75 customer experience quotes to supercharge your business in 2022

Updated: March 01, 2024

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Published: July 14, 2021

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11 mins read

Whether or not you’re making conscious decisions about it, your business is heavily involved in customer experience (CX). That’s because every business is.

This customer experience quote from Dave Dyson, Senior Customer Service Evangelist at Zendesk, sums it up:

"Customer experience involves every way a customer interacts with a company, at all stages of the customer journey — including the marketing materials they see before they become a customer, the sales experience, the quality of the product or service itself, and the customer service they receive post-purchase.”

In short, the customer experience is every touchpoint between a consumer and your brand.

Every. Single. One.

And going beyond the interaction itself, customer experience starts with your core business model, company culture, and internal operations. It seeps into every part of how your company runs — even the parts that customers never see.

So how can you make sure you’re maximizing every opportunity to improve your customer experience (Pre-purchase experience and Post-purchase experience) and convert your customers to loyal lifetime customers?

We’ve got 75 quotes about customer experience so you can learn from the pros.

You’ll find insights from some of the biggest names in business, like Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos, plus some equally wise people you’ve probably never heard of before. (Life is about balance, right?)

Customer Experience Quotes: Steve Jobs

  1. “You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work back toward the technology, not the other way around.” — Steve Jobs
  2. “Get closer than ever to your customers. So close that you tell them what they need well before they realize it themselves.” — Steve Jobs
  3. “Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren't used to an environment where excellence is expected.” — Steve Jobs
  4. “You can't just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they'll want something new.” — Steve Jobs
  5. “Quality is more important than quantity. One home run is much better than two doubles.” — Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs quote about starting with the customer experience and working back toward the technology

Customer Experience Quotes: Walt Disney

  1. “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
  2. “You can design and create, and build the most wonderful place in the world. But it takes people to make the dream a reality.” — Walt Disney
  3. “Times and conditions change so rapidly that we must keep our aim constantly focused on the future.” — Walt Disney
  4. “I would rather entertain and hope that people learned something than educate people and hope they were entertained.” — Walt Disney
  5. “It's no secret that we were sticking just about every nickel we had on the chance that people would really be interested in something totally new and unique in the field of entertainment.” — Walt Disney
Customer experience quote from Disney on doing everything so well that customers bring their friends

Customer Experience Quotes: Jeff Bezos

  1. “If there’s one reason we have done better than our peers in the internet space over the last 6 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
  2. “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
  3. “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
  4. “Focusing on the customer makes a company more resilient.” — Jeff Bezos
  5. “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
Jeff Bezos quote about how focusing on customer experience is the reason the company has done so well

Customer Experience Quotes: Bill Gates

  1. “Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.” — Bill Gates
  2. “Every day we’re 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
  3. “We all need people who will give us feedback. That’s how we improve.” — Bill Gates
  4. "If you show people the problems and you show people the solutions, they will be moved to act." — Bill Gates
  5. "Only a few businesses will succeed by having the lowest price, so most will need a strategy that includes customer services." — Bill Gates
  6. "A company's ability to respond to an unplanned event, good or bad, is a prime indicator of its ability to compete." — Bill Gates
  7. “Who decides what’s in Windows? The customers who buy it.” — Bill Gates
  8. “In business, the idea of measuring what you are doing, picking the measurements that count like customer satisfaction and performance… you thrive on that.” — Bill Gates
Bill Gates customer experience quote on unhappy customers being your greatest source of learning

Best Customer Experience Quotes About Service

  1. “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
  2. “When people call our call center, our reps don’t have scripts, and they don’t try to upsell. 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
  3. “The goal as a company is to have customer service that is not just the best, but legendary.” — Sam Walton
  4. "Customer service shouldn't just be a department, it should be the entire company." — Tony Hsieh
  5. “Customer service is an opportunity to exceed your customer’s expectations.” — John Jantsch
  6. “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
  7. “Businesses often forget about the culture, and ultimately, they suffer for it, because you can’t deliver good service from unhappy employees.” — Tony Hsieh
  8. “Only once customer service has become habitual will a company realize its true potential.” — Than Merrill
A quote from Shep Hyken explaining that customer service is how you make customers feel

Customer Experience Quotes About Competitors

  1. “In the world of internet customer service, it’s important to remember your competitor is only one mouse click away.” — Doug Warner
  2. “Exceptional customer experiences are the only sustainable platform for competitive differentiation.” — Kerry Bodine
  3. “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
  4. “The customer experience is the next competitive battleground.” — Jerry Gregoire
  5. “If you are not taking care of your customers, your competitor will.” — Bob Hooey
  6. "Instead of focusing on the competition, focus on the customer." — Scott Cook
A customer experience quote from Doug Warner on the importance of treating customers well or your competitor will

