e divergent forces at work within the telco and get them all to focus on accomplishing the same customer objective. Chapter 12 Role of the Customer Management System The job of revamping the infrastructure, culture, and expectations of a telco to make this vision a reality is a tall order. To make it a reality is the biggest job of the CRM organization and the CRM system and it will take many months, if not years, to accomplish. eXcellence in Telecommunications The Telco Churn Handbook Chapter 13 CHAPTER 13 CUSTOMER VALUE AND THE CUSTOMER VALUE FUNCTION Over the course of the last few chapters, we have concentrated on presenting a case for the development of strong, consistent segmentation discipline that can be used to develop and enforce a consistent treatment of all customers in all situations, while at the same time allowing individual business units to function in a relatively autonomous manner. Putting such a discipline in place all by itself, however, does not guarantee success. Two outcomes are required to achieve a significant benefit from all of this effort. The first outcome is to make sure that the telco has a consistent, effective customer relationship management (CRM) strategy and business model in place that will be used by everyone. (We will be considering this issue in the next section.) The second outcome is to ensure that the segmentation models that are developed are models that provide valuable information about the customer and that can be used to help direct decision making. Although we cannot discuss all the details about the development of these models here, there are a few critical components we should examine. By far, one of the most important concepts we need to include in our segmentation efforts is the standardized treatment of customers based on their intrinsic value to the firm. After many years of trial and error, we have found that the following approach eXcellence in Telecommunications The Telco Churn Handbook provides us with the best single metric for the resolution of this cr