But I think "super-empowering" is a bit more urgent than "flat-worlding." His argument runs something like this. In the past, if you were a dispossessed or oppressed citizen of a hopeless nation, you might have decided to take up arms in a struggle against the regime. In that case you might become a terrorist or a revolutionary. But, until about ten years ago, the range of action that such an angry man would have, the extent of tools at his disposal, was limited. A terrorist could do damage, yes, could kill people. But could he bring down a country? Could he ignite global war? Not so much. The angry man's radius of disruptive action was most often limited by the tools he had available. The Palestinian Intifada is a good example - young men picking up rocks and throwing them at an army.

On the other hand, if you flash forward to modern day, the same angry man who might have had a rock or an assault rifle in his hand in 1980 finds, with easy access to the Internet and cell phones and encryption, that he can aggregate discontent that's spread over a wider range, and consequently do wider damage. The angry man becomes a "super-empowered angry man" and we know how destructive their reach can be.

I've written about this before because, frankly, the ability of terrorists to aggregate discontent seems to mirror what's happening in the much more benign world of the customer experience.

If you look at the disgruntled customer twenty years ago versus today, you see a similar ratcheting up of his ability to cause widespread damage through aggregation of discontent. His tools are far more powerful: social networking websites, blogs, video and audio recordings, on and on. His platforms reach far more people, and they take what would once have been a very indignant letter-writing campaign and turn them into overnight global outrage.

What happened to AOL is one manifestation of the phenomenon. The rise of Paul English as an industry pundit is another. There are far too many examples to recount here, but they are all business school cases-in-waiting.

What's happened to companies, I think, is that the customer has, for now, turned the tables on business when it comes to branding and marketing. Where a company used to have a strongly asymmetric advantage over customers through the larger budgets and staff used to create and disseminate "message," now some customers are hitting back with equally powerful anti-messages, and companies are, quite naturally, unprepared for this turnabout.

Equally interesting is the fact that the anti-message has, to date, almost always been negative, though that doesn't have to be the case.

So far, this changing dynamic has largely occurred outside the call center, among customers themselves. But the call center is where the effects are felt first, and where companies have the power to confront the aggregated discontent (if they choose to).

In my next installment of this series, I'll talk a little about how this all relates to the call center, its functioning, and its management.

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