Providing a great customer experience is becoming increasingly important to companies. In fact, over 80% of companies want to use the customer experience to differentiate themselves from their competition.

But how can you get started on providing the best customer experience possible? We rounded up 25 customer experience quotes from some of the most well-known business leaders to inspire you to make your CX the best it can be.

1. You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work back toward the technology — not the other way around. —Steve Jobs
2. The customer experience is the next competitive battleground. —Jerry Gregoire
3. We see our customers as invited guests to the 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
4. Here is a simple but powerful rule: always give people more than what they expect to get. —Nelson Boswell
5. 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
6. The well-satisfied customer will bring the repeat sale that counts. —J.C. Penney
7. Customer expectations? Nonsense. No customer ever asked for the electric light, the pneumatic tire, the VCR, or the CD. All customer expectations are only what you and your competitor have led him to expect. He knows nothing else. —W. Edwards Deming
8. The customer’s perception is your reality. —Kate Zabriskie
9. Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning. —Bill Gates
10. The single most important thing is to make people happy. If you are making people happy, as a side effect, they will be happy to open up their wallets and pay you. —Derek Sivers
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
12. Always do more than is required of you. —George S. Patton
13. 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
14. To understand the man, you must first walk a mile in his moccasin. —Native American Proverb
15. Until you understand your customers – deeply and genuinely – you cannot truly serve them. —Rasheed Ogunlaru
16. The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good. —Samuel Johnson
17. Do what you do so well that they will want to see it again and bring their friends. —Walt Disney
18. When you improve your product so it does the customer’s job better, then you gain market share. —Clayton Christensen
19. If a customer walks out without shoes, you really want to find out why. ‘It didn’t fit’ is not good enough. —Thomas G. Stemberg
20. The only source of knowledge is experience. —Albert Einstein
21. I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel. —Maya Angelou
22. When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but creatures of emotion. —Dale Carnegie
23. It will be disastrous when a leader or manager shows up with one attitude one day and treats people with a different attitude the next day. —Zig Ziglar
24. 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
25. Almost all quality improvement comes via simplification of design, manufacturing… layout, processes, and procedures. —Tom Peters

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Photo from On Top Visibility.