any? Share them by dropping a comment below.