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9. Create Business Rules to Drive Decisions. Business rules codify and automate processes, specifying what should happen in specific situations, thus enabling both differentiated customer treatment and automation. Developing organizationwide business rules is a monumental task, and how well it is done directly affects your success in building customer relationships. Business rules define the ways that the strategy is executed.

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10. Empower Employees with Information and Training. Capable desktop tools may be the most visible technological feature of customer relationship applications. Just as the cockpit of an airplane displays all the information a pilot needs to fly in any condition, the contact management screen should pull together cleanly and clearly all that the organization knows about its relationship with that customer. Furthermore, business rules should dynamically change that screen to support and guide the agent in optimizing the customer relationship. Empowerment is a key principle, however, because no set of business rules can or should fully anticipate every conceivable situation: Agents need training, information and support offered by business rules so that they can make good decisions that are consistent with the organization’s strategy.

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11. Retain the Right Customers. One of the truisms associated with customer relationship management is that it is cheaper to retain a customer than to acquire a new one, but that idea can be taken a step further. In order to maximize value, organizations should focus on retaining valuable customers, not necessarily all customers. Be warned, however, that misapplication of this principle can be dangerous. Mistreating “low value” customers, even if you are losing money on them, is hard to justify in the court of public opinion (which is where your future high-value customers are sitting).

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12. Remember That Cultivating Customer Relationships is a Way of Doing Business. These efforts go beyond tools, techniques or programs. Building customer relationships is about the way you do business. It requires participation and hard work by people throughout the organization, and if done right, the work never ends. Results from these efforts should be fed back into the process to continuously refine business rules, marketing efforts and information systems. True optimization has no finish line — it’s an ongoing mission.