I started my career as a Customer Support Engineer at HubSpot. And, like with any first job, I learned a ton not only about my company, but about supporting customers in general.
HubSpot is where I adopted a customer-centric mindset. I learned the company’s tools inside and out and assisted customers troubleshoot our software. Most importantly, I learned the critical nature of anticipating customer needs, providing solutions, and ensuring that customers are set up on a path to success throughout their journey.
Well call this: customer success – anticipating customer challenges or questions and proactively providing solutions. In customer success, you’re a customer advocate, not just someone who answers questions here and there when they pop up.
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In my experience, most support personnel can provide customer service. But, customer success requires buy-in across the team at various levels. That’s why I’ve put together this list of inspirational quotes so you can share with your team proven examples of customer success.
31 Inspirational Customer Success Quotes Industry Experts
1. Lincoln Murphy
Lincoln Murphy has a lot to say about customer success both on social media and his blog, Sixteen Ventures. While he has written plenty of content about customer success, it’s importance, and how to implement it in your business, sometimes short and sweet is a little more effective than a drawn-out blog post.
In my opinion, his following tweet sums up the importance of customer success powerfully and succinctly.
“You can focus on adoption, retention, expansion, or advocacy; or you can focus on the customers' Desired Outcome and get all of those things”
Key Takeaway:
Talk to your customers. What do they want? What do they need? And how can you meet them halfway? I’ve always had the most success when leveling with customers and getting to the heart of how I can help them succeed.
Prioritizing the success and delight of your customers will always benefit the bottom line. In my experience, aligning with your customers’ needs and prioritizing their success is a win-win situation for both your business and theirs.
2. Tomasz Tunguz
Tomasz Tunguz, venture capitalist at Redpoint and author of Winning with Data, has a brilliant blog on all things startups, where he talks about customer success, client retention, and how to start managing or owning your first business.
My favorite, an anecdote on “oxidizers” in startups, narrates how a company can’t function fully without identifying its weaknesses.
He says in his post:
“At the outset of a startup, engineering throughput can be a limiting factor; the team simply can’t code fast enough. At some point, the product launches but no one knows about it. Marketing is the bottleneck. When customers come rushing through the door, money in hand, sales and customer support might stunt the growth of the company. Other times it’s culture or product market fit or money or competition. But for each startup at every stage there is a limiting factor.”
Key Takeaway:
Startup or not, identifying and solving your business’s bottlenecks is integral to customer success. While there might be a limiting factor in a sale or launch, communication is usually a simple cure-all.
Make no mistake: your customer success department is a separate team in your business, but they shouldn’t be an island. There needs to be a web of communication between customer success and sales, marketing, and product development – not just a back-and-forth, but set discussions like monthly team check-ins or quarterly strategy assessments.
What I love about this quote is that it puts the holistic nature of customer success into perspective. To best solve for the customer, your house must be in order first, and being able to serve customers best is a noble motivator for tackling internal challenges.
3. Ellie Wilkinson
Senior Manager of Customer Success at Moz, Wilkinson is a Princeton alumna and data-loving website design wizard with something to say. At Moz, she oversees strategy and direction with the customer success team. Her advice here comes twofold.
First, in an interview with Amity, Wilkinson explained her team’s most significant advantage with their customers:
“I would say that our biggest advantage right now is that we’re able to provide our customers with the support they need to succeed with Moz at any point in their journey.”
And second, in a tweet:
Get good at asking questions:
Why did you click on that?
Why didn't you click on that?
What would make this better?
What's missing? #mozcon
Key Takeaway:
I don’t think I could have said it better myself. Wilkinson hits the nail on the head by identifying customer success as a critical advantage at her company. Furthermore, she unveils the importance of asking customers questions to remain capable of anticipating their needs and facilitating their success.
As a support engineer, I found that asking questions was the key to providing customers with the highest quality support. Not just any questions, but questions that empathetically drill down into where they’re experiencing pain points and how they would like to succeed.
