Your Customers Are Not Your Users

When the character Guy finally tries Green Eggs and Ham (and likes it) from the book Sam-I-Am, he has transitioned from being a customer to being a user. Customers are more about value perception, while users are all about behaviour and doing. They can be -� and often are -� the same person. However, when you build models of them (like personas), it is helpful to treat them differently.

In particular:

Identify where a customer transitions to a user (and back into a customer) in an end-to-end experience journey.
Recognize that they are not necessarily the same person. For instance, the customer might be buying a product for the user.
Like all models, sometimes the lines are fuzzy, e.g. if you are taking a car for a test drive, you are a customer trying to imagine what it’s like to be a user.
Because of the emphasis on perception vs. behaviour, they can involve very different types of research techniques.
One is not more important than the other, just different aspects of an end-to-end experience.

Scott Plewes

Chief Strategy Officer

Over the past twenty-five years, Scott has worked in the areas of business strategy, product design and development in the high tech sector with a specialization in experience design. He has extensive cross-sector expertise and experience working with clients in complex regulated industries such as aviation, telecom, health, and finance. His primary area of focus over the last several years has been in product and service strategy and the integration of multi-disciplinary teams and methods. Scott has a master's degree in Theoretical Physics from Queen's University.