Customer Knowledge Management (CKM): Perspectives & Practices

While Customer Relationship Management (CRM) refers to building strategies and tools for managing relationships with customers, Customer Knowledge Management (CKM) refers to strategies that help companies derive valuable insights about customers that get stored in the form of customer data / information to be shared across the value chain, which when preserved would become a knowledge repository for the future generation of managers.CKM is an art of managing business and attempts to integrate implicit and explicit knowledge and aligns it with CRM goals for realizing long term business objectives of sustained efficiency and competitive advantage.CKM aims at preserving customer knowledge for truly understanding how customers behave based on the changes in the environment from the insights obtained about the customers over a period of time.Thus the dynamics of CKM emerge from the fact that it records changes in the customer behavior across the customer lifecycle and also provides for co-creation effort with customers.This characteristic feature provides an edge for CKM to score above CRM.This paper would attempt to provide insights on those areas that truly distinguishes between CRM and CKM and would explain why companies should have broad strategies defined to achieve common goals of CKM in the long-run.It would also place a discussion on how companies can stand to gain a competitive advantage by preserving customer knowledge through a few best practices caselets