4. Carolyn Kopprasch
As the Chief Happiness Officer at Buffer, Kopprasch details her thoughts about customer success (and various running and health wins) on her blog. She was on the customer success train very early on, just with a different name (Customer Happiness).
In one of her older blog posts, Kopprasch details how one of the web developers at Buffer helped a customer by responding to his complaint. She details it at the beginning of the post like this:
“At Buffer and many other customer-centric startups, the product, marketing, and engineering teams all listen to customer questions and answer them directly. This has changed through the years as the needs and team have grown. In its current form, just about everyone in the company ends up hanging out with the Happiness Heroes for about a half day each month.”
Key Takeaway:
I love this quote because it illustrates that customer success is a company initiative, not just the responsibility of support teams. While it may not be the most effective for developers at your organization to respond directly to customer inquiries, it’s the spirit of what Kopprasch is saying that rings true. It can only benefit your bottom line if all departments are oriented toward customer success.
5. Dana Niv
Niv is a Senior Customer Success Manager and a writer for Oktopost, where she chronicles her social media, customer success, and content marketing advice on the blog.
One thing Niv does is integrate the benefits of social media into the customer success mindset -- a.k.a. building relationships through social media. This is because she’s aware of the customer’s position even before they’re a prospect:
“Today’s B2B customers feel empowered. They demand a whole new level of customer focus, expecting companies to know them personally, recognize their challenges, and cater to their needs.”
Key Takeaway:
As I mentioned earlier, I found that customers were the most delighted when I made their goals my own and we worked together like teammates. Customers today expect a personal and empathetic level of service from companies they engage with, and Niv makes that clear. Investing in your relationships with customers is investing in your business. If you anticipate your customers' needs, it will pay dividends over time.
6. Scott Howard
Scott Howard is a revenue engineer who writes about sales, growth, entrepreneurship, and revops. Despite focusing on the sales side, Howard clearly understands how customer success underpins a holistically successful business and, of course, revenue growth.
“Customers purchase outcomes, not products. Outcomes that translate into their success.”
Key Takeaway:
I love this quote because it makes the customer’s perspective clear. Sure, a product might have impressive features and a slick UI, but at the end of the day, customers are looking to move the needle, and it's your job to help them do that.
7. Chad Horenfeldt
Chad Horenfeldt is the Customer Success and Customer Experience Leader at PathFactory and thought leader in the CS field. I enjoyed Chad’s insights in his Medium post titled The Foundation of Customer Success, precisely his assertion that trust is the foundation of Customer Success, internally and between you and the customer. I’ll let Chad explain further.
“I’ve found that when customers trust you, they are more open to listening to you and working to achieve value from your product. When customers have found value from your product, they will develop a higher degree of trust for you.”
Key Takeaway:
Chad gets at the heart of customer success with the above quote. In my experience, establishing a collaborative, trusting relationship with customers is the best way to ensure value and success for both parties.
8. Nima Torabi
Nima Torabi is an entrepreneur and Product Manager. While his titles may not have customer success in the name, he has a strong understanding of Customer Success and how it’s influenced from the product perspective, as evidenced in his Medium post.
“A product should enable users to feel smart and capable, not overwhelmed and frustrated.”
Key Takeaway:
I love this quote because it succinctly indicates that our products should empower customers. Of course, a strong service relationship is the essence of customer success, but customer success is an organization-wide endeavor. From a product perspective, your product should empower users and facilitate their success, which requires alignment of both product and service teams with the needs of the customer at the forefront.
9. Rob Giglio
Rob Giglio is the chief customer officer at HubSpot and has over 20 years of industry expertise. In the above podcast interview with Smartbug Media, Rob shares wisdom regarding Customer Success, fostering trust in your brand, and more. There are plenty of nuggets throughout the interview, but this quote at the end stuck out to me when Giglio was asked for some parting advice to other marketing professionals.
“We have to, right now, focus on building trust. Simplify the message, emphasize trust.”
