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.

Look, I think that when we started Virgin Atlantic 30 years ago, we had one 747 competing with the airlines that had an average of 300 planes each. Every single one of those have gone bankrupt because they didn't have customer service. They had might, but they didn't have customer service, so customer service is everything in the end.

Customer service should not be a department, customer service is everyone's job.

The decision-makers should communicate the customer pictures and the logic of the strategies and actions. That communication allows employees throughout the organization to implement the strategies and actions, tweaking them appropriately in response to variations in the marketplace. It also allows employees to recognize information in the marketplace that contradicts the customer pictures, either because the pictures were not entirely correct or because customers have changed.

The most customer-centric organizations can answer any question by deciding what's best for the customer, without ever having to ask.

True marketing starts...with the customer, his demographics, his realities, his needs, his values. It does not ask, "What do we want to sell?" It asks, "What does the customer want to buy?"

To achieve consistently terrific customer service, you must hire wonderful people who believe in your company's goals, habitually do better than the norm and who will love their jobs; make sure that their ideas and opinions are heard and respected; then give them the freedom to help and solve problems for your customers. Rather than providing rules or scripts, you should ask them to treat the customer as they themselves would like to be treated - which is surely the highest standard.

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.

We are reinventing ourselves as a company. Compaq is taking ownership of its customer relationships and accountability of our customer's needs.

Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black.

The customer is always right...even when they're wrong.

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.

Forcing your employees to follow required steps only prevents customer dissatisfaction. If your goal is truly to satisfy, to create advocates, then the step-by-step approach alone cannot get you there. Instead, you must select employees who have the talent to listen and to teach, and then you must focus them toward simple emotional outcomes like partnership and advice....Identify a person's strenths. Define outcomes that play to those strengths. Find a way to count, rate or rank those outcomes. And then let the person run.

Wal-Mart, with its legendary focus on customer value in terms of price, is innovating in sustainability. Now, we're beginning to see the mirror image, a convergence, as the not-for-profit sector is beginning to serve more effectively by applying private sector accountability and efficiencies to social needs. This reflects a rising recognition that to serve others best requires more than good intentions; it mandates a focus on real-world results. Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are among the most conspicuous advocates and representatives of this transformation.

We did start with a simple manifesto, as we called it, which was a description of what we were about, and it was the Un-carrier. It was about finding and solving customer pain points in an attempt to fix a stupid, broken, arrogant industry. It was something we felt passionate about. It was our goal to make changes and have the industry make the same ones.

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

The complaining customer represents a huge opportunity for more business.

The federal government said today they've begun training sessions for airport security workers to provide what they call more customer satisfaction to the travels, they want to make it easier for us. They're instructing security guards to glance at your luggage tags so that they can call you by your first name. Isn't that creepy? The guy touching your wife, calling her by her first name.

Lean thinking defines value as providing benefit to the customer; anything else is waste.

The service in L.A. is the best. You don't get sarcastic, surly, fed-up waiters and waitresses like you do in England. They're good at their job and they're there for the customer. The only depressing thing is a lot of them have written more screenplays than me.

A lot of people have fancy things to say about customer service, but it's just a day-in, day-out, ongoing, never-ending, persevering, compassionate kind of activity.

A social contract is the way out of this dilemma for corporations that want to lead in the 21st century by showing consumers how seriously they take customer loyalty and goodwill.

Remember that, in the end, the customer doesn't know, or care, if you are small or large as an organization - she or he only focuses on the garment hanging on the rail in the store.

Auctomatic was a compressed start-up experience, going from start to launch to acquisition in under a year. We spent a long time building the product before getting our first customer, whereas with Stripe we made sure we had paying customers from the very start.

Treat customer support as a product.

My definition of innovative is providing value to the customer.

Most DRM solutions diminish the value of the product by either directly restricting a customer's use or by creating uncertainty.

The customer service representative hung up on me when I asked to talk to a supervisor.

It is the customer that pays the wages

An institution which is financed by a budget - or which enjoys a monopoly which the customer cannot escape - is rewarded for what it deserves rather than what it earns. It is paid for 'good intentions' and 'programs'. It is paid for not alienating important constituents rather than satisfying any one group. It is misdirected by the way it is being paid into defining performance and results as what will produce the budget rather than as what will produce contribution.

The purpose of a business is to create and keep a customer. All business activities must be focused on this central purpose.

The purpose of a business is to get and keep a customer. Without customers, no amount of engineering wizardry, clever financing, or operations expertise can keep a company going.

It's very logical: There is proven ROI in doing whatever you can to turn your customers into advocates for your brand or business. The way to create advocates is to offer superior customer service.

If you make a sale, you can make a living. If you make an investment of time and good service in a customer, you can make a fortune.

I didn't go to college, but if I did, I would've taken all my tests at a restaurant, 'cause 'The customer is always right'.

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

Service standards keep rising. As competitors render better and better service, customers become more demanding. Their expectations grow. When every company's service is shoddy, doing a few things well can earn you a reputation as the customer's savior. But when a competitor emerges from the pack as a service leader, you have to do a lot of things right. Suddenly achieving service leadership costs more and takes longer. It may even be impossible if the competition has too much of a head start. The longer you wait, the harder it is to produce outstanding service.

The #1 guideline to success is you must be in business for yourself. When you work for someone else, you sell your time at wholesale to your employer, who then re-sells it at retail to the customer.

When you focus on results, you will very seldom see a change in your culture. But, if you focus on a customer-centric culture, you will realize long-term results.

Clear content, simple navigation and answers to customer questions have the biggest impact on business value. Advanced technology matters much less.

The two critical questions to ask are: "Who is my customer?" and "What value am I adding?" Unfortunately, many workers cannot answer these questions. They tend to blindly do things, and develop bad habits of doing things over and over for no good reasons.

You can get an awful lot of effects into the customer's mind for a great deal less time and money in radio than you can in television.

It is in the ordinary events of every day that we develop the proactive capacity to handle the extraordinary pressures of life. It's how we make and keep commitments, how we handle a traffic jam, how we respond to an irate customer or a disobedient child. It's how we view our problems and where we focus our energies. It's the language we use.

If customer ignorance is a profit centre for you, you're in trouble.

Treat [the customer] as guests when they come and when they go, whether or not they buy. Give them all that can be given fairly, on the principle that ‘to him that giveth shall be given’. Remember always that the recollection of quality remains long after the price is forgotten. Then your business will prosper by a natural process.

We're taking requests from customers who are looking for certain used copies. We already found 18 to 20 Louis L'Amour books that were on a customer's request list.

Completely understand the customer by seeking an intense, complete and empathetic understanding.

The purpose of a business is to create a customer.