'Customer' or 'client'?
I popped in to the doctor’s yesterday but I had to wait because my GP was busy with another customer. Actually, I was a bit late for my appointment. I’d just got off the phone to my child’s teacher. She’s always keen to chat because my family is one of the school’s best customers.
As consumers, we rank that particular school above any other in the district. We joined the local church to get our children on to the waiting list. This delighted the vicar, because the poor old Church of England needs as many new customers as it can get.
Sounds crass doesn’t it? Medics, clerics and pedagogues are hardly alone among 'professionals’ in not having succumbed to the language of crude commercial exchange. Yet lawyers are not so seemingly immune. It is now routine for solicitors in particular to be told what their 'customers’ - who are 'consumers’ of legal services - want from them and how they should (or must) provide it.
The Gazette’s readership, or a significant chunk of it, gets very irate about this (see this week's letters page). A butcher, baker, or candlestick maker has 'customers’. Solicitors, who are professionals, have 'clients’. Or did.
Not only that - solicitors are officers of the court, custodians of the rule of the law. The reductive language of the street market is as misleading as it is vulgar. Of course, with the government busy dismantling legal aid, and seemingly intent on dismantling open justice too, you might think semantic punctiliousness ought not to be a primary concern of solicitors. Perhaps so.
But the dissidents have a point.
The word 'customer’ connotes a transaction between a 'buyer’ and a 'seller’, nothing more. This is the language of deskilling and commoditisation. Its effect - perhaps even its very object - is to negate the concept of the 'professional’. Just as we're all consumers now, so everyone who sells us stuff is but a self-interested 'producer'.
What they are doing - the people who use the word 'customer’ when talking about solicitors - is trying to put you in your place. That's how it seems to this non-lawyer, at any rate.
Paul Rogerson is Gazette editor-in-chief
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Comments
Could not agree more! Another
Could not agree more! Another attempt to dumb down the profession, or should that be industry!
Of course, this is exactly
Of course, this is exactly what happened to banking, sorry, financial services industry.
The people who were understood to be professional advisers became mere salesmen of "products" with targets of sales volumes to meet. In fact, all the professional old bank managers were sacked and replaced with salespeople-but nobody told the "consumer", who still believed these people were acting in the clients best interests rather than their own. The results of this are apparent in the current financial position.
The same is happening with the legal profession, sorry, "legal services industry"-the results will be equally disastrous.
The legal profession had, no doubt, many faults. Destroying it will not fix them.
sounds goo
I think i'd quite like just being a "producer" of legal services.
if that's all it is then there would be no need for any fiduciary duties, no implication that our tasks can exceed our retainers and no liability to any third parties. no-one could complain about us just becuase they were a pain in the backside and, best of all, no need for an ombudsman or a regulator at all because the market would decide.
on that basis - i think we'd actually all be better off!
Who cares
As long as the customer/client pays their bill and recommends me to their friends.
Old Debate
I can remember reading a similar debate to this in a nurses' journal many years ago when the care professions were starting to call patients 'clients' instead. It was pointed out then that 'patient' was more appropriate for the medical world as it came from the latin 'patiens': to suffer, whereas 'client' came from the latin 'cliens': to hear and obey. As lawyers surely that's exactly what we want from our clients.
I bridle at being called a
I bridle at being called a customer on a commuter train. I am not. I am a passenger travelling from A to B as there is no free will, or voluntary 'transaction', involved. It's the only way to get to work on time. The author Alan Bennett has noted how he put his head in his hands when the guard on 10.10 from King's Cross to Leeds was restyled 'Customer Operations Leader'. I have no objections to being called a customer at the buffet bar though.
These can be fine distinctions. I look forward to the legal ombudsman's next entreaty urging Clifford Chance to serve its 'customers' better!
Purchasers, Customers, Clients & Consumers
There is one thing we often find in many places that the consumer of the product or service is often forgotten in the client/customer debate.
In many relationships the purchaser, the customer/client, may not be the end consumer – the person who really uses the product or service.
Despite the rise of the metro sexual male why has “Boots for Men” never taken off? They have tried, in the early 2000’s, well most male toiletries used to be bought by mums, wives and girlfriends. (Don’t have the exact figures these days)
The purchaser is already in the main Boots stores, why develop a new retail environment for male products and make the purchaser go elsewhere?
Whether you talk of clients, customers, it’s the consumer of services that needs to be understood.
What ever name you decide for them, knowing who is using your services , those who create the demand is key, they may ultimately establish whether value was delivered and whether they will use you again.
Client implies working with; customer, selling to
The parallel with banking/financial services is a good one. I struggled when that sector started speaking of 'products'. But I still haven't got my head around their use of 'wrapper' - a term often used with ISAs (and sandwiches).
'Client', to me, implies a trusted partnership and high-value service. Product, wrapper, customer: they're all nouns that imply a commoditisation of professional services.
Then again ...