21 Insightful Quotes To Get You In Your Customer’s Head

It’s no secret, we are passionate about ensuring your customers are happy with you.

Many stores we know focus on the pre-checkout experience. They focus their budgets on attracting customers and making sales. But what happens after the customer checks out from your store?

Do your customers come back?

This is why the post-purchase customer experience is so important.

We understand keeping customers is hard work. You need to get into the mindset of your customer, understand what they want and think several steps ahead on how to fulfill those expectations.

In the long run, keeping customers is not just cheaper. It’s also more profitable. Yet sometimes we get distracted and our focus slips away from our customers.

We’ve compiled a list of 21 quotes we love from CEOs, thought leaders, authors and other thought leaders in retail, business and eCommerce to help us refocus on the customer’s needs.

Apply this mindset to any interactions customers have with your brand. Whether it is on the frontline of customer support, or designing customer experiences within your product or store, these quotes will help you remember what the customer wants.

1. “Merely satisfying customers will not be enough to earn their loyalty. Instead, they must experience exceptional service worthy of their repeat business and referral. Understand the factors that drive this customer revolution.”

Rick Tate. Faculty member for the Institute of Management Studies

Takeaways: Always strive for excellence when you handle customers. Exceptional service is what makes your customers stay with you.

2. “If you do build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful.”

Jeff Bezos. Founder and CEO of Amazon

Takeaways: People recommend things they love. They don’t recommend things they don’t like or are merely okay with.

3. “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 (CEO and Founder of Amazon)

Takeaways: Amazon is famously customer-focused due to this mindset. Constantly focusing on customer experience may not profit in the short run but it will pay off in the long run.

4. “I am a broken record when it comes to saying, ‘We have to focus on the consumer.’… I don’t think the answers are just in the numbers. You have to get out and look.”

A.G. Lafley, CEO, Procter & Gamble

Takeaways: Ask your loved ones for a company or service they’re consistently a repeat customer of and discover why. Sometimes you can get a richer perspective outside of the numbers.

5. “I’m most passionate about personalization. I firmly believe that personalized experiences with brands will most drive loyalty and relevance for customers in the future.”

Katrina Lake, CEO, Stitch Fix

Takeaways: Think about the feeling when you receive an email saying “Hi, (First Name)”. Now compare that feeling when you receive an email announcing that the product you’ve had your eye on is now running at a significant discount. This is personalized marketing at its core.

6. “You have to create a consistent brand experience however and wherever a customer touches your brand, online or offline. The lines are forever blurred.”

Angela Ahrendts, Senior Vice President of Retail, Apple

Takeaways: Your customers can be surfing your shop from anywhere. You need to consider all possible customer touch points from both online and offline channels.

7. “I believe the first companies that make an effort to develop an authentic, transparent, and meaningful social contract with their fans and customers will turn out to be the ones that are the most successful in the future.”

Simon Mainwaring, Founder and CEO, We First

Takeaways: Social media can be a powerful extension of your brand, but you need to go further to develop strong relationships with your brand.

8. “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

Takeaways: Customers are the lifeblood of any business. Protect them at all costs.

9. “It is not the employer who pays the wages. Employers only handle the money. It is the customer who pays the wages.”

Henry Ford, Founder of the Ford Motor Company

Takeaway: Acquiring and then keeping your customers should be the number 1 priority of any business.

10. “Business is all about the customer: what the customer wants and what they get. Generally, every customer wants a product or service that solves their problem, worth their money, and is delivered with amazing customer service.”

Fabrizio Moreira, politician and businessman

Takeaways: People buy something because they want to solve a problem they’re facing. It could be providing a better version of themselves, solving a problem they haven’t even anticipated or a pain point bothering them.

11. “It is so much easier to be nice, to be respectful, to put yourself in your customers’ 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, investor

Takeaways: Negative customer experiences spread far and wide. It takes many times more positive customer experiences to make up for a negative customer experience.

12. “A complaint is a chance to turn a customer into a lifelong friend. I say that seriously, not as some press release baloney.”

Richard Branson, Founder of the Virgin group

Takeaways: If handled correctly, customer complaints are excellent opportunities to build relationships and retain loyal customers. Only 4% of unsatisfied customers actually complain about their negative experiences.

The other 96% take their business elsewhere and tell up to ten other people about their problems. Stop the chain of negative publicity by resolving the complaint effectively.

13. “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 of Conversation Agent

Takeaways: Customers buy things. Customer evangelists preach about the things they’ve bought. They make sure everyone they know hears the good news about you.

14. “Customers don’t expect you to be perfect. They do expect you to fix things when they go wrong”.

Donald Porter, American actor

Takeaways: Things go wrong sometimes. Be proactive about informing the customer and quickly work towards a solution. They will appreciate it.

15. “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, customer loyalty consultant

Takeaways: This quote summarises the power of customer loyalty, in a single sentence.

16. “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, author

Takeaways: If resolved properly, customer complaints are a marketing opportunity to drive sales and repeat business. Don’t miss the opportunity.

17. “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, author and entrepreneur

Takeaways: News of bad customer service reaches 3x as many people as a good experience (HelpScout) They spread it on social media or word of mouth. Be careful!

18. “Always keep in mind the old retail adage: Customers remember the service a lot longer than they remember the price.”

Lauren Freedman, real estate agent

Takeaways: Exceptional customer service stories go viral and are remembered.

19. “I have connected by phone with customers who have left negative reviews and had a chance to get to know them. Not only was I able to solve their problems, a lot of the customers were so happy with the customer service that they become repeat customers.”

Chris Gronkowski, professional footballer and founder of Ice Shaker

Takeaways: Smaller companies are generally agiler than larger companies. 80% of Americans agree smaller companies have a bigger emphasis on customer service than large businesses.

20. “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

Takeaways: This is the reason why there’s the saying ‘the customer should always come first’.

21. “The customer’s perception is your reality.”

Kate Zabriskie, customer experience consultant and author

Takeaways: The people who know best what customer service is, are customers, because they are the ones who know what they want. Hence, we should be listening to them and taking their views seriously.

For more exclusive reports, insights, and interviews on the latest updates in e-commerce and logistics, follow us on LinkedIn or join our community as a member.