I'm surrounded by people working on the customer experience, the customer journey, customer insight and analysis, high touch and low touch customers, customer service standards, customer relationship management and generally all things customer. So I was struck by a placard I came across that reads: We are students not customers.
It was a great challenge to my thinking. I looked up 'customer' to get a definition: 'A party that receives or consumes products (goods or services) and has the ability to choose between different products and suppliers. (See also buyer)'.
I guess students do have the ability to choose between different products and suppliers – and higher education institutions are racing to keep up with the notion that we can marketise higher education. (See the The Marketisation of Higher Education and the Student as Consumer for a number of views on this).