"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"
About this Quote
The subtext is hard-nosed: niceness is cheaper than cleanup. Cuban wraps a business lesson in moral language - “nice,” “respectful,” “in their shoes” - because those words land in a culture where companies routinely talk about “community” while optimizing for churn. He’s implying that a “broken customer relationship” isn’t an accident. It’s usually the outcome of systems that make it difficult to get answers, easy to feel dismissed, and impossible to feel seen. Repair, then, isn’t just one apology email; it’s rebuilding trust against a memory of being treated as a ticket number.
Context matters: Cuban’s brand is the blunt billionaire who still venerates hustle and service, a retail-era instinct updated for an online world where one bad experience becomes public content. The quote works because it’s both pep talk and warning: you can’t out-market a reputation for indifference, and the cheapest PR is preventing the story from happening.
Quote Details
| Topic | Customer Service |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
| Cite |
Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Cuban, Mark. (2026, January 14). 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. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/it-is-so-much-easier-to-be-nice-to-be-respectful-150817/
Chicago Style
Cuban, Mark. "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." FixQuotes. January 14, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/it-is-so-much-easier-to-be-nice-to-be-respectful-150817/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"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." FixQuotes, 14 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/it-is-so-much-easier-to-be-nice-to-be-respectful-150817/. Accessed 12 Feb. 2026.