Key Takeaway:
I believe Giglio’s quote elegantly explains how customers want to be met. Simply put, they don’t want any BS. In my experience, customers desire authenticity and want to feel they are getting the most value from their investment possible.
From a marketing perspective, simplifying the message means leveling with customers and painting a clear picture of what they can expect from you in exchange for their hard-earned dollars. Transparency and simplicity combined with an emphasis on trust are winning combinations for customer success.
10. Kristi Faltorusso
Kristi Faltorusso is a customer success thought leader and influencer who actively shares her CS expertise and tips on social media. In a recent LinkedIn post, Folorusso stated:
“If you are a Customer Success Leader and you‘re not meeting with customers regularly, you’re doing it wrong.”
Key Takeaway:
This is bold statement, but the sentiment is accurate. There’s no substitute for talking with customers when planning for their success. Customers value authentic conversations that confirm their needs areeing bprioritized and their struggles are understood.
11. Daphne Costa Lopes
Daphne Costa Lopez is a customer success all-star. She heads up HubSpot’s Customer Success team in Ireland and runs a boutique CS consulting service.
Lopez delivers a treasure trove of customer success wisdom in a post on her website titled The Future of Growth is Customer Success. Here’s one of my favorite excerpts:
“To move to the next tier [of customer success], you will need to build more than feedback loops from the customer to your senior leadership team.
You will have to get into their minds and learn about the future of their industries, their niche challenges, how they might be disrupted, emerging technologies in their fields. Get them to tell you what’s keeping them up at night when they think about the future. Your customers will be able to tell you things that your team and consultants could never know.”
Key Takeaway:
Lopez drives home the point that high-level customer success requires you to put yourself in the customer’s shoes. Her post is a goldmine of inspiration for customer success, and I highly suggest you check it out.
12. Nick Mehta
Nick Mehta is the CEO of Gainsight, a Customer Success and Product Experience software platform. In his LinkedIn Newsletter, Mehtaphysical Musings, Mehta discusses Saas, Customer Success, and Product with a fun personal flair.
Here’s a quote of his that I found to be illuminating:
“Customer Success 2.0 is about making CS an enterprise-wide priority. Every person in a company needs to be aligned around the customer, whether you’re in Sales, Marketing, or CS. At the end of the day, it's value that matters—not churn. Value is the thing that mitigates churn and drives Net Dollar Retention.”
Key Takeaway:
You might be wondering, “What is customer success 2.0?” It’s a term coined by Mehta that indicates the next evolution of Customer Success methodology.
As I mentioned, CS should be a company-wide initiative, not just the responsibility of service and support teams. Even if you don’t work in a client-facing role, you must always account for the needs and struggles of the customer when making decisions.
13. Cinthia Silva
Customer Success Leader at Nasdaq and one of the Top 25 Customer Success Influencers of 2023, Cinthia Silva knows a thing or two about delivering value to customers. She said this on dealing with client churn:
“The first question to ask is “why” and particularly “why now”? This simple question provides a broader perspective to the decision and is crucial to understand before planning a strategy to address it. Too many times, the immediate reaction is to offer a discount to solve the problem before understanding what led to the decision in the first place. Newsflash, if a client churns, it’s rarely just about the cost. In my experience, if clients are experiencing the full value of your solution, they will happily pay for you to solve their problem.”
Key Takeaway:
I love this quote because it highlights the need to drill down and understand your customers’ motivations, especially if they’re upset and considering leaving.
I’ve handled my fair share of upset customers in my technical upport years. While it’s attractive to jump to discounts at the first sign of rough waters, I’ve found more long-term success when I could empathize with the customer and get to the root of their problem.
14. Diana De Jesus
As CEO and Founder of The Customer Success Project, Diana De Jesus has dedicated herself to helping other CS professionals thrive in their careers and retain happy customers. Check out the following quote from one of her recent blog posts:
“Once the ink dries on the contract, the Customer Success team is there to take them from “I hope this works” to “Wow, this really works!”
