Customer vs. User
Which term is most appropriate when we’re talking about our e-commerce audience?
Spending nearly a decade in the world of software and digital agency work, I never really dug in too deeply into e-commerce methodologies and best practices. I kind of bounced around industries and internal-facing products without necessarily specializing in any one realm.
Transitioning into the e-commerce world has been a whirlwind — exciting, but in all the right ways. I’m beginning to focus my specialization in User Experience a little bit more, in order to continue pushing the limits for our site and the industry. E-commerce has a lot of unique qualities that separate it from other industries. For my work, in particular, the fact that there is a physical product team and a digital product team in the same room makes it endlessly interesting, and really exciting that the work I do puts a tangible thing into someone’s hands at the end of their user journey.
I have realized quickly, that there are many overlapping goals across my work and other departments. Although, being the first and currently only user experience person on the team, it has become clear there are some differences in goals that actually make a world of change when strategizing.
It started a couple of months ago. I realized in most meetings that fellow coworkers were using the term “customer” when talking about the people using our site and products. I, of course, defaulted to the term “user”. Although, thanks to never-ending internal self-doubt, I thought maybe I was just making an error and not familiar with industry terms, so I attempted to be more cognizant, and used the term “customer” more. What I realized after doing so, is that I became distanced from the real journey of our audience, and that when I was talking about a “customer”, and someone else from another department was talking about the “customer”, we had inherently different perspectives on what we should be focusing on. It only took a few weeks, but I realized there is a substantial difference between a customer and a user.
CUSTOMER — implies finite state, focused on end-goal of spending money
USER— implies continual journey, focused on taking various actions over various potential sessions
Obviously, I am not advocating to eradicate the term customer. It is an incredibly important term that is embedded in certain parts of our industry and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. I just feel that if a conversation is UX-focused, the term should be avoided, and user is a more apt and applicable way of describing the people interacting with our site, of which concerns a UX perspective.
Personally, customer feels more distant and abstract, where their money-spending is what defines them. User is much more broad, and flexible. It doesn’t pigeon-hole the subject into one predetermined funnel, and allows them to show us unexpected paths — what we weren’t looking for.
These unique user journeys are what make us better at our job, we learn from them and become accountable. The better we prepare for error, the better our users’ experiences are.
Essentially, all I ask is that perhaps we think about the people using our site as more than just anonymous line-items with deep pockets, but as people who have thoughts, experiences, and assumptions before they even get to our site. That all of those things can drive them down different paths from one day to the next, and we need to embrace this and learn from it. I think we’ll find that our goals for customers and our goals for users are, in fact, very similar, but maybe we’ll see them all with a little more empathy. Empathy goes a very long way in regards to connecting with the people we want to engage with.
