Terminology

There are customers and customers.

In IT support terms, customers are the end-users. We call them "users" (this is possibly also the rudest work in the English language sometimes).

Anyhow end-users are also known as customers. The clients are the people who pay for the service. Clients can be customers and are often users. This vocabulary ("clients" and "customers") is part of the IT Infrastructure Library. That's the definite best practices in IT service delivery.

When you go to the shops and buy a pint of milk you are a customer of that shop.

So that's two meanings for the same word.

I saw an advert today for a Customer Services Manager in IT. So I naturally thought about users - bless them - and that sort of thing. I crafted a suitable c.v. and covering email and sent it to the recruiter. Then, in the afternoon, I phoned him.

It took a while for us - him and me - to figure out what exactly he meant by customers. But eventually it became clear that it was more a case of milk-shopper rather than end-user. And, it wasn't much of an IT job either. Bah.