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The secret about customer service in the new economy isn't that it's bad -- everyone knows it's bad. The secret is that it's harder to deliver good customer service than ever before.

Ultimately, what is so striking about the customer-service revolution that we are digging our way through is how little a century of technological innovation really changes what matters.

Even if you have the empathy and the passion and you address the customer's problem, you haven't really given good customer service in total. You haven't done that until you have eliminated the problem that caused her to call in the first place.

The customer is always right, but not all customers are always right for you.

You don't build it for yourself. You know what the people want and you build it for them.

We like to say at Schwab that the difference between sales and service is relevance. If a client perceives us as presenting a solution to a problem he doesn't have, that is selling. That feels really bad, and it's a huge waste of time. On the other hand, if the client sees us as presenting a solution to a problem he does have, that's service. That's not sales.

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.

Why are customers who say they're satisfied not necessarily repeat customers? Because satisfaction is a measure of what people say, whereas loyalty is a measure of what they actually do. Many managers still don't recognize this fundamental difference, so they use customer satisfaction and customer loyalty interchangeably, as though they were synonyms.

What the economy has today is not service - it's lip service, the thing that delivers what we call little murders, the daily indignities as customers that suffocate us. That's why the service economy is giving way to what we call the support economy.

There are three things which are vital to business success: the customer experience, great employees and cash flow.

#1 is great customer experience

Only if managers define market segments that correspond to the circumstances in which customers find themselves when making purchasing decisions can they accurately theorize which products will connect with their customers. We believe that customer segmentation (or categorization) should be based on the notion that customers "hire" products to do specific "jobs." Doing so will help managers segment their markets to mirror the way their customers experience life. This approach can also uncover opportunities for disruptive innovation.