Users vs Service Users - What's in a name?

What's in a name anyway?

What's in a name? Names are identifiers. Names are powerful. Names are personal. In this era of personalized communications and 'being genuine', what 'name' do you give to your service users?

Personifying your service users gives them a character. For external communications, it’s a necessity. Nobody wants to be called a ‘user’ in communications, CRM, or marketing material. (“Dear Valued User” — ugh!).

When I was working on EdTech tools, the obvious thing was to call our service users ‘teachers’ and never ‘users’.

It’s helpful to continue this practice not just for external communications but for internal communications too. (E.g. “How can we help teachers get richer feedback from their students?”).

I made a point of everyone in the company referring to our service users as ‘teachers’ so that it personified them and connected the development thought processes to thinking deeply about who we are actually building tools for and what their use case is.