Who you consider to be your customer depends on whom you're talking to within your organization. Originally, "Customer" referred to the party responsible for paying the bill, as represented by "Billing's Definition of Customer" in Table 1. We have everything we needed to know about the customer to collect money from our products and services. However, other business areas, such as marketing and customer servicing, may include other parties in their definition of customer, including the decision maker, the influencer of the purchasing decision and the product or service's end user.

The emerging definition of customer is more marketing-oriented. This definition encompasses a lot more that just the party that is financially responsible for paying for the purchased product. It includes anyone who has the potential for influencing the sale, including third party agents that sell your products to the ultimate end-user. The billing view of customer alone is no longer sufficient for determining exactly who are your customers.

Table 1: Customer Definitions

To further complicate matters, in some companies, the customer of one line of business may be a competitor to another business area, as occurs within the long distance telephone industry. To the line of business that provides access to the local network considers the long distance communication companies to be its customers. But, within the same company's consumer market, the long distance companies are its largest competitors. To complicate matters even more, businesses have been known to apply the word "Customer" to their alliance partners, agents and brokers. Customer is becoming a catch-all phrase that encompasses almost any one that you do business with.

To understand who is your "Customer", you must step back and examine the people and organizations you consider to be your customers. What behavior do they exhibit that makes you call them "Customer"? What relationships do they participate in that is an indication that these parties are considered to be customers?

Business language is extremely rich and expressive. A single term can connote an entire scenario of about things and the relationships that exists between those things. For example, the term Customer implies the existence of a person or organization that is purchasing the products or services of another person or organization. Simply by speaking the word Customer, the audience will assume that at least two parties (e.g. person or organization) are involved in a relationship in which the products and/or services of one party (the service provider or Vendor) are being rendered to the other party (the Customer). We may not know the nature of the customer relationship (e.g. the types of service or products involved), but we have been able to gleam a lot of information from the use of a single word. Very often, a business term is shorthand for a set of hidden business rules associated with business concepts which appears in the meta-level model.

If you closely examine the definition of customer, you will realize that it is defining a provider/receiver relationship between people and organizations (or Business Parties) and your organization. Those parties that receive your products and services are in the role of customer. You are in the role of supplier or vendor. You are attempting to manage your relationship with the business parties who are your customers. From this perspective, it is easy to see that it is the nature of the roles that parties assume with respect to one another that causes us to consider a business party to be a customer. In fact, when the definition is applied to your suppliers, it becomes obvious that your organization is just another business party who has assumed the customer role with respect to your vendors.

Table 2: Customer Role Types

As illustrated in Figure 2, the roles that a business party assumes with respect to your product and service offerings, business events and with one another provides a formula for describing the characteristics of your customer. These characteristics can vary by line of business or product line. For example, the Pension Plan Trust department may consider both the company whose pension is being administered and the employees covered by the plan to be customer. However, for individual trusts, only the donor or the executor is considered to be the customer, not the beneficiaries. Because each area of the business can have its own unique language based on the products being offered, their business vocabulary must be examined to identify the significant roles that indicate a customer relationship exists.

Customers need to be understood from an enterprise-wide perspective. Therefore, you must identify the organizations that interface, in some manner, with your customers, such as marketing, accounting, sales, servicing.. Each stakeholder has a perception of who is their customer, based on the nature of their interaction with the customer. Each stakeholder must articulate what he or she means when they use the word "customer". The Customer Relationship Building Blocks can be used as a framework for developing your enterprise's definition of customer, based on the roles that the people and organizations take with respect to your product and services.

When customer is defined in terms of the roles they assume, supporting different views of customer becomes quite easy. Each line of business can specify exactly the circumstances under which a business party is considered to be a customer. Within a product line, the roles that can be assumed are normally static. For example, a loan can involve borrowers who receive the money and co-signers who agree to pay the loan if the borrowers default. No one will question that the borrower is considered to be a customer. What about the co-signer? Are they customers too? The answer may be different depending on the point of view of the managers involved. Furthermore, the answer may change as the organization becomes more customer-focused. When customer-ness is defined in terms of the roles business parties assume with respect to your product and services, how they participate in events and their interpersonal relationships, the business is free to assume as many definitions of customer it needs to achieve success.