Integrating Customer Relationship Management, Performance Management, and Knowledge Management through Balanced Scorecard

Customer Relationship Management

The fundamentals of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) grew from demand on after-sales customer service. In addition, it is based on sales transactions and intensive data processing. With further influence of marketing and customer orientation principles, customer relationship management advances to adoption of value-added problem solving and customized services. However, the ultimate customer relationship management principle is to build customer loyalty and lifetime patronization. (Liew, 2008)

CRM is or should be a core competency in a customer oriented business. CRM emphasizes customer value added, customized services, customer driven products/processes, and customer relationship building. It has three levels of progress in terms of operating sophistication aligned with the concept of Knowledge Management (KM). They are:

• 1.

  Transaction-based data processing customer services

• 2.

  Informed decision based customized services, and

• 3.

  Knowledge-based customer and value driven relationship management (Liew, 2008)

Within the KM literature, the knowledge hierarchy (a.k.a. information hierarchy) has several versions; the amalgamated version is as follows: Data, Information, Knowledge, Intelligence, and Wisdom. For the purpose of this context, the first three levels should suffice. The importance of understanding the differences and interrelationships between data, information, and knowledge cannot be overemphasized. (Liew, 2007; Zins, 2007)