hat one of the key ingredients for a good relationship with your customers is to define what kind of relationship you want to have and then be ready and able to follow up on that commitment. Now we see that we must also figure out how to get everyone in the organization to participate in that relationship in the same way. When the customer begins a relationship with your organization, it is based on a contract that has been negotiated between the two of you. Some of the contract is explicit (the terms of the service agreement contract) and much of it is implied (promises made by advertising, sales people, and customer service). When the relationship gets underway, however, what are the chances that everyone interacting with that customer knows what this contract is really about? What are the chances that different customer touchpoint organizations will confuse, confound, and aggravate the customer with their interpretations of the contract? The odds are very high. What is needed is a mechanism that will keep everyone synchronized around the contract that is currently the reality for the customer. Chapter 9 The Corporate Customer Data Warehouse Ultimately, there is only one way that any organization can hope to get all of these different parts of the business to synch up around customer issues. They need to share a common repository of information about the customer and a common set of policies and practices for dealing with that customer. Note please that this is a two-part statement. First you must have a centralized location where information about the customers and their contacts are stored. Second, you must get all customer touchpoint organizations to operate with a standard framework for interacting with those customers. The Good News The good news is that creating such a repository of customer information (although expensive and time consuming) is a relatively simple process. A central computer repository holds and manages all core information about every single customer and prospect. This repository must b