This is a copy of a post I made a year ago, but since I seem to be having this discussion with a lot of folks recently, I thought I would repost it today. Incidentally, the folks at Versage do a much better job of making this argument than I do, so I encourage you to visit their website (site no longer exists).
People often ask me why I use the word customer rather than client to describe the people I work with. I don’t intend to start a religious war with this post, but I do think the words we use are important. So here are some of the reasons that I think customer is the more appropriate word.
Customer comes from the word “custom” which means habit or something done regularly. I want the people that I do business with to buy from me on a regular basis.
Client, from the Latin cliens, means “dependent” or “follower”. A client is also a person who is receiving services from a social services agency. This in no way describes the relationship that I want to have with people who do business with me.
When I was growing up, prostitutes had clients; banks had customers.
I’ve always believed that a business exists to create value for its customers. Using the word “customer” constantly reminds me of this mantra.
The difference between a customer and a client is often described by the level of service provided by the seller of the product. I have spent my entire career in industries that called their customers “clients” (or some label other than customer). On more than one occasion, I have been corrected for calling them customers. I always thought it odd that the person who bought our products and services should get a different label depending upon how we treated them. We just sell products to customers – clients deserve more attention and better service. It’s as if it was decided that we needed to label those who we will treat poorly vs. those we will treat well. I don’t think we needed a new word for customer; we just need to treat our customers better.
Those who buy from us are people – people, who determine the value of our products and services. People who are entitled to judge the quality of the experience we deliver. People who decide whether to do business with us. In my opinion, “customer” describes this idea of the need to serve people and continually earn their business better than “client”, which hints at the attitude “they better do what I tell them to do if they want me the privilege of working with me”.
Another definition that I’ve heard is that customers buy products and clients buy services. In today’s world the line between products and services is becoming more blurred; more businesses are selling product\service packages. I think this trend will continue and defining customers this way will become more irrelevant.
Those are the main reasons that I prefer to use the word “customer” rather than “client”. I still slip once and a while (I blame it on my CPA training) and use “client”, but whenever I am corrected for using the word “customer” I tend to push back for the reasons stated above.
So, what about you? Do you have customers or clients?
