Customers & Sales
Serving customers, selling, and building products people want.
Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.
SourceBusiness @ The Speed of Thought (1999) · via Wikiquote
A business absolutely devoted to service will have only one worry about profits. They will be embarrassingly large.
SourceMy Life and Work (1922) · via Wikiquote
We've had three big ideas at Amazon that we've stuck with for 18 years, and they're the reason we're successful: Put the customer first. Invent. And be patient.
SourceJeffrey Bezos, Washington Post’s next owner, aims for a new ‘golden era’ at the newspaper. September 2013 · via Wikiquote
You can't just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they'll want something new.
SourceInterview with Inc. Magazine for its "The Entrepreneur of the Decade Award" (1 April 1989) · via Wikiquote
When you're young, you look at television and think, there's a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that's not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want.
SourceInterview in WIRED magazine (February 1996) · via Wikiquote
Most people have no concept of how an automatic transmission works, yet they know how to drive a car. You don't have to study physics to understand the laws of motion to drive a car. You don't have to understand any of this stuff to use Macintosh.
SourcePlayboy interview (1985) · via Wikiquote
I get asked a lot why Apple's customers are so loyal. It's not because they belong to the Church of Mac! That's ridiculous.
SourceAs quoted in "The Seed of Apple's Innovation" in BusinessWeek (12 October 2004) · via Wikiquote
In business, the idea of measuring what you are doing, picking the measurements that count like customer satisfaction and performance... you thrive on that.
Software innovation, like almost every other kind of innovation, requires the ability to collaborate and share ideas with other people, and to sit down and talk with customers and get their feedback and understand their needs.
Who decides what's in Windows? The customers who buy it.
I think there will be PCs at every price point.
Any product that needs a manual to work is broken.
Great companies are built on great products.
Yeah, well I think anyone who likes fast cars will love the Tesla. And it has fantastic handling by the way. I mean this car will crush a Porsche on the track, just crush it. So if you like fast cars, you'll love this car. And then oh, by the way, it happens to be electric and it's twice the efficiency of a Prius.
I do think there is a lot of potential if you have a compelling product and people are willing to pay a premium for that. I think that is what Apple has shown. You can buy a much cheaper cell phone or laptop, but Apple's product is so much better than the alternative, and people are willing to pay that premium.
Some companies out there quote a start of production that is substantially in advance of when customers get their cars.
We polled Tesla owners, do you want autopilot disabled or not. Not one person wanted it disabled. That's pretty telling.
The problem with car dealerships is you've already decided what you want to buy before you even go there, and you're really just going there to talk through some annoying negotiation.
Nobody wants to buy a $60,000 electric Civic. But people will pay $90,000 for an electric sports car.
'Star Wars' is fun, its exciting, its inspirational, and people respond to that. It's what they want.
If the boy and girl walk off into the sunset hand-in-hand in the last scene, it adds 10 million to the box office.
Football games are on TV, and it doesn't affect stadium attendance at all. It's the same with movies. People who really love movies and like to go out on a Saturday night will go to the movie theater.
It is not the employer who pays the wages. Employers only handle the money. It is the customer who pays the wages.
The man who will use his skill and constructive imagination to see how much he can give for a dollar, instead of how little he can give for a dollar, is bound to succeed.
There is one rule for the industrialist and that is: Make the best quality of goods possible at the lowest cost possible, paying the highest wages possible.
A market is never saturated with a good product, but it is very quickly saturated with a bad one.
Trust the young people; trust this generation's innovation. They're making things, changing innovation every day. And all the consumers are the same: they want new things, they want cheap things, they want good things, they want unique things. If we can create these kind of things for consumers, they will come.
I'm not a tech guy. I'm looking at the technology with the eyes of my customers, normal people's eyes.
We want to help U.S. entrepreneurs, small business owners, and brands and companies of all sizes sell their goods to the growing Chinese consumer class. Chinese consumers will get to buy the American products they want. This, in turn, will help create American jobs and increase U.S. exports.
If you want to invest in us, we believe customer number one, employee number two, shareholder number three. If they don't want to buy that, that's fine. If they regret, they can sell us.
When we first started our internet company, 'China Pages', in 1995, and we were just making home pages for a lot of Chinese companies. We went to the big owners, the big companies, and they didn't want to do it. We go to state-owned companies, and they didn't want to do it. Only the small and medium companies really want to do it.
Our focused customers are small business and young people. We did a great job in China. How can we help those young people in India, in Pakistan, in Africa. If they can use in the same ways.
Alibaba spends money on improving the products and services, not on kickbacks. That's a good thing. It's called a value system, and because of that, we get more and more small- to medium-sized companies to support us in China.
