How To Set Up Customer Hierarchies

Consider the following customer hierarchy:

The figure illustrates a customer hierarchy.

The above hierarchy shows a parent company (McDonalds Corporation) with two subsidiaries and one general manager. Each subsidiary, in turn, has subsidiaries and these subsidiaries can have their own subsidiaries...

You must set up a person for every individual and business in a hierarchy. After the basic demographic information is defined, you define each person's children using the Person to Person page.

Note: A script can be used to set up a hierarchy. The demonstration database contains a script that guides users through the process of setting up a hierarchy.

While hierarchies would typically be set up to define parent companies and subsidiaries, you can use this functionality for many other purposes. For example, a customer relationship manager could set up a hierarchy containing their "important" customers. To do this, they'd need to create a "dummy" person for the parent and then link the "important" customers to it.