The Customer Relationships process category gives IT service providers a mechanism to understand, monitor, perform and compete effectively in the marketplace they serve. Through active communication and interaction with customers, this process category provides the IT enterprise with valuable, current information concerning customer wants, needs, and requirements. Once these requirements are captured and understood, the process category ensures that an effective market plan is created to bring the various IT services and capabilities to the marketplace.

Use of a Service Catalog contributes to effective communication with customers, and also provides everyday usage details to approved users of services. In support of delivering these services, service level agreements (SLAs), underpinning contracts (UCs), and operational level agreements (OLAs) are planned, created, implemented, monitored, and continuously improved in this process category. A sound understanding of the real demand for services, categorized by the mix of user communities, helps ensure the vitality of SLAs and underpins achievement of targets.

As the dependence of business activities on technology-based support grows, assistance is needed to help customers understand and exploit the transformation potential from technology. While the IT services are in operation, customer satisfaction data is continuously gathered, monitored, and recorded to enhance IT service capabilities and IT's presence in the enterprise.

The governance and implementation details of each process will depend on the essential nature of the relationship with customers, most obviously indicated by whether they are internal or external. For an IT provider solely serving internal customers there can be little or no flexibility in the choice of marketplace. (ITIL® uses the term Market Space, defined as "All opportunities that an IT Service Provider could exploit to meet business needs of Customers. The Market Space identifies the possible IT Services that an IT Service Provider may wish to consider delivering." ) This marketplace selection decision occurs in the Direction category; here, the customer-facing implications of those decisions are addressed and can result in more than one implementation of each process depending of the market complexity.

Processes in the Customer Relationships category

* Part of PRM-IT, but not core to ITSM. The process is described at a summary level.