ent history, and good utilization. He has called several times in the past three months with complaints about his bill. It would not be a good idea to send a direct marketing campaign to Tom, telling him how great your customer service is. It would also be bad form to have a salesperson call on Tom about upgrading his current contract without at least warning that salesperson about the history of trouble. The converse situation is also true. For example, say that Mary Jones has been professionally churning for the past eight months, dropping and re-subscribing every time a new promotion is available. It would be a very good idea to make the sales staff aware of that fact and to discourage them from acquiring Mary once again. What if Mary's brother, Peter Jones, was an especially bad credit risk? It would be very advantageous if the sales department could be alerted to that fact SO that they would avoid providing Peter with a phone. Who is In Charge of the Customer? Finally, even when all of these other mechanisms have been put in place, we still have one serious overriding problem that will prevent us from truly functioning well in a relationship. Unless we put some person or organization in charge of managing the customer relationships themselves, there is no way that all of these different people, groups, and views are ever going to get coordinated. Each of the different groups involved in customer touchpoint activities are assigned to manage one portion of the relationship. Chapter 9 One group manages advertising messages, another manages sales activities, and yet another does customer service. No one group or person, however, has the authority to override the decisions of the other groups for the sake of the health of the overall relationship. Problem No. 4: Someone Needs To Be Responsible For Customers Business units are commissioned with execution of specific objectives. Each unit will do whatever it takes to accomplish those objectives and will, therefore, slant how they manage the customer relationship fo