s: diligently attending to consumers' needs, providing high-quality customer input for purposes of product design, and maintaining open and effective communication.
             Relationship marketing is about having an indirect conversation with the customer through analyzing their behavior over time. Relationship marketing uses the event-driven tactics of customer retention marketing, but treats marketing as a process over time rather than single unconnected events. Using the relationship marketing approach, you customize programs for individual consumer groups and the stage of the process they are going through as opposed to some forms of database marketing where everybody would get virtually the same promotions, with perhaps a change in offer. The stage in the customer Life Cycle determines the marketing approach used with the customer. The relationship marketing approach then uses this Life Cycle model as a "timing blueprint" to follow, targeting the right customers at the right time, with the most profitable offer.
             Relationship building is not an easy task and in order to achieve customers loyalty, companies have identify what type of customers they are targeting in order to understand what type of relation to build:
             · Basic: The salesperson does not follow the consumer after sale
             · Reactive: The salesperson encourages the consumer who bought the product to call them in case of problems.
             · Accountable: The salesperson calls the consumer a short time after the sale to ensure that the product meets consumer's expectation.
             · Proactive: The company "follows" the consumer and tries to make suggestions about new or improved product use.
             · Partnership: The company almost works with the customer to discover ways to deliver better value.
             The relationship strategy to adopt depends on two factors: the number of consumers and their profitability. The following figure summarize the strateg...