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While research on customer relationship management (CRM) focuses on customers’ desire to engage in relationships, the literature has paid little attention to customers’ ability to do so. Drawing on relationship research in psychology, this dissertation demonstrates that the success of CRM is contingent on customers’ inherent ability to maintain relationships. To explain this ability, the current research introduces the concept of customer relationship vulnerability (CRV), that is, the predisposition of a customer to react adversely to the occurrence of critical incidents in relationships. In a series of six studies, this monograph develops and validates a CRV scale and probe the success of various CRM initiatives at different levels of CRV. The results show that customers with high CRV are immune to these initiatives. Integrating CRV in industry surveys can help marketers avoid the wrong customers and, therefore, allocate their CRM resources more strategically and efficiently towards the right customers.