Customer Definition: Pronunciation, Examples, and Idioms

Look at how “customer” is applied in real-life situations:

The “customer” description suits several other words you can use instead of it:

Related nouns: shop store money price

Synonyms (contextual): client buyer consumer purchaser

Common collocations: to listen to a customer to attract customers customer account

These words will allow you to discuss different situations that happen in shops, from what customers do to what they feel.

With adjectives: new customer happy customer loyal customer

With verbs: customer pays customer waits customer asks customer complains

With nouns (noun + noun): customer information customer number customer list

You will be able to talk about shops and their bonus programs after learning some of these useful phrases:

• Customer service is the help that a customer receives from people who work in a shop before, during or after they buy something.

  Customer service in this shop is the best. They always find clothes that suit me.

• A customer card refers to a special card that a customer can use to buy discounted products and services.

  They gave me their customer card, and now I have a 10% discount in their shop.

• A regular customer is a phrase that describes a person who regularly buys something in one shop.

  The cashier knows me because I’m their regular customer. I go there every week.

You’ve learned so many collocations and idioms and know how to define “customer.” It is time to find out whether you can put your knowledge into practice. 

“Customer” in English has more variations than in other languages. Learn how to read this word in French, Spanish and German.

What does “customer” mean for big brands? What do we know about customer service in Mesopotamia? Read further to know about everything.

• The oldest written customer complaint dates back to 1750 BCE.

  The message that was found in the city of Ur, which is in modern Iraq, was left for a merchant who offered goods of poor quality. You can find the text on the Guinness World Records website.

• The company with the largest customer base is Unilever.

  You may not know the name of this brand, but you probably have at least one of its products at home. It states that more than 3 billion people use its products every day: food, cosmetics, or cleaning supplies.

• Not every customer is allowed to buy a Birkin bag.

  Even if you have about $10,000–$200,000 of free money and the desire to buy a bag, you probably won’t be able to. If you want to be offered to buy one, you need a long history of Hermès purchases.

• Zappos had a customer service call that lasted almost eleven hours.

  The brand is very attentive to its relationship with its customers, so sometimes its calls last very long and sound more like a conversation with a friend.

This word appears in countless marketing materials, and the most notable are featured below:

— Jeff Bezos

Running one of the most successful businesses in the world, Jeff Bezos says that it is more important to think about your customer than to compete with others.

— Marshall Field

One of the most popular phrases in retail and service is to not argue with your clients and to agree to their conditions, even when they are wrong.

— Henry Ford

When providing services and creating products, employers and employees need to think about customers, because they are those who pay wages.