customers according to their level of loyalty. The ladder's first rung consists of prospects, non-customers who are likely to become customers in the future. This is followed by the successive rungs of customer, client, supporter, advocate, and partner. The relationship marketer's objective is to 'help' customers climb the ladder as high up as possible. This usually involves providing more personalised service and providing service quality that exceeds expectations at each step. Customer retention efforts involve multiple considerations: Customer valuation – Gordon (1999) describes how to value customers and categorise them according to their financial and strategic value so that companies can decide where to invest for deeper relationships and which relationships need to be served differently or even terminated. Customer retention measurement – Dawkins and Reichheld (1990) calculated a company's customer retention rate. This is the percentage of customers at the beginning of the year that are still customers by the end of the year. In accordance with this statistic, an increase in retention rate from 80% to 90% is associated with a doubling of the average life of a customer relationship from 5 to 10 years. This ratio can be used to make comparisons between products, between market segments, and over time. Determining reasons for defection – It comprises investigating root causes, not mere symptoms. This involves probing for details when contacting former customers. Other techniques include the analysis of customers' complaints and competitive benchmarking (see competitor analysis). Developing and implementing a corrective plan – This could involve actions to improve employee practices, using benchmarking to determine best corrective practices, visible endorsement of top management, adjustments to the company's reward and recognition systems, and the use of recovery teams to eliminate the causes of defections. A technique to calculate the value to a firm of a sustained customer relationship has been developed. This calculation is typically called customer lifetime value, a prediction of the net profit of a customer's relationship with a company. Retention strategies may also include building barriers to customer switching by product bundling (combining several products or services into one package and offering them at a single price), cross-selling (selling related products to current customers), cross-promotions (giving discounts or other promotional incentives to purchasers of related products), loyalty programs (giving incentives for frequent purchases), increasing switching costs (adding termination costs such as mortgage termination fees), and integrating computer systems of multiple organizations (primarily in industrial marketing).