How Do They Know Their Customers So Well? Lessons from the Leaders in Customer Knowledge Management [Archive.org URL]

The management of customer knowledge is critical to many contemporary business initiatives involving customers and customer-relationships. Firms are investing billions of dollars in technologies to manage customer information and turn it into knowledge. Yet few organizations have developed outstanding levels of customer insight, and most concentrate only on the customer data that are easiest to address. In the research for this article, we investigated the customer knowledge management practices of 24 leading firms. We found that the leaders in customer knowledge take a multi-pronged approach addressing multiple, but thus far unintegrated, types of customer information and knowledge. The most effective firms focus particular energies on the human aspects of customer knowledge. Contrary to many recommendations, we found little evidence that companies can combine all customer knowledge in one integrated repository.

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