Customer Knowledge Management Competence: Towards a Theoretical Framework

TLDR

Customer knowledge is increasingly viewed as a key strategic resource, and recent research indicates strong synergies between Knowledge Management and Customer Relationship Management. The paper seeks to clarify Customer Knowledge Management as an integrated approach and to propose a tentative framework for CKM competence, namely the integration of customer knowledge into CRM processes. CKM is defined as an ongoing process of generating, disseminating, and using customer knowledge within and between organizations and customers, and the authors propose a tentative framework that embeds this knowledge into CRM practices.

Abstract

Customer knowledge has been increasingly recognized as a key strategic resource in any company's success. Recent studies conducted in the fields of Knowledge Management and Customer Relationship Management have proposed that the two approaches can have great synergies. In this paper, our purpose is to provide an understanding of Customer Knowledge Management (CKM) as an integrated management approach and competence it requires. We describe CKM as an ongoing process of generating, disseminating and using customer knowledge within an organization and between an organization and its customers. In addition, we propose a tentative theoretical framework of CKM competence, i.e., the ability to integrate customer knowledge into customer relationship management processes.