5 Useful Quotes from Experienced Customer Service Leaders

Whether you’re a customer service director, manager, or representative, reading a few good words of wisdom always seems to help inspire your next course of action. Especially when those words are from veteran leaders, who have said some amazing things about how to interact with your customers, and how to motivate you and your team to succeed.

Let’s take a moment to read through our picks of the 5 most useful quotes for customer service professionals:

1. Sir Richard Charles Nicholas Branson is a well-known investor and philanthropist. He founded the Virgin Group, which controls more than 400 companies. His philosophy was to always exceed customer expectations in surprising ways. He says,

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.

2. William Davidow is a successful Silicon Valley venture capitalist, philanthropist and author. For many years, he was senior VP at Intel, where he was responsible for the development and design of the Intel microchip. William’s quote is explaining the importance of execution. He says,

The longer you wait, the harder it is to produce outstanding customer service.

3. Have you ever experienced a positive outcome from a customer service problem, where perhaps you didn’t recall exactly what happened, but you do remember that positive feeling at the end? That’s the premise of Maya Angelou’s quote. Maya was an American poet and civil rights activist. She published seven autobiographies, three books of essays, several books of poetry, spanning over 50 years. She says,

People will forget what you said. They will forget what you did. But they will never forget how you made them feel.

4. One tip that we often tell customer service professionals is that you need to understand the customer’s problem completely, before you can attempt to fix it. Stephen Covey solidifies that statement. Stephen is an American educator, author, businessman, and keynote speaker. His most popular book was The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. He says, 

Seek first to understand. Then to be understood.

5. Steven Paul Jobs was an American entrepreneur, businessman, and inventor. He was the chairman, the chief executive officer, and a co-founder of Apple Inc. His quotes have always been incredibly inspirational. This one is my favorite because it forces companies to go beyond just serving customers, but making an actual effort to truly understand their needs. He says,

Get closer than ever to your customers. So close, in fact, that you tell them what they need well before they realize it themselves.