"Customer" or what's in a name?

One of the largest government agencies in Australia is called "Centrelink" which seems to be a great name for an organisation that (according to it's own propaganda) offers "a range of services delivered on behalf of ten government policy departments and a number of other agencies."

Specifically:

1. Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs.
2. Department of Employment and Workplace Relations.
3. Department of Transport and Regional Services.
4. Department of Veterans' Affairs.
5. Department of Health and Ageing.
6. Department of Education, Science and Training.
7. Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry.
8. Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
9. Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy.
10. Department of Immigration and Citizenship.

As part of this same propaganda, Centrelink also manages to add to the confusing double speak of governmental language by its use of the term "customer"

One would imagine that in normal parlance, a customer is someone who actually pays to receive a service or a product from someone else. Thus, you would imagine that Centrelink's customers are actually the so called policy departments and agencies that commission it to deliver certain services on their behalf.

However if you have a chance to look at Centrelink's Customer Charter, a 2o page PDF document you will discover to your surprise (and hopefully delight) that the word "customer" actually refers to both those organisations that pay for work to be done for them and also those people who are required to come to Centrelink to obtain the services that are being provided.

It's a fascinating use of the word.

In many instances it could be argued that as each individual who receives a service is a tax payer of some sort, thus he or she is actually (if indirectly) paying for the services that are received by means of their contribution to consolidated revenue.

Accordingly, it is merely right and appropriate that they are considered not only to be consumers of these services, but in a particularly funny and convoluted way because they are actually paying for them, should be called "customers".

In the dim and distant past people who received services from government departments were called 'clients,' but in this more modern and upbeat society that we live in, I guess it's no longer fashionable to use such terms - it's far more appropriate to use the terms that refer to all of us these days, consumers and customers and of course manufacturers, distributors, sales persons and marketers.

The world seems to have been overtaken by fiscal attributes and much like the old saying - "they who live by the sword shall die by the sword" perhaps we should now re-frame the saying into a more explanatory option that uses fiscal terminology.

That would certainly make sense of the billions that are being made through "virtual" businesses like PayPal, Facebook etc.

For those of us who used to work in the new business of "knowledge management" we are likely to reap the whirlwind of what we have sown.

The CIA infiltrates Facebook through a financial stake in its operations, (see the Canberra Times article "Facebook's faceless men" Sat. January 19 2008), companies pay billions to gain access to our personal preferences in the data bases of the so called 'free services' that abound on the Internet so that they can target their advertising to those preferences and so reduce our ability to resist their blandishments, our banking systems rely on our greed to have what others have and then suffer the loss of all our investments because they are virtual and not real, these are the risks.

If the world markets do result in a global meltdown following the so called Sub-Prime lending that went on in the USA we have only ourselves to blame.

Investing in rhetoric and double speak and virtual reality is merely a great way to play some games with each other. Life is not a virtual game as some people are realising for the first time - for most of us it's reality.

When you take games theory and practice and actually introduce it into the real world the characters that in a game might die horribly when you (the person playing) makes a mistake, in real life the character cannot spring back to life in the next round of the game, he/she just dies.

Are we all just customers or consumers in someones mad idea of a reality game or are we finally going to grow up and realise that we do NOT live in a virtual world and that our actions in the world in which we live have real consequences that do NOT lend themselves to a quick press of the 'reset' button.