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Viewing Contact Relationship Hierarchies

A contact's relationships are those of influence. End users may have a contact who relies heavily on the opinions of others when making purchasing or other decisions. If so, they may want to keep track of the relationships between a contact having purchasing authority and those who might influence his purchasing decisions.

End users use the Contacts Relationship Hierarchy view to identify and capture key relationships for a contact. This view features a graphical tree that provides a visual representation of a contact's relationships. The tree displays both the natural hierarchy of a contact's parent-child relationships to entities such as companies and households, as well as custom-defined relationships.

Custom-defined relationships are ad-hoc associations between the contact and any other contact, organization, or household. End users can record custom-defined relationships between any two entities in the adjacent Party Relationships list.

NOTE:  The Relationship Hierarchy view is also available on the Companies and Households screens. For more information, see Viewing Company Relationship Hierarchies and Using the Household Relationship Hierarchy.

To view a contact's relationship hierarchy

1. Navigate to Contacts > Contacts List.
2. In the Contacts list, drill down on the contact for whom you want to view a relationship hierarchy.
3. Click the Relationship Hierarchy view tab.

   The Contacts Relationship Hierarchy view appears.

To define a relationship between contacts

1. Navigate to Contacts > Contacts List.
2. In the Contacts list, drill down on the contact for whom you want to describe relationships; if the contact does not exist, add it.

   For more information on adding contacts, see Adding Contacts.

3. Click the Relationship Hierarchy view tab.
4. In the Party Relationship list, add a record and complete the necessary fields.

   Some fields are described in the following table.

   Field	Comments
   Relationship	Categorizes the relationship between the contacts. The field has an LOV for Custom Defined Relationship values. Predefined values include Reports To, Spouse, Child, Lawyer, Board Member, Primary Contact (Backup), Admin Assistant, Competitor, Referral, Service Provider, Investor, Wealth Management Rep, Related Subsidiary, Bank Attorney, Trustee Attorney, and Debtor Attorney. This LOV can be modified by the Siebel administrator. For more information, see Configuring Lists of Values.
   Type	Defaults to Contact. Other values include Household, Organization, and Employee.
   Value	Identifies the other member of the relationship. The values are constrained by the Type field selection. For example, if Type equals Contact, then clicking the select button displays the Select Contact dialog box.

   The newly defined relationship is expressed in the Relationship Hierarchy explorer.