Do you have Customers or Clients?
by Andrew on 06/03/08 at 3:23 pm
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These two words used to be confusing to me. I knew that “consumers” was a no-no (it makes people feel like farm animals), but I would use “customers” and “clients” interchangeably, sometimes in the same paragraph. A “customer” seemed like someone who would shop at a retail store, whereas a “client” was something that big businesses had, but that separation never felt quite right.
Michael Gerber, in E-myth Mastery, shed some light for me:
“A customer is someone who buys from you once. A client is a customer who returns to your company time after time.”
Perhaps a dictionary would disagree with this definition, but it made a whole lot of sense to me. Most importantly, it changed the goal of each phonecall, e-mail and meeting that I have with a new contact. Am I aiming to make a customer (a one-time buyer), or a client (a long-term relationship)?
This plays itself out in a number of ways:
- I will sell whatever is in my range to a customer, regardless of their real need.
I will tell a client to try the shop down the road for that particular widget, and invite them back in the future for what I do best. - I will make sure a customer doesn’t read the fine print too carefully, and then make a quick buck from admin fees, penalties and surcharges.
I will make sure a client knows exactly what they are in for, so that there are no surprises that will sour the relationship - I will maximise the profit on each sale to customer, cutting corners on quality, packaging and service.
I will maximise the experience that a client has with my brand and my products, forfeiting short-term profit for a delighted brand-ambassador.
Every business from Boeing to your local B&B can choose between growing their customer-base and growing their client-base. Looking back, I know that most will wish they had chosen the latter.
Andrew Smith is the pedantic systems guy behind Live Alchemy, a SA e-commerce company. Andrew writes for Ideate in an attempt to make the world a more efficient place. View more articles by Andrew.
