The Outcome of Knowledge Process for Customers of Jordanian Companies on the Achievement of Customer Knowledge Retention

2. Literature Review

KM, as a discipline, is designed to provide strategy, process, and technology to increase organizational learning (Satyadas et al., 2001). The various system designs attempt to capture and capitalize on the existing explicit, implicit and, in some cases, tacit knowledge of organizations. This emphasis on technology hides the range of knowledge available in an organization and processes that facilitates the flow of knowledge. Organizations must develop an integrative approach to KM that covers all potential components of knowledge and leverages specific components strategically aligned to their business objectives. In addition, KM is not something new; it is going to be something tangible and, in other words, there is a type of revolution on this topic today. Therefore it can be useful for the success of CRM activity. As a concept, it is one of the important factors for achievement of customer knowledge retention in the long term. Study of the KM process is important for the organization to validate the objective. Therefore, CRM process can be considered as knowledge oriented process with the characteristics of knowledge intensity and process complexity (Lin et al., 2006). Customer knowledge managers seek opportunities for partnering with their customers as equal co-creators of organizational value. This is also in stark contrast to the desire to maintain and nurture an existing customer base (Gibbert et al., 2002). Goh (2005) describes KM as an expertise that is widely recognized as having a significant impact on business performance. It is an approach that is used to capture, create, and apply knowledge to make the CRM process successful (Alryalat et al., 2007). The literature shows that managers focus on how to produce growth for the corporation through acquiring new customers and through engaging in an active and value-creating dialogue with them, and are much less concerned with customer retention information. Furthermore, it has been maintained that CRM and KM have been gaining recently wide interest in business environment (Gebert et al., 2002).