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Abstract The concepts of customer relationship management (CRM) and knowledge management (KM) both focus on allocating resources to supportive business activities in order to gain competitive advantages. CRM focuses on managing the relationship between a company and its current and prospective customer base as a key to success, while KM recognizes the knowledge available to a company as a major success factor, From a business process manager's perspective both the CRM and KM approaches promise a positive impact on cost structures and revenue streams in return for the allocation of resources. However, investments in CRM and KM projects are not without risk, as demonstrated by many failed projects. In this paper we show that the benefit of using CRM and KM can be enhanced and the risk of failure reduced by integrating both approaches into a customer knowledge management (CKM) model. In this regard, managing relationships requires managing customer knowledge knowledge about as well as from and for customers. In CKM, KM plays the role of a service provider, managing the four knowledge aspects: content, competence, collaboration and composition. Our findings are based on a literature analysis and six years of action research, supplemented by case studies and surveys.
Keywords Knowledge management, Customer relations, Process management
Introduction
The concepts of customer relationship management (CRM) and knowledge management (KM) have recently gained wide attention in business and academia. Both approaches focus on allocating resources to supportive business activities in order to gain competitive advantages. Although these concepts are currently mostly regarded as separate research areas, we see a high synergy potential in an integrated approach.
To build good relationships with customers, it is necessary to serve each customer in his preferred way, therefore requiring the management of "customer knowledge" (Davenport et al., 2001). Many knowledge management approaches, as presented by KM models, regard managing knowledge as independent of the supported business processes. Knowledge and its management are seen as inherently valuable, a view not generally shared by the process owners who have to bear the costs of the supportive activities, but are measured by their ability to generate revenue and control costs. In many cases the latter is not measured in knowledge, but in services or products (Demarest, 1997).
In this paper we show...