What do they Know?

Essentially, customer knowledge management (CKM) involves leveraging three types of customer knowledge: 1. about the customer, 2. to support the customer, and 3. from the customer. Most organizations focus on only one type of customer knowledge. But unless a company can competently leverage about, support and from , their CKM agenda will be found wanting. Even organizations that recognize all three often fail to integrate knowledge management activities across the three. In order to leverage customer knowledge successfully, four issues need to be addressed: 1. segmentation, 2. integration, 3. distribution, and 4. application. To succeed at this, an organization must be ready to learn as well as teach. It must be selective and choose customers who have open knowledge sharing cultures, are willing to engage in knowledge creating activities and are willing to take a degree of risk.