7. Passenger v Customer
Reeks of consultant speak. If they are called passengers it reminds everybody what the object of the exercise is. Had similar situation in the health service, they are patients and want a medical issue sorted.
Customer tends lean towards a sales opportunity, coffee shops on stations, over-priced branches of M&S in hospitals.
One of the fixed ideas behind privatisation was that
BR▸ was run, by engineering and operations, for its own benefit and convenience not the passengers'. I remember hearing one of the privatisers explaining at the time that they had designed the process with minimal barriers to entry (capital both as money and owning equipment), so a group of outsiders could bid for a franchise.
The idea was to bring in people from a retail background, where (it is said) the customer is king and always right. The switch to "customer" was meant to reflect this change of ethos of those running the
TOCs▸ , which should start to recognise that they were customer-facing.
Of course that totally misses some important differences. With competent logistics (which you can hire in) to maintain stock levels, you can retail stuff out of your stock room that was manufactured ages ago. It stays as made, with no involvement of the manufacturers until it's been bought and taken (or sent) home.
You can't retail a rail journey that way. You have to keep manufacturing the journey after it's been sold, and while it's going on, until it has finally been consumed. So the manufacturing staff (both engineering and operations) need to be involved throughout. This makes life more difficult, but can't be wished out of relevance.
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