We generally take a pretty condescending view of the individual customer, creating strategies for "managing the relationship," scripts and scores that tell us how valuable a customer is and what psychological buttons to push to achieve a desired purchasing result.

But what happens when the power shifts and it's the individual customer who is a force to be reckoned with? Take the case of AOL.

This company is famous for how difficult it is for customers to cancel their service. Without getting into the pros and cons of their customer retention strategy, let's just stipulate that it's a pretty advanced set of techniques for preventing cancellations by turning them into "save" opportunities by CSRs.

One customer who tried to cancel his account recorded the entire call to customer service. He posted the recording to a blog. It became a viral incident blasting AOL's service attitudes. For mere pennies, one angry customer had the power to broadcast AOL's inner workings - and his dissatisfaction with them - to an audience of millions. Millions. That prompted more outcry; one website posted a purloined copy of the internal AOL training documents dealing with retention strategies. More embarrassment ensued. One customer asymmetrically impacts the operations of an entire company.

Or take the case of Dell. A man named Jeff Jarvis bought a laptop that he found unsatisfactory. Unfortunately for Dell, they gave him very poor service, and he described it in excruciating detail on his popular blog over the course of months. It galvanized an entire community of like-minded unhappy Dell customers. According to some observers, the long-term incident known popularly as Jarvis' "Dell Hell" has actually impacted Dell's stock price. One man, an Internet-enabled megaphone, and a major corporate problem focused on the call center.

What can you do in the face of a "super-empowered angry customer"? Not a lot - at that point it's really too late to do anything but apologize, promise changes, and slink off into PR damage control.

But all call centers - and all companies - have to recognize that every customer is a potential SEAC. There are no opportunities to sweep unhappy interactions into aggregates and point at our average success rates. Call centers must preemptively act to negate the outlying bad interactions because every single interaction has become a flashpoint for public humiliation and failure. This is a phenomenon that's going to change the way companies strategize about customer relationships. It's going to change the way you think about spending on things like self-service, CRM, customer support software and the like. And it's going to force you, the call center professional, into collaborating with marketing and upper management.