26 Customer Experience quotes to inspire your sales team

26 Customer Experience quotes to inspire your sales team

A customer’s experience with your sales team can make or break your relationship with them. And it doesn’t take long before a series of bad experiences can tarnish your brand’s reputation. Think 1 star reviews and a barrage of complaints on social media, or even becoming a front page news story like United Airlines.

On the flip side, outstanding customer experience will win you the business, increase average purchase price and turn transactional customers into advocates who refer their friends.

But every sales team, even the high performing ones, have days when they’re not feeling the love for their customers. They need a little inspiration and a gentle reminder that their customers are humans not numbers.

So we’ve collected 26 of our favourite customer experience quotes to help you rally the troops and inspire your team. We’re talking about the good stuff from Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates – leaders who have learnt, sometimes the hard way, just how important customer service is.

 

Quotes about having a customer-first culture

 A customer-first culture is one of the secret weapons for most highly successful businesses. It goes beyond nice, friendly scripts and polite staff to being something that is ingrained in your operations, your hiring, and even internal relationships. When a business is truly motivated to put the customer first, the impact can take on a life of its own. Customers are more loyal, their order sizes increase, they refer new business and become advocates. Staff also report feeling better levels of satisfaction in their work when they’re united in their cause for customers. As Heather Williams says (1), “Revolve your world around the customer and more customers will revolve around you.”

 

2. Every company’s greatest assets are its customers, because without customers there is no company. – Michael LeBouef, Author of How to win Customers and Keep Them for Life

 

3. A satisfied customer is the best business strategy of all. – Michael LeBouef, Author of How to win Customers and Keep Them for Life

4. Politeness goes far, yet costs nothing. – Samuel Smiles, Scottish Author

5. Customer service isn’t a department, it’s a philosophy!, Shep Hyken, Customer Service and Experience Expert and Bestselling Author

6. 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

7. Make a customer, not a sale. – Katherine Barchetti, Founder K.Barchetti

8. Every great business is built in friendship. – James Cash Penney, Founder or J.C. Penney

9. Customers may forget what you said, but they’ll never forget how you made them feel. – Unknown

10. The customer’s perception is your reality. – Kate Zabriskie, President of Business Training Works

 

Quotes about listening to the customer

Agents can become so focused on following a script that, let’s face it, sometimes they forget to listen, and I mean really listen, to what the customer is saying. As Don Alden Adams says (11), “To give real service you must add something which cannot be bought or measured with money, and that is sincerity and integrity.”

 

12. Go beyond merely communicating to ‘connecting’ with people. – Jerry Bruckner, Author of The Success Formula

13. Our attitude towards other determines their attitude towards us. – Earl Nightingale, Radio Personality

 

 Quotes about surprising and delighting your customers

To turn customers into advocates it’s essential to exceed their expectations.

As Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, says(14), “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.”

15. 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, Founder of the Virgin Group

16. Here is a powerful yet simple rule. Always give people more than they expect to get. – Nelson Boswell, CEO and Owner of Nelson Boswell

 

Quotes about turning customers into advocates

First class customer experience can turn one off customers into repeat customers; and repeat customers into advocates who, according to Chip Bell, Customer Service Keynote Speaker (17), “Don’t simply recommend you, they insist that their friends do business with you.”

18. Here are some more of our favourite quotes on the power of customer loyalty.

19. 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, Founder and Head of Strategy of Conversation Agent LLC

20. The purpose of a business is to create a customer who creates customers. – Shiv Singh, Senior Vice President Innovation and Strategic Partnerships, Visa

21. The best advertising you can have is a loyal customer spreading the word about how incredible your business is. – Shep Hyken, Customer Service and Experience Expert and Bestselling Author

 

Quotes about taking unhappy customers seriously

As Derek Sivers says, (22) “Customer service is the new marketing.” That doesn’t necessarily mean that happy customers are always going to talk about you, but it does mean that unhappy customers will. Especially through social media, forums and online reviews.

23. If you make customers unhappy in the physical world, they might each tell six friends. If you make customers unhappy on the internet, they can each tell 6,000. – Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon

24. Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning. Bill Gates, Microsoft Founder

25. No amount of advertising can repair the damage done by failing to properly address a customer’s concern. – Albert Schindler

26. Customers don’t expect you to be perfect. They DO expect you to fix things when they go wrong. – Donald Porter, Managing Director of MSB Consulting

Finally, no list of inspirational quotes would be complete without a cute cat meme. You’re welcome.

 

From woo-ing customer to retaining customers and resolving customer complaints; your sales team should be focused on one thing – what the customer wants. And while the customer is not always right, they are always important and should be treated with respect.