So. Traditional ways of measuring and managing the customer and his experience don't work anymore.

You know about the bell curve. It's the statistical tendency of measured data to cluster around a central mean, and tail off at the high and low extremes. (This is a dramatic oversimplification - for a real appreciation of what it means, search wikipedia for "normal distribution".) The bell curve is a pretty reasonable description of the way customer satisfaction can be measured. If asked the simple question, most people will gravitate to a "somewhat" satisfied state; a few will be "extremely satisfied", a few will be "extremely unsatisfied." Of course, actual results will vary, but let's just assume for a minute that the bulk of customers will cluster around a mean, and there will be a few outliers at each end of the scale.

Most of the time, call center professionals take the aggregate result - the mean, or the hump of the curve. It's all they really have the time for, and it's what most of their existing technology is good at telling them. But what of the outliers? Isn't it likely that the outliers tell a story that can be much more interesting and perhaps insightful into the real nature of the customer/company relationship?

One side of the outlier equation consists of folks who are blissfully happy. They do tell an interesting story, but we're not going to consider them right now. Now I want to focus more intently on the other side, the outliers who are extremely dissatisfied. These form the pool from which our Super Empowered Angry Customers are born.

How do we define a Super Empowered Angry Customer? I count three criteria that qualify someone as part of this elite group:

1. They've dealt with you and come away dissatisfied. This doesn't mean they've come away from the call center dissatisfied. In fact, they may never have called you - they may have come away from a store, a rebate experience, a delivery experience, any of many types of interactions - and found it wanting.

2. At the same time, they are personally motivated to spread the word about their dissatisfaction. To friends, family, co-workers, anyone who will listen.

3. And they have access to platforms that amplify the noise of their dissatisfaction beyond traditional boundaries.

The difference between a normal angry customer and a Super-Empowered Angry Customer lies in criteria #3.
I can cite lots of examples of SEACs in action, but the most interesting and useful is the AOL case, garnering lots of publicity this past summer. In short, a caller taped a really bad interaction wherein the rep wouldn't let the customer cancel his AOL service. He then posted the tape on the Internet and voila, it became a cause celebre and a flashpoint for everyone who had a tale to tell about AOL's sub-par service. It caught the company up short, turned a spotlight on both bad service and bad behind-the-scenes processes that let them happen. It did brand damage and, I am sure, will be a business school case study before the end of the decade.

While this became a big story in the mainstream media, I think the outlets that highlighted it, like Good Morning America, missed the real business story at the heart of it. And that is the fact that we've now got an asymmetric playing field between the company and the customer. Where the company used to hold all the cards in the relationship (except for one, the buying decision), now the customer has a platform from which to proclaim discontent and gather other, likeminded customers into a unified force.

What would have happened to AOL ten years ago in the same situation? There wouldn't have been a place to display the tape of the phone call. There wouldn't have been a way to rally a community of users who were similarly dissatisfied about what AOL had been doing. In fact, in order to find a similar example of customer fury that had an impact on branding and behavior, we almost have to reach back as far as the Exxon Valdez incident in the early 1990s.

In that case, of course, the fury wasn't based on a customer-centric event. Essentially, if you wanted to mobilize thousands of angry customers against you and have them screaming obscenities at you in public forums, you had to dump a shipload of oil on a pristine coast. Now all you have to do is irritate the wrong, highly motivated customer with a blog or a myspace page or YouTube access. The degree of company transgression needed to get to a critical mass of customer frenzy is far lower today, thanks to the amplifying technologies.

The other aspect of this that mainstream media missed was that they focused on the call center as the locus of the problem. In fact, while the rep may have been obnoxious, he was following a set of clearly delineated procedures. The process behind the scenes was deeply, deeply flawed.

I don't want to pick on AOL, they just happen to be a convenient example of the public nature of the SEAC's reach. I think everyone in American business needs to see this as the beginning of an era in which companies have little to no traditional control over the outcome of the relationship with their customers.

Hold that thought, please, till the next installment.

The SEAC series so far:
Part 1: What's a Super-Empowered Angry Customer?
Part 2: How Paul English Aggregated Customer Discontent
Part 3: Thomas Friedman and the Flat World
Part 4: When the Center Is Fine, But the Policies are Broken
Part 5: To Understand Angry, You Must Understand Happy