Client, customer and end user
Three roles rarely held by the same person and rarely wanting the same thing.
Commissions, funds and settles. Sets the budget and the acceptable performance.
The organisational unit receiving the service and stating the need on behalf of its people.
Experiences the service daily, with no influence on the specification or budget.
The difference in one sentence
The client pays, the customer asks, the user experiences — three interests that rarely align.
Why they get conflated
Satisfaction surveys measure the user while the client set the specification. The result is then read as a quality problem rather than a specification problem.
Why it matters
A provider delivering exactly what was agreed can still produce persistently dissatisfied users. That is a demand failure, not a delivery failure.
How to tell them apart
For every complaint ask: who ordered this, who pays for it, and who lives with it? Three different answers mean three different conversations.