Key Takeaway:
Short and to the point, this quote highlights the underpinning of delight in customer success. Gone are the days when you make a sale and the customer is just another name in a spreadsheet. As a CS professional, it’s your responsibility to delight customers with personalized service that unlocks the value of their investment in your product.
15. Rachel Provan
Rachel Provan is a customer success leader, LinkedIn influencer, and mentor to many in the CS field. As the founder and CEO of Provan Success, Rachel offers CS leadership courses and 1-on-1 coaching.
“In order to create advocates, companies need to focus on delivering an outstanding customer experience. This means delivering value with every interaction and providing swift resolution to any problems. When customers feel valued and appreciated, they are more likely to become advocates for your brand.”
Key Takeaway:
Provan delivers this quote in a blog post about customer advocacy. I love this quote because it reveals a benefit of customer success that can sometimes be overlooked: customer advocacy.
If your customers are delighted with your above-and-beyond level of service, they may willingly serve as brand advocates. Loyal customers who provide word-of-mouth testimony on your behalf can deliver more value than even the most expensive paid campaigns.
16. Yamini Rangan
Yamini Rangan is the CEO here at HubSpot. Prior to becoming CEO, she served as our first-ever Chief Customer Officer where she ensured customer success and delight across all marketing, sales, and service teams.
Rangan gives us many valuable CS insights in the above video interview with Conseil en Croissance Industrielle Insights, including:
“The concept we talk about at HubSpot is, what if you put the customer at the center and organize Marketing, Sales, and Customer Experience around that center so we can drive retention and continued value for the customer.”
Key Takeaway:
The concept Rangan is referring to is The Flywheel Model, which is a model adapted by HubSpot to explain the momentum you gain when you align your entire organization around delivering a remarkable customer experience. The Funnel is out, the Flywheel is in, and retention is now just as powerful as acquisition.
17. Josh Schachter
Josh Schacter is the CEO of UpdateAI, a company that uses AI to turn customer conversations into actionable insights that drive customer success. In a recent LinkedIn post, Schachter shares a bold truth regarding customer success and churn.
“STOP chasing a 0% churn rate! Prioritize retaining good customers and let the bad ones go.”
Key Takeaway:
This is a great quote because it speaks to a harsh reality of CS that many businesses need to come to terms with. Despite your best efforts, you can’t please everyone.
Sometimes, customers take up too much time, don’t treat your team well, or simply aren’t a good fit for your product, and that’s okay. Of course, you should strive to delight your customers and minimize churn, but focus your efforts on those whom you can genuinely deliver value to.
18. Gemma Cipriani-Espineira
Gemma Cipriani-Espinera is a top CS influencer and Chief Customer Officer who loves spreading the word about customer success and delight. Here is a recent quote from her LinkedIn that solidifies the importance of customer success:
“There is a SaaS revolution happening right now called Customer-Led Growth. Embracing customer retention, expansion, and advocacy will be your #1 growth engine in 2023. It’s cheaper than acquiring new business, it’s faster, and it’s reliable.”
Key Takeaway:
Cipriani-Espinera’s quote is excellent because it reframes customer success from being a cost to a revenue engine. Traditionally, companies focus on sales and acquisition as the primary revenue driver. Winning new customers is, of course, still important. However, delivering value to your existing customers will stimulate growth in all areas.
19. John DiJulius
Author, consultant, and CEO of the DiJulius Group, John DiJulius is an outspoken customer experience advocate. In this blog post he discusses the paramount nature of customer experience and how price becomes more irrelevant if you can offer above and beyond value.
“Every business has to decide where they want to compete — in the price wars or the experience wars. I prefer to compete on the basis of an outstanding customer experience.”
Key Takeaway:
There’s an old saying - you get what you pay for. By and large, this adage is true, and you should strive to make it so in your products and services. When I worked at HubSpot, we didn’t offer the cheapest solutions on the market, but that wasn’t the point. The customers I worked with were more than happy to pay a premium price for premium products and services. Don’t sell yourself short!
20. Don Peppers
Don Peppers is a veteran advertising executive and founder of customer-strategy consulting firm, Peppers & Rodger’s Group. Peppers gives us some tough love advice on nurturing relationships with customers below:
“Your job, if you’re a customer success manager, isn’t to make friends with your client. Your primary job is to challenge them, and get them to think, in order to make them more successful.”
Key Takeaway:
In my experience, it can be easy to fall into the trap of pleasing customers instead of serving their best interests. Of course, as a customer success manager, you want to develop a friendly and positive relationship with your clients. However, you should challenge them to reach top results instead of just smiling and nodding.
21. Adam Toporek
Adam Toporek is an influential voice in the Customer Success world and the CEO of CTS Service Solutions, a consultancy that offers customer-centric solutions through workshops and training.
“One of the best methods for retention I have found is continuing to add value after the sale. Silence is a Retention Killer.”
Key Takeaway:
Your customers don’t want to feel forgotten as soon as the ink dries on their contract. Your relationship with customers should be one of continued value and support throughout their entire journey.
The more value you provide to existing customers, the more loyalty and support they will throw your way. You get what you give; it's kind of like business karma.
I found in my career that customers will never forget when you go above and beyond to help them succeed, and those happy customers will stick around and spread the word about your brand.
22. Jeff Gardner
Jeff Gardner worked at Intercom where he eventually headed the Customer Support and Success teams. Now, he’s the CEO and Founder of Canua and gives us some customer success wisdom that relates explicitly to onboarding:
“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.”
Key Takeaway:
I know from experience that new customers can be vulnerable. Adopting a new tool and service can be frustrating and overwhelming, so it’s essential to set customers up for success from the very beginning.
This means having an effective onboarding strategy that seamlessly transitions into ongoing support. If you can get your customers feeling confident about your product from the start, the likelihood of them sticking around and growing with you skyrockets.
23. Marc Benioff
Marc Benioff is the well-known CEO of Salesforce. He’s been around the customer service block and knows a great deal about building products that empower customer success.
“Most of all, I discovered that in order to succeed with a product, you must truly get to know your customers and build something for them.”
Key Takeaway:
Everything you’re doing should be for the customer‘s benefit. Succeeding in customer success means truly understanding your customers’ needs, struggles, and desires, then steering the whole ship toward that goal.
24. Dharmesh Shah
Dharmesh Shah is HubSpot’s co-founder and CTO. At HubSpot, we align our whole organization around providing an exceptional customer experience and pride ourselves on our customer-centric culture. Accordingly, Shah exemplifies the importance of understanding customer problems and providing solutions.
“Customers are usually very good at identifying their problems, not so much the solutions.”
Key Takeaway:
Shah’s quote highlights that customers are the key to success. If you listen, customers make it clear what problems they face, and it’s your responsibility as a customer success professional to synthesize that information and discover solutions.
25. Jocelyn Brown
Jocelyn Brown is the Head of Customer Success and Sales at Hypercontext and a former CS executive at Allocadia. Brown understands that delivering value to customers is a top priority and that the customer defines the value:
“For me, the important thing to note is that value realization is defined by the customer and it is not static.”
Key Takeaway:
The foundation of customer success is helping customers realize value from using your product. However, it is essential to recognize that value is unique to every customer, and that definition is subject to change.
Accordingly, establishing an ongoing collaborative relationship with your customer is necessary to uncover their ever changing pain points and goals as you grow together.
26. Konosuke Matsushita
Image Source
Konosuke Matsushita is an industrialist and founder of Panasonic, Japan’s largest consumer electronics company. Matsushita may not be a member of the modern Customer Success movement, still, his philosophies embodied the same ideals of value and service to customers, even before the term was coined.
“After-sales service is more important than assistance before sales. It is through such service that one gets permanent customers.”
Key Takeaway:
Many businesses fall into the trap of over-prioritizing customer acquisition. It’s easy to view salespeople as rock stars, and they are, after all, bringing new business through the front door every month. However, don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Delighting existing customers is the key to creating loyal advocates of your brand who stick around for life.
