Quotes on Customers

On most lines, making a sale without making a convert does not count for much. Sales made by conviction - by advertising - are likely to bring permanent customers. People who buy through casual recommendations often do not stick

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.

Look after the customer and the business will take care of itself

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.

A few years ago, users of Internet services began to realize that when an online service is free, you're not the customer. You're the product.

I think one of the things people don't understand is we can build more shareholder value by lowering product prices than we can by trying to raise margins. It's a more patient approach, but we think it leads to a stronger, healthier company. It also serves customers much, much better.

Virtually every company will be going out and empowering their workers with a certain set of tools, and the big difference in how much value is received from that will be how much the company steps back and really thinks through their business processes, thinking through how their business can change, how their project management, their customer feedback, their planning cycles can be quite different than they ever were before.

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.

Success and profitability are outcomes of focusing on customers and employees, not objectives.

This is one of the innovator’s dilemmas: Blindly following the maxim that good managers should keep close to their customers can sometimes be a fatal mistake.

When you are making a decision about how best to serve your customers, your own experience is often a better guide than a more sophisticated analysis of the market.

If you look historically, what creates growth and wealth is innovation and investment, and increase in scale - more customers.

Our DNA is as a consumer company - for that individual customer who's voting thumbs up or thumbs down. That's who we think about. And we think that our job is to take responsibility for the complete user experience. And if it's not up to par, it's our fault, plain and simply.

There are only three measurements that tell you nearly everything you need to know about your organization's overall performance: employee engagement, customer satisfaction, and cash flow...It goes without saying that no company, small or large, can win over the long run without energized employees who believe in the mission and understand how to achieve it.

Customers should be number 1, Employees number 2, and then only your Shareholders come at number 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.

People pitch me all the time. But hopefully, you'll just go ahead and do it. We are trying to eliminate the need for pitches. I'd rather sit there and applaud. Customers buy products, not Powerpoint presentations.

A bit of theory as we settle down for lunch: the waiter's treatment of Kitty is actually a kind of sandwich, with the bottom bread being the bored and slightly effete way he normally acts with customers, the middle being the crazed and abnormal way he feels around this famous nineteen-year-old girl, and the top bread being his attempt to contain and conceal this alien middle layer with some mode of behavior that at least approximates the bottom layer of boredom and effeteness that is his norm.

I wish I could say I was shocked at the reports the NSA is secretly spying on the private phone calls of millions of Verizon customers. However, this is a predictable result of a government that continues to erode our liberties while promising some glimmering hope of security.

I think that the direct conversation is exactly what companies need to earn trust of customers. Admit an error. Fix a problem. Commit to doing better. That is only human.

Unlike the Tea Party, who see themselves as the customers of government, people in the Occupy Wall Street movement understand that we are the government. Stated most simply, we are trying to run a 21st-century society on a 13th-century economic operating system. It just doesn't work.