The Integration Of Customer Knowledge In CRM

Knowledge management (KM) is a process of knowledge creation, storage and utilization to improve the performance of an organization. Customer relationship management (CRM) provides business strategies and toolkits for companies to build their competitive advantages. By the introduction of KM into CRM, the Knowledge-enabled CRM (KCRM) is formulated to enhance business performance and achieve superior advantages. Based on the KCRM perspectives, the study aims to examine customer knowledge and its integration to help business gain customer insight and improve the effectiveness of CRM. CRM is a combination of customer-centric management concept and technological solution. The CRM system integrates people, technology and process of a company into an overall management system which incorporates the CRM concepts and software technologies. Customer knowledge is essential for business to understand a customer. It is a dynamic combination of people's experience and decision information about customers, as well as the data exchanged with them. The study categorizes the customer knowledge in CRM as: Process-oriented, Structure-based and Relationship-analyzed. The knowledge is both explicit and tactic. Explicit customer knowledge comes in the form of dispersed data in CRM databases. Tactic customer knowledge is normally hard to be coded and can only be found in the minds of employees, structures and processes of the enterprise. The coordination and linkage of customer knowledge are presented as integrated and dispersed form in CRM context. Knowledge integration is an important phase in KM processes. It's a synthesis and linkage of existing knowledge, and turn out to be an important method of knowledge creation. By integrating dispersed data and tactic knowledge about customer in CRM, business could get new and systematic customer knowledge, which contributes to a unified and complete customer view and accurate customer insight. The study presents a model and its framework for the integration of customer knowledge. It adopts codification and personalization strategies, and creates a specific knowledge integration environment, to establish a physical platform and software platform. The above three customer knowledge in CRM will be integrated on the platforms with the help of socialization and systemization mechanism, and the new knowledge generated in the processes will be placed into a customer knowledge base. The physical platform is a structure of learning organization that is based on all sorts of knowledge teams. The toolkits for the platform include Intranet, Extranet, Groupware, Community of Practice etc. The software platform consists of Customer Data Integration (CDI) solution and Customer Knowledge Base (CKB).