In today’s rapidly evolving world of subscription-based software, if there’s is one thing that’s certain it’s that the power is the hands of the customers. Gone are the days of companies relying on customer acquisition alone. Here are the top 20 customer success quotes.
Ranging from product experience, churn management, customer retention, customer experience, customer success management, customer loyalty, customer advocacy, etc. from thought leaders across various industries that impact customer success efforts.
While, retention and renewals are now just as critical to sustainable growth, and that means that in order to be successful, companies have to put their customers’ success first, let’s dig in to know more about that.
#1 Warren Buffett
Buffett emphasizes any business that has delighted customers has a salesforce out there. “Your customer is going to get to vote and talk. You want them out there as salesmen for you. In fact, customer delight is the main ingredient of success. You will succeed if you have delighted customers. Don’t settle for satisfied,” he added.
#2 Don Peppers
Don Peppers, is a leading customer, and marketing strategist in the customer success niche. In one of his recent excerpts, he explains, “Thanks to automation and digitization, customer experiences are going to get more frictionless and easier, and more services will be delivered online. But it’s essential businesses never lose sight of the fact that humanity will be more important and significant than ever before,”.
#3 Bill Gates
Bill Gates recognized that your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning. Also, these problems are real opportunities and ways to improve. And, in business, unhappy customers have the most to teach you about how you can improve your products and services.
#4 Bill Price
Bill Price, Founder, Driva Solutions has an interesting take on customer success. He quotes, “With the shift to the SaaS model, the connection between your customer’s success and your success is much more direct and felt more quickly. Smart companies have realized that customer loyalty is the most powerful sales and marketing tool that they have.”
#5 Lincoln Murphy
Lincoln Murphy, is a renowned growth consultant focused on Customer-centric Growth. For over a decade, he has helped hundreds of companies accelerate growth by optimizing the Customer Lifecycle. Ranging from customer acquisition to retention to account expansion and advocacy.
#6 Paul Philp
Paul Philp is a leading innovator in SaaS and Customer Success. As Founder and CEO of Amity, Paul has spoken with Customer Success professionals from over 1,000 SaaS providers. Aside from this, Paul has a lifelong passion for helping businesses put customers first.
#7 David Clark
The best CSMs can always identify the trends in what’s happening with the product and relay those insights to the product teams in a meaningful way.
#8 Jeff Gardner
Gardner believes that when it comes to customer support, it’s easy to get distracted by flashy stunts aimed at “delighting” your customers. However, focusing on the fundamentals, not the flash, is what really makes customers happy. The faster you can help customers understand and extract value from your product that is in line with their business goals the stickier and more successful they’ll be.
#9 Wynne Brown
Wynne Brown, Director of Customer Success, Seal Software believes in 3 simple things. First, ensuring that the reason our customers bought our software is fulfilled and they see value delivered. Second, bring in best practices, ideas, and initiatives to the table that our customers wouldn’t have thought of. And, third, be the voice of the customer back so that our product can always be better iterated to fit the customers’ needs.
#10 Maya Angelou
Angelou adds, By going out of your way to identifying customer needs, interests, expectations, and desires, and then by taking extra steps to satisfy them, you can surely help guarantee customer and brand loyalty.
#11 Ken Lownie
Ken Lownie, General Manager, Agatha says, “When it comes to tasks like managing SOPs and quality documents, customers are looking for ready-to-use applications, not platforms. They are done with complex, expensive systems that require a lot of time, money and effort to configure and customize. Also, in the subscription economy, the connection between your customer success and your success is much more direct.
#12 Guy Lever
RPA can help CSMs with their day-to-day tasks, and give them more time to focus on strategic work. Eventually, we may see it be able to predict customer questions and pitfalls in the product.
#13 Richard White
Richard White, CEO, UserVoice explains, “Your loyalty program should reward your customers and your distributors. Likewise, customers that show consistent loyalty and engagement should be encouraged and rewarded for choosing your brand time and time again. Focus less on being on top of every social media channel & more on building easy ways for customers to contact you.
#14 Guy Letts
Guy Letts, CEO, CustomerSure adds that “You need to make it clear to the customer what will happen once they have given their feedback. If the customer has highlighted a problem in their feedback and you can fix it quickly, you’ll really blow their socks off. Give one person responsibility for listening to your customers and authority to act on what they hear.”
#15 Jason Lemkin
Said to be one of the world’s greatest customer success advocates, Jason Lemkin Jason is a true champion of customer success. In fact, he’s perhaps the most vocal advocate in the entire SaaS community about the topic. Jason believes that customer success is the secret sauce in SaaS. And as you can tell from our company name, we live and breath the success of customers—especially in the B2B space.
#16 Jeff Bezos
Jeff Bezos, CEO, Amazon says that he advises companies to assess each situation and make the right decisions for that particular situation, while also developing deep intuition and a direct connection to the situation. Remember, “We’re not competitor-obsessed, we’re customer-obsessed.”
#17 Adam Toporek
As a third-generation entrepreneur with extensive experience in retail, wholesale, franchising, and small business. Adam understands the impact that customer experience can have on the bottom line. And brings lessons from the front lines of entrepreneurship to organizations of all sizes. He adds, “One of the best methods for retention I have found is continuing to add value after the sale. Silence is a retention killer.”
#18 Andrew Marks
Andrew Marks, Founder, SuccessHacker says, “An important component of preventing churn is the need to always be aware of how your customer defines success. It will change over time, so ensuring that you’re in sync regularly is important.”
Andrew developed and implemented a customer success strategy for our enterprise customers. In a short amount of time, he was able to build a team and nurture relationships with key accounts. His deep expertise in leading customer-centric services teams was extremely helpful.
#19 David Apple
David Apple, Head of customer success and sales, Notion shares his previous experience as Director, customer success, Typeform. At Typeform, the sales team falls under Customer Success. As a result, the sales team is very focused on bringing in the right type of customer. This is where you are building trust, and delivering value to potential customers during the sales process.
#20 Paul Philp
Whether its high touch or low touch – we leverage the power of automation.
Final Take
Quotes are one way of sharing one’s learnings. Similarly, customer service quotes or customer success quotes have a lot to share about their experiences with customers; mainly things that one must-do and never-do.
From their years of experience, they share words of wisdom through these customer success quotes. Then this can help understand and change customer success operations for better efficiency and results.
Rakhin has over 10 years of experience driving business development and client services. In his prior roles, he stayed close to customers to understand their requirements and help them achieve their business goals. He is passionate about customer success.
Published March 16, 2020, Updated February 28, 2023