Sometime in the last couple of years the franchise companies the Tories appointed to destroy our railways started calling the passengers "Customers". Patronising gits. "Customers" in this context is management course jargon from c. 1985-89 - it takes a few years for the staff to succumb to indoctrination. It's pobably out of fashion in business now.
It is patronising & divisive. "Passenger" is the traditional term - although in the 1980s rail people often used "traveller", which is quite pleasant. Not only does it have a romantic ring to it ("commuter" sounds so pooterish) but it implies that we are all in this together. "Travellers" and "crew" have a common interest in getting the train home on time. But "Customers" and "staff" are in competition with each other. One wants to spend as little money as possible, the other wants them to spend more.
They tried to get us computer workers to stop talking about "users" at the same time. In that context it hides some real relationships that need thinking about in systems analysis. Our (i.e. suppliers of computer systems) customers are not always the same people as our users. Inside large companies the customers are the people who pay the user's wages. On the Net the customers are our "clients" (another odd word - patronising in a very etymological sense) the users are their customers...
And I always suspected that railways used "services" so that you couldn't complain when they put you on a bus instead of a train.