Featured Image for the blog: 10 Quotes To Inspire Better Customer Service As We Round the Corner into 2021

Confined to our own four walls this year, we were suddenly presented with something we’ve been begging for more of for so long: time. 

But while our time was initially spent watching The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up and reorganizing the kitchen, the linen closet, then our bedroom drawers, somehow it started to slip away.

I shut my computer at 5 p.m, and sans commute, I have So. Much. Time.

Still, though, my dusty bookshelf stares at me, novels and business books piling up begging to be read. My kitchen sink with the third go-round of daily dishes waits to be washed. The unpainted trim in my living room mocks me.

But you know what? I have so much time and nothing else to do, I’ll get to it tomorrow. Tonight sounds like a better night to shut off my brain, sink into the couch, and binge a show.

Then, tomorrow turned into the next day. And the next. Suddenly, it’s the weekend and my imprint on the couch is swallowing up the blankets. And maybe the cats.

With so much time, it’s hard to grasp how quickly it all passed.

Time in 2020 is pretend.

If you feel like time passed without tons to show for it in 2020, you’re not alone.

What we gained in time we lacked in motivation and inspiration. Trying to distance ourselves from the existential dread devouring our world proved quite exhausting.

And while the world won’t press reset when the clock strikes midnight on January 1st, a new year gives us hope. We see a glimpse of light, and the thought of a better year has our wheels turning on how to improve our businesses, fine-tune our operations, and deliver outstanding customer service, without the barrage of stressors we felt in 2020.

[Read Next] The future of customer service in a post-covid world

To keep the positive momentum going, we’re sharing some inspiration for better customer service next year.

If your couch is summoning you to binge a show, know that this inspiration is bite-sized and ready to gobble up, so you can get back to whatever’s calling your name.

Here are 10 quotes to inspire how you spend your time improving customer service in the new year.

“A brand not responding on Twitter is like hanging up the phone on customers. With millions watching.”

Dave Kerpen

“Unhappy customers cost more to serve because they require more time and resources to build goodwill. Instead of spending money to recover from a bad experience, proactively spending money to create positive experiences pays off incredibly.”

Blake Morgan for Forbes

“No matter how successful specific tools are (for example, online self-service), companies that lack visibility into where customers are choosing to interact from touchpoint to touchpoint can still experience service breakdowns.”

McKinsey & Company

“Building a team of super agents, therefore, involves elevating self-service and creating more empowering contact center environments. It also involves re-training agents for an era of customer contact in which interactions are increasingly personal—and frequently spread across contact channels.”

– Brian Cantor, CCW, The Future of the Contact Center: A Forecast

Customer service quotes from CX leaders to inspire your 2021 strategies

“If we consistently exceed the expectations of employees, they will consistently exceed the expectations of our customers.”

Shep Hyken

“Employees who believe that management is concerned about them as a whole person – not just an employee – are more productive, more satisfied, more fulfilled. Satisfied employees mean satisfied customers, which leads to profitability.”

Anne M. Mulcahy

“When a customer complains, he is doing you a special favor; he is giving you another chance to serve him to his satisfaction. You will appreciate the importance of this opportunity when you consider that the customer’s alternative option was to desert you for a competitor.”

Seymour Fine

“If social media has any lessons for the contact center it is this: everybody wants to know that they are doing well. A happy agent is one who knows they are performing, and knows that others know it too.”

– Ric Kosiba, Chief Data Scientist at Sharpen, for SWPP

“Take your contact center metrics seriously, not just in terms of agent performance but as indicators of what might be a broken customer journey. Blaming agents for customers who are unsatisfied with, say, a faulty product or overly strict return policy doesn’t solve the problem.”

– Kindra Cooper, CCW Digital

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We originally wrote this post on February 22, 2017 and we updated it for new insight on December 23, 2020.