K.Q. Dreger, writing for Audacious Fox:
A lot of software isn’t free. Plenty of people pay to use products. Yet, we call these people users in most of our copy and internal communications. Should we?
What if we tried calling them what they actually are: customers.
I strongly believe everything he says in this article.
I’ve seen many people list reasons why you should refer to customers of your product/service a user, whether it’s a blog post, on Twitter, or even on laptop stickers. I however, prefer the term customer.
The way the word “user” gets thrown about always feels pretty weak, and it just seems like a bit of a nice word. It means you treat them simply as people that use something that you’re offering. But what if they’ve paid you for that thing? Surely they you should grant them a bit of respect and refer to them as why they actually are, a paying customer.