Quotes About Customer

The outside-in discipline requires that you have an explicit customer-based reason for everything you do in the marketplace. Managers need to create what I call "customer pictures," verbal descriptions of customers that highlight the key customer characteristics and make those customers come alive. Although managers never know as much about customers as they want and need to know, the outside-in discipline requires that they construct customer pictures anyway, basing the pictures on whatever hard data they have plus hypotheses and intuition.

Loyal customers, or customers who recommend their friends, give me the most pride. I think that is the biggest compliment I can get. I think in the restaurant business, it takes patience from the customer to spark up a relationship with the restaurateur, but it takes also work from the restaurateur to spark up a relationship with his customer.

At age nine, I got a paper route. Sixty-six papers had to be delivered to sixty-six families every day. I also had to collect thirty cents a week from each customer. I owed the paper twenty cents per customer per week, and got to keep the rest. When I didn't collect, the balance came out of my profit. My average income was six dollars a week.

All the businesses from the beginning of history have struggled with product development (assuming there is a market, doing the market testing and so on). But now they start with customer development. Get the customer who says, "Yes. I want that. I need it. I wanna use it. I'll pay for it." And then you go back and work with your engineers. It is changing the world!

When you obsess about the customer, you end up defeating your competition as a byproduct. When you are just obsessed about the competition, you end up killing yourself, because you are not focused on the customer.

To quote a recent customer email, “I really appreciate your thoughtful and professional response. I don’t get that a lot from customer service. Usually, it’s scripted nonsense that makes it seem like I’ve done something wrong. You’ve single-handedly improved my perception tenfold. Someone there ought to give you a pay raise."

I am always consulted about covers, and give feedback, but I am also aware that what causes a customer to pick a book up off a shelf in the UK is very different from what causes a customer to pick a book up in the US.

Welcome to the Customer Revolution, where you are no longer in charge. Your customer is.

Sam Walton's values are: treat the customer right, take care of your people, be honest in your dealings, pass savings along to the customer, keep things simple, think small, control costs and continuously improve operations.

If your users have many questions, it's a failure of your primary site design. It becomes not so much customer support, as much as customer complaints.

When you lose a customer, it can be tempting to tell each other, "That customer's not very sharp. They just made the wrong decision".

We want to have a diverse workforce that mirrors our customer base. Diversity of thought, we believe, is crucial to business success. We also are a tech company. And when we look at the skills that we need going forward, software engineers, electrical engineers, strong technology backgrounds, that's key for success as well.

A friend who used to be my customer told me one day: "I promise I am going to help you to be relocated." He's a realtor and after he bought two buildings in the business district in Boston, he said: "Are you ready for your next place?" I could not believe it.

I think the way design was practiced for most of the 20th century was very declarative. A designer came up with a solution for a project and put it in place and shipped the solution and it landed in a reader or a customer's hands as a brochure. They would see it as a poster, or as a piece of signage. And that was sort of it. That was the end of it. I think Internet technology has really upended that whole equation because in some ways a designer's work is never really done online.

It's through neglecting all other values to bring the customer the lowest price that Wal-Mart ended up with such a horrible sex discrimination problem, but that model produces lots and lots of other problems as well, which I think are possibly going to be more difficult to fix.

Thank you for calling customer service. If you're calm and rational, press 1. If you're a whiner, press 2. If you're a hot head, press 3

My customer isn't wrapped up in labels and money.

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

No vision issue today is bigger than the question of efficiency versus some combination of innovation and customer service.

The great thing is the start - to see an opportunity for service, and to start doing it, even though in the beginning you serve but a single customer - and him for nothing.

Don Keough's (CEO Coca-Cola) 11 Rules on "HOW TO LOSE": 1. Stop taking risks 2. Be content 3. Never deviate from what the founder did 4. Be inflexible 5. Rely totally on research and experts 6. Concentrate on competitors instead of your customers 7. Put yourself - not the customer - first 8. Solve administrative concerns first 9. Let others do your thinking for example, headquarters 10. Rely on T-G-E: "That's Good Enough" and T-N-M-J: "That's Not My Job!" 11. Rationalize slow growth

Best way to succeed is to do things for the customer, not to the competition. Very few people buy a product in order to help you hurt the competition. To think otherwise is lunacy.

Sometimes when I walk into one of my own stores, I look at the display and say, "This looks so good - I want to buy it." Yet other times I walk in and the displays and mannequins will be all wrong, and I don't want to buy anything. When a customer walks into a store, she's looking for inspiration. So I'm tuned in to people, and I care about what they need and who they are.

When a customer enters my store, forget me. He is king.

Consistent alignment of capabilities and internal processes with the customer value proposition is the core of any strategy execution.

Exceed your customer's expectations. If you do, they'll come back over and over. Give them what they want - and a little more.

Oh no. I got a customer service person from another country.

Industrial design keeps the customer happy, his client in the black and the designer busy.

You always get that one customer that decides that your name is boy. Or something. It certainly reinforces a respect I already had for people that are in the hospitality industry.

What's important at the grocery store is just as important in engines or medical systems. If the customer isn't satisfied, if the stuff is getting stale, if the shelf isn't right, or if the offerings aren't right, it's the same thing. You manage it like a small organization. You don't get hung up on zeros.

You're a pretty cool customer, huh?" says Agent Hunt. "I hide my inner pain under my stoic visage." Agent Hunt looks like he would like to put his fist through my stoic visage.

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.

A customer is never out of warranty, even if his product is.

We've already seen shifts happening in some of the big companies - Google, Apple - that now understand how vulnerable their customer data is, and that if it's vulnerable, then their business is, too, and so you see a beefing up of encryption technologies. At the same time, no programs have been dismantled at the governmental level, despite international pressure.

When people talk about successful retailers and those that are not so successful, the customer determines at the end of the day who is successful and for what reason.

Corporations invest in sophisticated CRM, or Customer Relationship Management, programs to effectively oversee their relationship with their customers at every point during the buying process.

Like the effect of advertising upon the customer, the methods of political propaganda tend to increase the feeling of insignificance of the individual voter.

The customer is usually wrong, but statistics indicate that it doesn't pay to tell him so

If you get into a customer service fight with a hooker, even if you're in the right, you're in the wrong.

Perception is all there is. If the customer think he's right, he's right.

When a customer asks what no one else has ever asked, pay close attention.

At a car dealership, the person who sells the car is the hero, and also gets the commission. But if the mechanics don't service that car well, the customer won't return.

An unsuccessful manager blames failure on his obligations; the effective manager turns them to his own advantage. A speech is a chance to lobby...a visit to an important customer a chance to extract trade information.

Truly world-class firms are always examining their business processes and continuously seeking solutions to improve in key areas, such as lead time reduction, cost cutting, exceeding customer expectations, streamlining processes, shortening time to market for new products, and managing the global operation.

The impact on a customer of a bad buying decision is usually greater than the impact of a salesperson of a lost deal.

The Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, which highlights customer satisfaction, workforce empowerment, and increased productivity, has come to symbolize America's commitment to excellence.

I am concerned about any attrition in customer traffic at Starbucks, but I don't want to use the economy, commodity prices or consumer confidence as an excuse.

If your customer base is aging with you, then eventually you are going to become obsolete or irrelevant. You need to be constantly figuring out who are your new customers and what are you doing to stay forever young.