Customer-centric knowledge creation for customer relationship management

As the pace of today's world increases with advances in technology and globalization, the heat of rivalry and competition in the business world is also rising. It is a wake-up call for many firms that they can no longer just convince customers to buy whatever they sell. They have to understand their customers. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) can assist firms to "know your customer" and "construct good relationships with customers." In order to know your customer and construct a good relationship, customer knowledge must be acquired and managed. However, this is no easy task since customer knowledge can be subjective and difficult to extract or manage. An approach is needed to acquire and manage customer knowledge. Knowledge management, including knowledge creation, can assist in terms of acquiring and managing customer knowledge. Knowledge management not only improves understanding of the customer, but also improves business process performance by enabling response to customer needs in a timely manner with better quality of service. Customer-Centric Knowledge Creation is the process for the creation of knowledge based on customer knowledge within the CRM contexts which are enterprise-wide, customer-centric, technology-driven, and cross-functional. The aims of this process are to assist organizations to gain more understanding of the customer, embedding customer knowledge into organization knowledge, and creating a customer-focused mindset in organizational members. In other words, it is to sustainably create knowledge focusing on customer knowledge in an organization.