Article | 17 min read
101 customer service quotes to keep your team motivated at work
Customer support isn’t always easy, but some good customer service quotes can keep your team going on tough days.
Last updated January 11, 2023
Customer-facing jobs are not for the faint of heart. While you’re sure to have your fair share of wins, some days will inevitably be hard. After all, it can be challenging not to take a disgruntled customer’s words personally. If you’re feeling drained or worn down, read these uplifting customer service quotes to help change your mindset—better yet, download some of our favorites to hang up by your desk.
Motivational customer experience quotes
If you’re in need of a pick-me-up or some CX inspo, look no further—you’ve come to the right place.
- “Remind yourself the nature of the work is helping frustrated people in situations that are confusing at best or impossible at worst. Never take it personally, and know you are able to help simply by listening with an empathetic ear.”
— Jillana Peterson, principal operations manager at Zendesk - “If you make a sale, you can make a living. If you make an investment of time and good service, you can make a fortune.”
— Jim Rohn, entrepreneur and author - “You are serving a customer, not a life sentence. Learn how to enjoy your work.”
— Laurie McIntosh, facilitator, writer, and editor at Business Training Works, Inc. - “If you are not taking care of your customer, your competitor will.”
— Bob Hooey, author, coach, and speaker - “To the customer, you are the company.”
— Shep Hyken, author and keynote speaker - “A customer is the most important visitor in our premises. [They are] not dependent on us, we are dependent on [them]. [They are] not an interruption to our work, [they are] the purpose of it.”
— Mahatma Gandhi, lawyer, activist, writer, and politician - “Service first, sell after.”
— Teresa Anania, SVP of global customer success at Zendesk - “There are no traffic jams on the extra mile.”
— Roger Staubach, NFL Hall of Famer - “[We] are rich only as [we] give. [One] who gives great service gets great rewards.”
— Elbert Hubbard, writer and philosopher - “Create multiple scenarios or use cases with the functionality your product offers. You will run into all sorts of issues and will know how to resolve them by the time you are asked by a client. This will make you more relaxed when on calls or presentations, as you will already know the answer.”
— Noel Proudfoot, customer success analyst at CashAnalytics - “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 Walmart and Sam’s Club - “Always keep in mind the old retail adage: Customers remember the service a lot longer than they remember the price.”
— Lauren Freedman, author and retail veteran - “I am straightforward and honest with my customers. I will give them my employer’s ‘spin’ on a situation. But I will not lie.”
— Max Shak, founder of nerDigital - “To listen closely and reply well is the highest perfection we are able to attain in the art of conversation.”
— Francois de La Rochefoucauld, author - “Customer service represents the heart of a brand in the hearts of its customers.”
— Kate Nassar, The People-Skills Coach - “Make the customer the hero of your story.”
— Ann Handley, keynote speaker, writer, and marketer - “What do we live for, if not to make life less difficult for each other.”
— George Eliot, author and poet - “There will be obstacles. There will be doubters. There will be mistakes. But with hard work, there are no limits.”
— Michael Phelps, the most decorated Olympian of all time - “Life is for service. Anything that we can do to help foster the intellect and spirit and emotional growth of our fellow human beings, that is our job.”
— Fred Rogers, creator and TV host of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood - “Your support team is the hidden gem in your business. They are there with your customers throughout their entire lifecycle. They are bonded.”
— Delores Cooper, manager of scaled success at Zendesk - “Being on par in terms of price and quality only gets you into the game. Service wins the game.”
— Dr. Tony Alessandra, author and business expert - “To be great at something, you have to come at it with passion, or not at all.”
— Peachy Garcia, senior customer advocate at Zendesk - “To give real service, you must add something which cannot be bought or measured with money, and that is sincerity and integrity.”
— Douglas Adams, author - “Words of comfort, skillfully administered, are the oldest therapy known to man.”
— Louis Nizer, lawyer - “The key is to set realistic customer expectations, and then not to just meet them, but exceed them—preferably in unexpected and helpful ways.”
— Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Group - “The goal as a company is to have customer service that is not just the best, but legendary.”
— Sam Walton, founder of Walmart and Sam’s Club - “Know what your customers want most and what your company does best. Focus on where those two meet.”
— Kevin Stirtz, author - “Do what you do so well that they will want to see it again and bring their friends.”
— Walt Disney, founder of Disneyland and Walt Disney World - “The customer experience is the next competitive battleground.”
— Jerry Gregoire, former SVP and CIO of Dell Computers - “There is a ‘why’ behind your organization and product that makes it invaluable to your clients and users. You might not always have an immediate resolution, but you do have a product that is filling a gap for your clients and understanding that will continue to motivate you.”
— Shae Phelps Peden, client success partner at 360Learning - “Shift the focus of your customer from what went wrong to what you will do to make it right.”
— Sakshi Jain, marketing lead at OSlash - “Remember, the best job goes to the person who can get it done without passing the buck or coming back with excuses.”
— Napoleon Hill, author - “The purpose of a business is to create a customer who creates customers.”
— Shiv Singh, business leader and author - “Happy customers are your biggest advocates and can become your most successful sales team.”
— Lisa Masiello, author, advocate, and entrepreneur - “Memorable customer service can only take place in a human-to-human situation.”
— Jeffrey Gitomer, author, speaker, and business trainer - “A business absolutely devoted to service will have only one worry about profits. They will be embarrassingly large.”
— Henry Ford, founder of Ford Motor Co. - “Collecting feedback is necessary to continue to have your product or company be the brand differentiator. … Letting [your customers] know they are heard and [you] are aware of their concerns and feedback validates their thoughts and makes them feel valued.”
- “Don’t find fault. Find a remedy.”
- “Always try to understand the client’s end goal for the feedback. Quite often, a client brings feedback regarding a specific solution to answer a very narrow need. However, having a deeper understanding of their actual need will often reveal a larger gap that might impact multiple clients. Understanding the challenge and actual goal almost always outweighs specific parameters outlined by an individual customer.”
— Shae Phelps Peden, client success partner at 360Learning - “The customer’s perception is your reality.”
— Kate Zabriskie, President of Business Training Works, Inc. - “To give without any reward, or any notice, has a special quality of its own.”
— Anne Morrow Lindbergh, author and aviator - “People will sit up and take notice of you if you will sit up and take notice of what makes them sit up and take notice.”
— Harry Gordon Selfridge, retail magnate and founder of Selfridges - “Customer feedback is incredibly important to any organization, and customer service teams play a crucial role in being the voice of the customer.”
— Nicole Potalivo, customer success director at The Neat Company - “Log every piece of feedback from a client in a system that is actively used. Then review this weekly or monthly with your team to see what can be done to improve.”
— Noel Proudfoot, customer success analyst at CashAnalytics - “I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen.”
— Ernest Hemingway, author and journalist - “Seek first to understand. Then to be understood.”
— Stephen R. Covey, author - “We don’t want to push our ideas onto customers, we simply want to make what they want.”
— Laura Ashley, fashion designer and entrepreneur - “Make every interaction count, even the small ones. They are all relevant.”
— Shep Hyken, author and keynote speaker - “Don’t dwell on what went wrong. Instead, focus on what to do next. Spend your energies on moving forward toward finding the answer.”
— Denis Waitley, author, consultant, and motivational speaker - “Customers long to interact with—even relate to—employees who act like there is still a light inside.”
— Chip Bell, founder of Chip Bell Group - “Although your customers won’t love you if you give bad service, your competitors will.”
— Kate Zabriskie, President of Business Training Works - “Customers are like teeth. Ignore them, and they’ll go away.”
— Jerry Flanagan, State Farm agent - “Right or wrong, the customer is always right.”
— Marshall Field, founder of Marshall Field and Company - “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 - “Rule 1: The customer is always right. Rule 2: If the customer is ever wrong, re-read Rule 1.”
— Stew Leonard, founder of Stew Leonard’s - “If you’re not serving the customer, your job is to be serving someone who is.”
