During a Square Board meeting, our newest Director Howard Schultz, pulled me aside and asked a simple question.
“Why do you all call your customers ‘users’?”
“I don’t know. We’ve always called them that.”
…
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. Below is a letter I sent the team after that Board meeting explaining why. It’s a start (we’re not done yet).
To everyone in the technology industry: I encourage you to reconsider the word “user” and what you call the people who love what you’ve created, starting with yourselves.
I love the direction here, but I don’t think it takes it nearly far enough. To really get in the head of a customer, we (as an organization at MobileDevHQ and as an industry as a whole) should nail down our customer to a specific person.
In our case, a user shouldn’t just be a customer, it should be a profile of a real person.
An example: From now on, I want everyone at MobileDevHQ to stop thinking in terms of a user or customer, abolish those words from our vocabulary, and instead start thinking in terms of Jane. Jane is the mobile marketing manager at a large publisher. She spends her day in a variety of tools, from paid ad networks, to engagement analytics platforms, to MobileDevHQ. She’s not technical — meaning she couldn’t code an app herself — but she understands technology, understands the basics of organic app marketing, and is looking to us for guidance on how she’s performing and how to get better.
In short: Jane needs MobileDevHQ to succeed at her job. She wants to help her organization build a big mobile business. And she wants to enjoy doing that every single day, so she needs to enjoy using MobileDevHQ.
From now on, I will mandate that we remove user from our vocabulary, but also remove customer, and instead replace it with Jane, a specific person we know well.
