We Have Customers, Not Users
Rethinking the U in UX. Derogatory or democratic?
Back in the days of dial-up internet connections, there was a saying in the tech industry: “The only two businesses in the world that have ‘users’ instead of ‘customers,’ are drug dealers and software companies.” That’s not true. Even drug dealers know they have customers to serve. It’s the police who call them “users.” It’s a derogatory term.
Calling them “user” seems more democratic. And therein lay the seeds of failure.
Yet in the culture of Microsoft (where I work) and other technology companies, the word persists. As does a curious bias against “customer.”
The theme I hear repeatedly is that “customer” focuses too much on money. Calling them “user” seems to be more democratic. It puts the people who use our products on an equal level with us. After all we use our products, too. It appeals to our sense of egalitarianism. It meshes with the meritocracy that we aspire to.
And therein lay the seeds of failure.
We’re not our customers
The work I do on the Storefronts team, writing customer-facing content, requires me to be a professional amnesiac. Every time I look at a text string, page, or flow, I have to forget everything I know about our products and services. (Some might argue that’s light work for me.) I have to approach any feature or web page the way our customer might. Because our customers see our products in a profoundly different way.
We’re not our customers — not by-and-large, not in general, and certainly not in e-commerce. We spend our days lavishing care and attention on our software and hardware. That’s our work. Our customers have zero interest in doing this. They just want to use our products to do their work and move on. To us, a bug is an interesting problem to solve. To our customer, it’s keeping them from finishing a presentation, or going on a picnic with their family or friends.
Our customers aren’t paid to develop our products. They pay us to use them — with their hard-earned money, their time, or their data. They keep the company going. They make it possible for us to pursue our mission—to empower every person and organization on the planet to achieve more.
Sure, we’ve some things in common. We both use technology. In B2B, where many customers are fellow IT professionals, we’re even more alike. But there is still a profound difference. We’re here to serve our customer, not the other way around. Any competent salesperson will tell you the key to success is embracing a service mentality.
“User” chips away at the service mentality. It makes us forget that we’re not our customer. We conflate our two very different points of view. Despite our best intentions, we produce products and services that meet too many of our needs, and not enough of theirs.
The person who downloads Windows 10 for free is no less of a customer than one who pays for it.
Okay. Still, “customer” seems so commercial, so crass. It sounds so money-grubbing, when what we really want to do is transform the world. Even among those of us who fight the battle against “user,” some seem repelled by the term “customer.”
Which does our customers a great injustice.
“Customer” is not a dirty word
Commerce, the buying and selling of things, was the driving force that created our civilizations, at crossroads where nomadic sellers gathered to display their wares — and nomadic customers came to shop. Soon, some chose to make their home at the crossroads. From crossroads came towns. From towns arose great cities. The computer you’re reading this on, the house you live in, the Boeing 767, the Statue of Liberty, Monet’s Water Lilies, Taj Mahal, the Apollo moon landings, One Hundred Years of Solitude, pretty much anything by Youssou N’Dour, the temples at Angkor Wat, Guernica, the light bulb, Beethoven’s 9th, polio vaccine, Bugs Bunny, The Silk Road, and yes, Windows 10, Facebook, Twitter, Google, iPhone— virtually nothing we’ve created would exist, were it not for our civic bonds that began with sellers and buyers — that began with customers and customer service.
We should be happy we have customers. We should be grateful we have customers. We should be honored we have customers. Yet we call them “user,” a derogatory term.
Terms like “Visitor” “Guest,” “Listener,” “Player, “Reader,” “Team member,” or just good old “Person” are all true and vital in the right context, often when we’re speaking to the outside world. But no matter what else we call them, when we gather to create a new product, service, feature, or offer, those we build it for are also our customers.
A company that buys ad space on MSN is a customer, but so is the person who reads the news for free. Someone who buys 10,000 seats for Azure is, but so is the employee who uses one of those licenses. The person who downloads Windows 10 for free is no less of a customer than one who pays for it.
In the last few years at Microsoft we’ve worked together to effect tremendous change throughout the company, embracing human-centric design, more-personal computing, and a focus on the customer. But old habits die hard, and one of the oldest habits we have is “user.” Like a faint but constant wind, it keeps pushing us off course. It keeps chipping away at our service mentality.
Whether you write code, design hardware or apps, manage programs or releases, lead a team, build websites, keep server farms humming, or keep the company on the right side of laws and regulations, as an industry we need to expunge “user” from the specs we write, from the decks we build, from our websites, from our daily speech, from our words and thoughts, and replace it with “customer.”
Because that’s what we’re lucky enough to have. We have customers, not users.
Check out the Microsoft Store. That’s where I work to serve my customers.
Follow me @geofmiller
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