— Jan Carlzon, Swedish businessman - “Success is not defined by the ability to have no complaints, it is defined by the ability to deal with them.”
— Mikkel Svane, founder and CEO of Zendesk - “Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.”
— Bill Gates, founder and CEO of Microsoft - “Customer service shouldn’t just be a department—it should be the entire company.”
— Tony Hsieh, former CEO of Zappos - “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, former CEO of McDonald’s - “Elegance is like manners. You can’t be polite only on Wednesday or Thursday. If you are elegant, you should be every day of the week. If you are not, then it’s a different matter.”
— Aldo Gucci, former Gucci chairman - “Customers don’t expect you to be perfect. They expect you to fix things when they go wrong.”
— Donald Porter, former VP of British Airways - “We have a mantra, ‘don’t be evil,’ which [means] to do the best things we know how for our users, for our customers, for everyone.”
— Larry Page, CEO of Alphabet (parent company of Google) - “Customer experience is so much more than improving what’s not working. It can be about creating more meaningful experiences that transform an organization. Innovating around the customer journey can lead to impressive results and help customers in ways that provide not just fewer ruined days but incredibly positive experiences that better their lives.”
— Jeannie Walters, CEO of Experience Investigators and CX speaker - “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, CEO of Berkshire Hathaway - “Understanding that every person has their own life, their own hardships, and their own problems really puts things into perspective. We don’t have to solve all their problems. We don’t even have to solve a single problem, honestly. Just listening, being compassionate, and responding kindly is enough to diffuse almost every difficult situation we’ve faced.”
— Nicole Thelin, founder of Low Income Relief - “Customers are never actually personally angry at customer service professionals. They’re angry at the company, the product, or the situation in which they find themselves. Even when they say hurtful things, it’s not because of who you are as a person at the end of the day.”
— Maria Britton, CEO of Trade Show Labs - “When you assume negative intent, you’re angry. If you take away that anger and assume positive intent, you will be amazed.”
— Indra Nooyi, former CEO of PepsiCo - “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, CEO of Tesla and founder of SpaceX - “You can’t transform something you don’t understand. If you don’t know what’s going well and what’s not in the current experience, how will you know what to redesign and what to continue doing in the future?”
— Annette Franz, founder and CEO of CX Journey - “How you think about your customer influences how you respond to them.”
— Marilyn Suttle, customer service expert and CEO of Suttle Enterprises - “I believe that the true road to preeminent success in any line is to make yourself master of that line.”
— Andrew Carnegie, businessman and philanthropist - “Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value.”
— Albert Einstein, theoretical physicist - “Good customer service is about understanding your client’s needs and then exceeding them.”
— Cory Cabral, CEO and president of Proactive Access - “Once they’ve exhausted all possibilities and the customer still isn’t satisfied with the outcome, the customer service team needs to know they can end the conversation without fear of repercussions from management. You’ll save your team a tremendous amount of stress if they know there is a cutoff point when dealing with unhappy customers.”
— James Green, owner of Cardboard Cutouts - “Strive to provide the best possible experience for customers, even if it means making a few sacrifices along the way.”
— Peter Monkhouse, founder of ICL SA - “Customer service is the hardest job. But good customer service defines your business and creates customer loyalty.”
— Heather Rommel, support systems analyst at Zendesk - “It takes months to find a customer … seconds to lose one.”
— Vince Lombardi, former American football player, coach, and NFL executive - “We have the opportunity to make or break customer trust every day through each interaction.”
— Jillana Peterson, principal operations manager at Zendesk - “When I think about great service, it’s about how you are every interaction you have with the customer and use that as a way to improve their perception of your organization.”
— Jon Herstein, SVP of customer success at Box - “Sales without customer service is like stuffing money into a pocket full of holes.”
— David Tooman, customer service professional - “A satisfied customer is the best business strategy of all.”
— Michael LeBoeuf, business author and former management professor - “Take care of your customers, and your customers will take care of your brand.”
