Recall the questions that I raised in my last post in this series. First, the WHO questions that get at the issue of who is responsible for the customer experience. Then, the WHY questions that grapple with the root causes of poor performance. And finally the HOW questions, that help you fix the processes that got you into a pickle.

There's no common set of answers for these questions. No two situations are identical - but you can start to create some common methods of attack by understanding that the patterns that lead to performance breakdowns are visible long before they reach critical mass. In other words, you can know what's going to set off a super empowered angry customer before he or she takes up the megaphone against you, perhaps even before he gets angry. In the modern world you can't take away his megaphone or platform for broadcasting his distress. But you can create strategies for coping beforehand that prove that you understand the dynamics of the customer experience.

It starts with understanding what you want from customers. I have a working theory of the customer/company relationship that posits there are just three elements to the relationship, three variables to manipulate:

Your whole call center operation is based on the need to create, for your business, Happy Customer who Buy More and Lower Cost to you. I've written about this before, and for anyone who wants me to, I'm happy to elucidate this at greater length. For those who think this might be an oversimplification of a more complex reality - well, you're right. This is a gross oversimplification. But here's proof that I've grappled with the complexities underlying the three-term construction:

That's a wall-sized explosion of the various interrelationships between Happy Customers, Buying More, and Lower Cost. It proves, among other things, that I need to get a life.

For the current purposes, though, I want to use the three-headed model as a baseline, as first principles that guide our thinking as we get into the details of what we want our customer relationship to look like and how we're going to manage it.

The neat thing about those three elements is that they are all related. Squeeze any one and you have an effect on the other two. That means that if you increase or decrease spending in any one area, you'll see an effect somewhere else. Creating metrics to analyze one will force you to create new metrics to understand the others. It's a complex, organic system.

And the one element that most people care about and understand better than the others is the first one, Happy Customers.

I think that the biggest problem hanging out there in the callcenterverse is a basic misunderstanding - maybe it's a misreading? - of the basic idea of customer happiness. And it goes back to the ideas I was talking about in the earlier parts of this series about measuring the whole customer population as an aggregate. It's a paradox of call center activity, isn't it, that we measure things in huge groups even as we excel at the micro-unit, the "call" or interaction.

Customer happiness is measured by a lot of things, but most notably the metric known as customer satisfaction. We use a lot of tools to get at that measurement, including surveys. I'm not going to tell you that your tools and measurements are wrong (although they probably are, for reasons that statisticians can better explain). What I want to tell you is that the measurement is incomplete and because of that, it's deeply misleading.

Customer happiness is not one thing. It's not well-represented by a Wal-Mart smiley face logo. All "happiness" is not created equal, and it's not easily understood by putting a number on a group and calling it customer sat. If I ask you how happy your customer base is and you respond by telling me that you have a customer sat of 86 or 92, it's clear already that we're speaking different languages.

If I ask you how you're doing today, and you tell me you're feeling like an 86, does that give me a good sense of your overall state of well-being?

Obviously, happiness and satisfaction are nuanced, multi-faceted states. There are lots of different ways to define "happiness". For example, here are a couple of different ways a customer can be "happy:"

• He can be interaction happy. That's the equivalent of him saying "I like what's happening to me right this second." "This coffee is ok."

• Or he can be abstractly happy. "Starbucks, yeah, not bad. I go there sometimes."

• He can be motivated and happy. "You should try the latte there - it was great."

• He can be surprised and happy. "Gee, the service is really getting better at Starbucks."

• Or, he can be empowered and happy. "I think I'm going to go home and start a blog at starbuckslover.myspace.com!" (Don't laugh, it really does happen.)

Now, there are umpteen ways to more finely slice and dice and express what we mean by happiness or satisfaction. And none of this nuance is captured by the typical call center's aggregate-based understanding of customer sat.

Managing your center to achieve an 85 or 95 rating is not going to help you identify the different processes needed to have a good interaction with both an interaction-happy customer and an abstractly-happy customer. They have different agendas, and so should your call center when dealing with them.

Of course, this problem is compounded by the fact that multiple states can exist in the same customer over time, or at the same time.

And even worse: each kind of happy state implies its opposite, negative state that also exists. Especially the last two in my list above. "I'm going to go home right now and start a blog called starbuckssucks.com!"

It's at that moment that a super-empowered angry customer is born.

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