Great Customer Experience Quotes

  1. “Every employee can affect your company’s brand, not just the front-line employees that are paid to talk to your customers.” — Tony Hsieh
  2. “If you’re not serving the customer, your job is to be serving someone who is.” — Jan Carlzon
  3. “Customers don’t expect you to be perfect. They do expect you to fix things when they go wrong.” — Donald Porter
  4. “Get to know your customers. Humanize them. Humanize yourself. It’s worth it.” — Kristin Smaby
  5. “Customer experience isn’t an expense. Managing customer experience bolsters your brand.” — Stan Phelps
  6. “Great customer service doesn’t mean that the customer is always right, it means that the customer is always honored.” — Chris LoCurto
  7. "The more advocates you have, the fewer ads you have to buy." — Dharmesh Shah
  8. “No amount of advertising can repair the damage done by failing to properly address a customer’s concern.” — Albert Schindler
Tony Hsieh quote about customer experience and how every employee affects your company’s brand

Quotes on Customer Experience Design

  1. You can’t transform something you don’t understand. If you don’t know and understand what the current state of the customer experience is, how can you possibly design the desired future state?” — Annette Franz
  2. “The first step in exceeding your customer’s expectations is to know those expectations.” — Roy H. Williams
  3. “If you want to be a good brand and have a value exchange with the customer… you’ve got to have the listening mechanisms that can catch up to the customer as well.” — Kelly Soligon
  4. “Building a good customer experience does not happen by accident. It happens by design.” — Clare Muscutt
  5. “Don’t reinvent the wheel. Focus on winning one customer at a time. Be honest and sincere. Do what’s right. There’s nothing magical about this. That’s been my guiding principle. To make it work, you have to live it every day. Make it your mindset.” — Robert Spector
  6. “Always remember that everyone with whom you have a relationship has an invisible sign on their forehead that says ‘Make Me Feel Important.’ Treat them accordingly.” — Eric Philip Cowell
  7. “Marketing is not the art of finding clever ways to dispose of what you make. It is the art of creating genuine customer value.” — Philip Kotler
  8. "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
  9. “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.” — Kenneth B. Elliott
A quote from Annette Franz on the importance of understanding your customers’ experience to make it better

Short Customer Experience Quotes

  1. “It’s easier to love a brand when the brand loves you back.” — Seth Godin
  2. “There is only one boss. The customer.” — Sam Walton
  3. “Make the customer the hero of your story.” — Ann Handley
  4. “Courteous treatment will make a customer a walking advertisement.” — J.C. Penney
  5. “If you don’t care, your customer never will.” — Marlene Blaszczyk
  6. “Repeat business or behavior can be bribed. Loyalty has to be earned.” — Janet Robinson
  7. “If you don't appreciate your customers, someone else will.” — Jason Langella
  8. “Customers will never love a company until the employees love it first.” — Simon Sinek
  9. “Ease your customers’ pain.” — Hazel Edwards
  10. “The customer’s perception is your reality.” — Kate Zabriskie
  11. Customer service is the new marketing.” — Derek Sivers
  12. “A satisfied customer is the best business strategy of all.” — Michael LeBoeuf
Seth Godin quote explaining how customers love brands that love them back

Customer Experience Quotes About Loyalty

  1. “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
  2. “The purpose of a business is to create a customer who creates customers.” — Shiv Singh
  3. “Customer experience is one of the two core pillars of customer retention. The thing is, you can’t grow if your customers don’t stick around.” — Jes Kirkwood
  4. “Customer experience management (CXM) = The art and science of coaxing lifetime loyalty from daily transactions.” — Steve Curtin
  5. “It is not your customer’s job to remember you, it is your obligation and responsibility to make sure they don’t have the chance to forget you.” — Patricia Fripp
  6. “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
  7. “We have entered the era of the customers. Today, providing customers with outstanding customer service is essential to building loyal customers and a long-lasting brand.” — Jerry Gregoire
  8. “Historically, our number-one growth driver has been from repeat customers and word of mouth.” — Tony Hsieh
  9. “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
Kevin Stirtz customer experience quote on the importance of every contact with a customer

Learning From the Wisdom of Great Customer Experience Quotes

Hopefully, these quotes on customer experience have given you the inspiration you need to go forth and conquer your business.

Whether it’s from one of the legends of the business world, or from someone you just learned about, there are tons of insights here that you can apply to your own customer experience efforts.

Just remember: the name of the game is to be proactive.

Don’t just wait until customers have a complaint after their purchase. Do your research, ask questions, and learn what they want and love — then build a killer customer experience into your company’s operations and culture.

When you design customer experience from the ground up, you’re all but guaranteed to smash your goals (and your competition!). 👊

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