— Amit Sarda, business and CRM consultant - ”Every interaction with a customer is an opportunity to make them feel valued, heard, and understood. The more you can do this, the more likely they are to come back or recommend your business to others.”
— Sarah Walters, marketing manager at The Whit Group - “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, founder of Amazon - “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, author, poet, and civil rights activist - “Make a customer, not a sale.”
— Katherine Barchetti, author and former owner of K. Barchetti Shops - “Approach each customer with the idea of helping [them] to solve a problem or achieve a goal, not [just] selling a product or service.”
— Brian Tracy, author and public speaker - “Keep CRM and other customer details handy to build insights that aid you in every following conversation.”
— Sakshi Jain, marketing lead at OSlash - “Customer feedback brings luck. It is always good to hear from your customers, whether it is good or bad feedback. This helps improve [services] because the comments are coming from first-hand users of [your] products.”
— Amit Gami, managing director of Heat Pump Chooser - “The reason it seems that price is all your customers care about is that you haven’t given them anything else to care about.”
— Seth Godin, author and entrepreneur - “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, author - “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 and keynote speaker - “Get closer than ever to your customers. So close, in fact, that you tell them what they need well before they realize it themselves.”
— Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple - “What’s important is that you build trust with your customers and take ownership of their issues. Let them know that you don’t have the answer but [you] will personally investigate for them, and make sure you follow through.”
— Nicole Potalivo, customer success director at The Neat Company - “Your customer does not care how much you know until they know how much you care.”
— Damon Richards (paraphrasing Theodore Roosevelt), customer care expert - “What it comes down to is treating each and every interaction the way you would if a good friend were calling and asking for help. You’d go that extra distance to make sure they have what they need.”
— Nicole Saunders, director of community at Zendesk - “Empathy and an open ear will take you a long way. Try to tune in to your customers and really understand what they need. Meet the customer where they are.”
— Zeenah Abouchelleih, senior customer success manager at UserVoice - “More business is lost due to poor service and poor treatment than poor product. The single greatest way a company can distinguish itself from its competition is by the level of service it offers, and the higher level of service you offer, the more successful you will be. Companies spend [sic] thousands of marketing dollars trying to convince us to buy their products, but if customer contact is not handled just right in a store, at a cell center, or on the web by [a] customer service representative, all that money is wasted.”
— Nancy Friedman, customer service keynote speaker - “All lasting business is built on friendship.”
— Alfred A. Montapert, author - “Good customer service means that we leave customers better than we found them. Even if we can’t solve the problem or do what they want us to do, we can at least smile, be cheerful, and respond compassionately to each person. If our customers leave with a smile, even when they’re having a hard time, then we’ve done well.”
— Nicole Thelin, founder of Low Income Relief
Quotes about handling customer feedback
Successfully managing customer feedback is an art form, but taking the time to perfect it can help make your job much easier. Not to mention, customers will have a better opinion of you and your company.
— Zeenah Abouchelleih, senior customer success manager at UserVoice
— Henry Ford, founder of Ford Motor Co.
Funny customer service quotes
In tough circumstances, a little humor can add some pep to your step and help you resolve your client’s issue with grace.
Empower your team
The Employee Experience Trends Report helps businesses understand how to keep their workforce supported and thriving—no matter what happens.
Inspirational customer service quotes from CEOs and leaders
Learn from the greatest entrepreneurial minds of the past and present, and implement their tips for delivering top-notch customer service experiences.
Customer loyalty quotes
Any good business person will tell you that their job is less about the products and services they offer and more about the relationships they build with their customers.
Read the following quotes to find out how some of the best in the biz develop and maintain great customer relationships.
Good customer service quotes can be the pick-me-up you need
When you work in customer service, you’re bound to get bogged down by feelings of frustration and low motivation at some point or another. Hopefully, the customer support quotes above can help give you a boost and remind you just how important your work is to the success of your company.
Empower your team
The Employee Experience Trends Report helps businesses understand how to keep their workforce supported and thriving—no matter what happens.
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