Relationship
A relationship is the standing connection between your business and one person or company: every conversation on every channel, the commitments made, the deals and cases, and what Connect remembers. Conversations end; a relationship does not, which is why it is the record worth looking at before you reply.
What it gathers#
One relationship answers a single question — *what is going on with these people* — and it is assembled from records that would otherwise be on five screens.
- Conversations on every channel, including calls with their transcripts and summaries.
- The lifecycle stage the person or organisation is at.
- Open opportunities and support cases.
- Dated follow-ups that are owed, and who owes them.
- Memory held at the contact tier, readable and erasable in place.
One implementation answers a relationship for both audiences, which is the reason a page like this can describe it once. The customer surface calls the screen People where the operator's calls it Relationships; that renaming is recorded deliberately rather than being a second feature, and the parity check knows about it.
Why a conversation is not enough#
Replying from inside one exchange is replying from a keyhole. The customer asking a routine question by email may have telephoned last week about something that has not been resolved; the enquiry that looks like a first contact may be the fourth attempt from an address you have not linked yet. Customer 360 is the view that puts the whole history in one place, and it is built on the relationship rather than on any one thread.
This is also why Connect's memory is scoped to people rather than to conversations. A conclusion drawn in March is available in September because it belongs to the relationship — relationship memory versus chat history sets out the difference and what it costs to get wrong.
Distinguishing it from four neighbours#
| Term | What it is | How long it lasts |
|---|---|---|
| Relationship | The connection itself | Until the business stops dealing with them, and the record survives that |
| Conversation | One exchange on one channel | Until the exchange stops |
| Opportunity | One commercial deal in the pipeline | Until it is won or lost |
| Support case | One post-sale issue | Until it is resolved |
| Company | The organisation record | Independent of who currently works there |
The costly mistake is treating an opportunity as the relationship. A lost deal closes the opportunity and changes nothing about the connection; a customer with no open deal is not an inactive relationship, and next-best-action reasoning that only looks at the pipeline misses most of what is happening — making a next-best-action defensible goes into that.
Questions#
Is a relationship with a person or with a company?
Either, and usually both at once: you deal with named people at an organisation. The person carries the conversations and the memory; the company carries what is true of the organisation regardless of who is currently answering.
What happens to the relationship when a deal is lost?
Nothing. The opportunity closes and the connection continues, with its history, its memory and any follow-ups still owed.
Does Connect read the whole relationship before every reply?
It works from what is relevant and what fits the budget for that piece of work, not from a full re-reading. That is why recorded memory and lifecycle stage matter more than volume of past text.