Customer service is currently the king, with social media and forums like this giving people a platform on which to complain, and a way of finding like minded people to share that sense of victimhood with.
Twenty, fifty, a hundred years ago, people were complaining about their commute and falling foul of the railway bylaws. I've seen copies of railway magazines from 1914 where passengers were writing in for advice about what to do because they had been charged by zealous ticket inspectors, and in the 70's, it was a running gag in Reggie Perrin.
One persons complaint is another persons good customer service. If I hold the late train for the gang running down the platform, is this good customer service? Not if it means the passenger already on the train misses his last bus home from the train station. If I refuse to allow passengers to walk through First Class to be standing at the front door, is this bloody awful customer service? No, it is good customer service to the passenger in the wheelchair in the front of First Class who would have been crowded out by the dozen or so trailing past her while the platform staff were attempting to put a ramp down. Is it poor customer service to insist that somebody with a cello on a seat in a busy Sunday afternoon long-distance train moves it to the luggage space (and because they say it is too valuable and they will have to stay with it they stand up for the journey)? It's good customer service for one (or two!) of the ten or so passengers who is standing in that carriage who can now sit down for the next 90 minutes.
However, in each of these real-life examples, people wrote, e-mailed, tweeted, or just resorted to old-fashioned name-calling or abuse because of what they perceived as poor customer service. The people who had received the good customer service, however, did not even realise they had received it.
In my life experience (which I had thought was considerable until I started on the Railway, when I quickly realised, to coin a phrase "You ain't seen nuttin yet"), there are a huge number of people out there who do think that the world revolves around them, and whinge loud and long about it. The NHS is especially suffering from this at the moment, but the railway runs a close second. These people will also try to twist any situation to make themselves the victim - who remembers the wheelchair chap going to Guide Bridge a few years ago?
A large part of this is that the large organisations are seen as "fair game", and they are constrained in what they can reply, and have an absolute terror of "Bad Publicity". They are swatting at flies trying to take on each complaint, and even when the millions of satisfied customers are taken into account, the noisy wheel is the one that gets the grease, so the comparative few complaining are the ones that get the attention.
There will be a backlash at some stage, where companies will start saying to serial complainers "We're doing our best for everybody, if you don't like it don't use us".