Names are an important part of our identity.  When someone we meet for the first time remembers our name the next time we see them, it communicates a level of respect, indulging our feeling of self-importance and strengthening the connection we feel with that person in return. Conversely, when we forget or incorrectly remember someone’s name – or when they do the same to us – that disappointing, negative impression might never go away. 

As such, in any customer-centric business (and one might reasonably consider all businesses to be customer-centric), finding a way to record names correctly is the first step toward maintaining a positive, fruitful relationship with those customers in the future.  As the burden of recording and administrating names falls more and more exclusively to automated, client-facing web pages (for example, the “create an account” page found on many businesses’ websites), a few important questions arise, such as: