Towards Customer Knowledge Management (CKM): Where Knowledge and Customer Meet

Abstract

According to the knowledge-based perspective of the firm and as a result of the shift from industrial to knowledge revolution, knowledge is an important asset that can be used as a tool to achieve a firm’s strategic goals in an effective way in order to achieve sustainability, competitive advantage, and other long-term benefits. On the other hand, the adoption of the “customer is the king/queen” strategy makes organizations focus on the task of gathering information about their customers that can be used in providing those customers with continuous improvements utilizing a special type of Knowledge Management (KM) strategy. This chapter explores customer knowledge management and its general concepts including knowledge and customer relationship management. It also reviews several models of customer knowledge management proposed in the literature. Conclusions and proposed future work are also discussed.