I'd like to return to the AOL issue for just a moment -- first, to acknowledge that the affair of the leaked CSR tape appears to have generated enough critical mass within AOL to lead to some cultural reform. I am told that there are changes under way within AOL's call center operations that aim to resolve some of the issues that occurred during the summer. I'd also like to reiterate that I'm using what happened to them as an instructive example. They are not the only company that's been zapped by a groundswell of empowered angry customers. They make a convenient and public example. It's easy to make fun of their situation, but they shouldn't be made scapegoats for what is a larger, culture-wide phenomenon.

That said, there's one interesting aspect to the whole arc of what happened to them that's often left out of the press coverage and out of common discussion. The nut of the problem here is that -- in my view -- the call center functioned exactly as it was supposed to. AOL, in essence, created a well-oiled machine for customer retention. Anyone who reads the training manual for reps in that center will see that although the individual rep in this case was a jerk, he was following a set of business processes that were designed to capture every save opportunity and convert it into a save.

In this context it's obvious that there's a disconnect between the guidelines, strategies and objectives set forth by the company's management and the actual effects they have on the customer experience. I seriously wonder what AOL's internal customer satisfaction surveying was telling them about cancellation issues, because it couldn't have been telling them that they were improving customer sat or the experience as a whole by ratcheting up the pressure to retain.

One of the basic premises behind the growth of Super Empowered Angry Customers is that they can't gain critical mass (that is, the power to persuade and move people to aggregate their anger against you) unless there's a large enough reservoir of untapped dissatisfaction already out there.

This whole scenario forces us to ask certain fundamental questions about how call centers operate. In fact, it forces the call center management into the uncomfortable (maybe even untenable position) of having to deal with that disconnect between corporate policy and call center operations. Unless someone in the call center points out that disconnect, the call center itself is going to be the focal point of accountability when problems erupt into the public sphere. It's the call center manager's butt that's on the line when an overzealous rep meets a super empowered customer. It's the call center's interaction that gets recorded, either by your monitoring system or by the customer himself. Which implies that you as call center professional have the tools at your disposal to diagnose these impending problems. And as the custodian of the customer experience within the organization, it's on the call center manager to alert corporate management to the dangers their policies are causing to customer experience and to brand management.

I think the wholesale changes happening on the customer side force call center pros to ask themselves certain basic questions:

First, questions of blame and responsibility, the "who" questions:

• Who is to blame when the call center works perfectly -- when it excels by any traditional call center measure -- in execution of a flawed strategy?
• Who is responsible for fixing it in the aftermath?
• Who should take the lead in making sure it doesn't happen in the first place?

Second, questions about process, workflow and collaboration:

• Why does it happen?
• Why does the existence of a flawed process go unrecognized?
• Why is the situation dangerous to both the call center operations and the company itself?

And finally, the drill-down questions that get to the heart of what you have to do about this kind of problem…. the kinds of questions that lead you to the right kinds of measurements or performance optimization methods:

• How do I know it's happening, or about to happen, in time to fix it? What do I measure to get this information?
• How do I avoid a bad outcome once I've detected a flaw in the processes?
• How do I take steps to fix it?

Now, please hold that thought until the next installment (and don't forget that you're holding the thought about outliers from Part 1, too). I promise that the next couple of parts will be really interesting, and not at all about AOL.

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