Jack Dorsey, creator of Twitter and the founder of Square, recently posed a question on his Tumblr page: Why do we call our customers users?. He was asked the same question by Howard Shultz, the Chairman and CEO of Starbucks, during a Square board meeting and decided he didn't have a good answer. So he decided to change the way he and his employees refer to the people who use their products.
At Square we’re removing the term “users” from our vocabulary, replacing it with “customers”, and the more specific “buyers”, and “sellers.” The word customer, given its history, immediately sets a high bar on the level of service we must provide, or risk losing their attention or business.
Dorsey's feels the term "users" abstracts the way his company thinks of the people who buy and sell goods through Square. "Customers" gives those people a more human face and reminds the people at Square that they're dealing with human beings. (To get the full story, you can read the entire post here: http://jacks.tumblr.com/post/33785796042/lets-reconsider-our-users.)
What do you think? Is this all just semantics, or are there good reasons to change the way we talk about people that use our software and web sites?
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