In the beginning I just wanted to survive. For the first three years, we made zero revenue. I remember many times when I was trying to pay up, the restaurant owner would say, 'Your bill was paid.' And there would be a note saying, 'Mr. Ma, I'm your customer on the Alibaba platform. I made a lot of money, and I know you don't, so I paid the bill.'
Consumption is still going up on Alibaba. This is because when the economy goes down people look online to Alibaba to buy cheaper things.
Alibaba is an ecosystem that helps small business to grow.
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.
The best customer service is if the customer doesn't need to call you, doesn't need to talk to you. It just works.
If you do build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful.
What consumerism really is, at its worst is getting people to buy things that don't actually improve their lives.
If you're competitor-focused, you have to wait until there is a competitor doing something. Being customer-focused allows you to be more pioneering.
There are two ways to extend a business. Take inventory of what you're good at and extend out from your skills. Or determine what your customers need and work backward, even if it requires learning new skills. Kindle is an example of working backward.
If your customer base is aging with you, then eventually you are going to become obsolete or irrelevant. You need to be constantly figuring out who are your new customers and what are you doing to stay forever young.
I'm a big fan of all-you-can-eat plans, because they're simpler for customers.
You know you're not anonymous on our site. We're greeting you by name, showing you past purchases, to the degree that you can arrange to have transparency combined with an explanation of what the consumer benefit is.
One of the things it was obvious you could do with an online store is have a much more complete selection.
You want your customers to value your service.
We want to build technology that everybody loves using, and that affects everyone. We want to create beautiful, intuitive services and technologies that are so incredibly useful that people use them twice a day. Like they use a toothbrush. There aren't that many things people use twice a day.
I have always believed that technology should do the hard work - discovery, organization, communication - so users can do what makes them happiest: living and loving, not messing with annoying computers! That means making our products work together seamlessly.
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.
Your customers can tell you the things that are broken and how they want to be made happy. Listen to them. Make them happy. But don't rely on them to create the future road map for your product or service. That's your job.
I still work hard to know my business. I'm continuously looking for ways to improve all my companies, and I'm always selling. Always.
If the pitch starts with a sob story, I'm out. If the pitch talks about personal issues, I'm out. If the pitch starts off with how big the market opportunity is, I'm out. If the pitch tells me what is unique about the product, how it can make a profit, and it's an area where I have expertise, I will read on.
Entrepreneurs need to be reminded that it's not the job of their customers to know what they don't. In other words, your customers have a tough enough time doing their jobs. They don't spend time trying to reinvent their industries or how their jobs are performed.
I have always been selling. I always had something going on. That was just my nature.
In addition to building better products, a more open world will also encourage businesses to engage with their customers directly and authentically. More than four million businesses have Pages on Facebook that they use to have a dialogue with their customers. We expect this trend to grow as well.
Our goal is to make it so there's as little friction as possible to having a social experience.
We're running the company to serve more people.
We pay attention to every demographic in every country, so we're going to focus on building things that teens are going to like, and we're also going to focus on building things that other folks are going to like.
The majority of people who don't have Internet, don't have the Internet because they don't know why they want to use the Internet.
People love photos. Photos originally weren't that big a part of the idea for Facebook, but we just found that people really like them, so we built out this functionality.
The real question for me is, do people have the tools that they need in order to make those decisions well? And I think that it's actually really important that Facebook continually makes it easier and easier to make those decisions... If people feel like they don't have control over how they're sharing things, then we're failing them.
Facebook and Instagram are both really popular with teens, both in the U.S. and globally across the world. I think what you're starting to see is that there are all these different ways that people want to share and communicate.
When we were a smaller company, Facebook login was widely adopted, and the growth rate for it has been quite quick. But in order to get to the next level and become more ubiquitous, it needs to be trusted even more.
I actually don't read most of the coverage about Facebook. I try to learn from getting input from people who use our services directly more than from pundits.
This is our commitment to users and the people who use our service, is that Facebook's a free service. It's free now. It will always be free. We make money through having advertisements and things like that.
I think it's very important that whatever you're trying to make or sell, or teach has to be basically good. A bad product and you know what? You won't be here in ten years.
I think that people want to know how to do practical and everyday things like how to get the pomegranate seeds out of a pomegranate.
Everywhere I go, I always look for creative entrepreneurs, whether it's artisans and craftsmen, small farmers and gardeners, or restaurateurs who use fresh, locally sourced ingredients.
When I first went to Kmart, I was so excited that I could bring my kind of taste to the masses. They didn't have 100 percent cotton sheets at mass market in 1987. We made those in yellow and pink and pale blue.
By putting the employee first, the customer effectively comes first by default, and in the end, the shareholder comes first by default as well.
A complaint is a chance to turn a customer into a lifelong friend. I say that seriously, not as some press release baloney.