27. Brian Gladstein
Brian Gladstein is an accomplished business builder and cybersecurity market strategist. He’s the CMO of Tufin and has over 20 years of experience leading teams that actualize customer value.
“You are not the hero. Your customer makes their own success.”
Key Takeaway:
I love this quote because it urges a mindset of humility in customer success. As CS professionals, it’s our mission to facilitate the success of our customers through the use of our products and services. However, at the end of the day, it’s the customer who must put in the work to reach their goals. In my experience, putting your ego aside when working with customers allows for a more authentic and prosperous relationship for everyone involved.
28. Jeff Bezos
Jeff Bezos, the famed billionaire founder and former CEO of Amazon, hardly needs an introduction. His company revolutionized the online retail space with an obsessive focus on customer service and convenience that made his product so easy to use that it’s almost impossible not to.
In one shareholder letter, Bezos wrote:
“We're not competitor obsessed; we're customer obsessed. We start with what the customer needs and we work backwards.”
Key Takeaway:
The takeaway is understanding how successful you can be if you point your whole operation toward solving for the customer. Creating customer value requires an intimate understanding of customer needs, goals, and pain points. If you can solve those problems in your products and services, that’s a winning combination.
29. Wynne Brown
Wynne Brown is an experienced customer success professional and interim VP of Sales at RockReach. Brown has published a variety of thought-provoking LinkedIn articles on the topic of customer success, including The dirty little secret that is keeping you from true Customer Success.
In her article, she discusses the fallacy of conflating caring about your customers with true customer centricity.
“Real Customer-centricity means that all your processes and delivery is predicated on knowing what the Customer wants out of the interaction. The value to the Customer drives everything. Instead of just caring about the Customer, take the care to design systems and workflows with the Customer at the center.”
Key Takeaway:
Brown’s point is that you should walk the walk and talk the talk regarding customer success. It’s easy to wax poetic about how much you care for customers, but you must back it up with actual systems and business processes that are focused on the needs of the customer.
30. Jay Nathan
Jay Nathan is a business executive and co-founder of Gain Grow Retain, a community for customer success leaders to collaborate, share, and grow. In a recent LinkedIn post, Nathan broke down the basic pillars of customer success quite succinctly:
“There’s no magic or dark art to customer success.
It’s a matter of focus on just three things...
1. Relationships
2. Value
3. Engagement”
Key Takeaway:
I love this quote because it demystifies the concept of customer success, which can feel nebulous with so many voices offering up their perspectives and definitions. Relationships involve identifying client stakeholders, taking steps to build relationships with them, and identifying which other members of your team need to be brought into the fold.
We’ve talked a lot about delivering value, but the key takeaway is understanding clients' goals, meeting them, and ensuring product usage contributes to meeting those goals. Finally, engagement means defining regular touchpoints and staying involved with the client and their ongoing projects.
31. Jason Lemkin
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Jason Lemkin is a seasoned venture capitalist and founder of SaaSTR, the world’s largest community for B2B/SaaS founders. To top it all off, Lemkin gives us a bold statement on the unexpected value of customer success:
“Customer success is where 90% of the revenue is”
Sure sounds like a big chunk of revenue for a department that isn’t winning new customers, right? However, Lemkin’s quote points to the fact that companies that succeed at customer success have higher net retention rates, which is a green light for continued growth. Additionally, it’s six to seven times more expensive to acquire a new customer than it is to retain an existing one.
Key Takeaway:
Focusing on creating and maintaining loyal customers is a recipe for steadfast revenue growth since retained customers buy more often and spend more than new customers.
Adopting a Winning Customer Success Strategy
If we can take one thing away from each of these quotes, it‘s that customer success starts at the top of the organization. If your decisions revolve around the success of your customers, then you’ll create a customer-centric culture that trickles down from your executive staff to your frontline support team.
Editor's note: This article was originally published in August 2017 and has since been updated for comprehensiveness.