I've never gone into business to make money. Every Virgin product and service has been made into a reality to make a positive difference in people's lives. And by focusing on the happiness of our customers, we have been able to build a successful group of companies.
You should not build your customer service system on the premise that your organisation will never question the whims of your clients.
We're introducing separate rooms with double beds in all of our planes so people can actually go with their partner and have a proper night's sleep.
Businesses and users are going to use technology only if they can trust it.
When we think about even the PC market and what is required in the student as well as in the consumer market, we want to be able to compete in the opening price point.
Wherever we are seeing something getting used, that to us is an early indicator that there might be something that people want. And then let's figure out how to make that great. And then let's go figure out monetization.
As I spent tons of time with customers, not just in the United States, but in emerging markets, in Europe, in Latin America, top of mind for everybody is how do they drive growth for their business going forward.
The thing we learned the most with the Xbox is the Xbox Live experience.
What matters is 'Have you done a better job of making our experiences feel like home on Windows?' That's our real goal, and that's what we're going to stay focused on.
We want to be able to service our customers more, like an Internet service. Our goal is to run one of the largest Internet services that enables people to use Windows on an everyday basis.
Making more sense out of my data, my needs, my tasks - to me, that's the future of Office.
The fundamental truth for developers is they will build if there are users.
Who wants a stylus. You have to get em and put em away, and you lose em. Yuck. Nobody wants a stylus.
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.
We think the Mac will sell zillions, but we didn't build the Mac for anybody else. We built it for ourselves. We were the group of people who were going to judge whether it was great or not. We weren't going to go out and do market research. We just wanted to build the best thing we could build.
This is what customers pay us for - to sweat all these details so it's easy and pleasant for them to use our computers. We're supposed to be really good at this. That doesn't mean we don't listen to customers, but it's hard for them to tell you what they want when they've never seen anything remotely like it.
It took us three years to build the NeXT computer. If we'd given customers what they said they wanted, we'd have built a computer they'd have been happy with a year after we spoke to them - not something they'd want now.
The manual for WordStar, the most popular word-processing program, is 400 pages thick. To write a novel, you have to read a novel - one that reads like a mystery to most people. They're not going to learn slash q-z any more than they're going to learn Morse code. That is what Macintosh is all about.
When I was younger, all I cared about was what people thought of me and my films. Now I care less about catering, hand-serving, hand-feeding the audience. I've gotten to the point now in my life where I'm serving myself.
The right moral compass is trying hard to think about what customers want.
Good companies do whatever it takes to make sure apps are great and don't hesitate to add features.
What strikes me every single time is that the aspirations of Indians are unique and unparalleled. They're very demanding, regardless of background.
If I'm about to forget my kid's birthday, I want the phone to scream at me until I do something about it.
Users are trying to discover apps; we are trying to improve the app discovery process, and developers are trying to reach users. If you step back, it's a problem we solved with search and ads in search.
I would love for my phone to scream if I am about to miss an important thing in my life and never bother me if I'm doing something very important and the information coming in is less important than what I'm doing.
Anything that won't sell, I don't want to invent. Its sale is proof of utility, and utility is success.
At one point in time, you had to choose, 'Do you want to do consumer or enterprise?' But the reality today is a bit different: Enterprises are a collection of consumers.
I think the iPhone is the best consumer product ever. That's what I feel about it. And it's become so integrated and integral to our lives, you wouldn't think about leaving home without it.
Our whole role in life is to give you something you didn't know you wanted. And then once you get it, you can't imagine your life without it. And you can count on Apple doing that.
Price is rarely the most important thing. A cheap product might sell some units. Somebody gets it home and they feel great when they pay the money, but then they get it home and use it and the joy is gone.
It turns out that people - in every country in the world, there's a segment of buyer that wants the best product and the best experience. And that's what we're about providing.
I think of a traditional CEO as being divorced from customers. A lot of consumer company CEOs - they're not really interacting with consumers.
People like things they can do now, not just think about.
People love our products. They love using our services. All of this, to me, equals great opportunity.
Our values are that we do think that people have a right to privacy. And that our customers are not our products.
The pre-owned market allows us to reach customers who really want an Apple device but can't really reach that point. I think it is great for people, or otherwise, we wouldn't we doing it. If we were not proud of the product, we wouldn't be doing it.
I don't subscribe to the view some people have in the industry that you should purposefully design products that do not last that long. I don't think it is good for anyone.
That has always been the objective of Apple: to do things that really enrich people's lives. That you look back on and you wonder, 'How did I live without this?'
You're dead if you aim only for kids. Adults are only kids grown up, anyway.
Your premium brand had better be delivering something special, or it's not going to get the business.
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