Customer Knowledge Management As A Success Driver For Business:a Case Study Of Mobile Sector Of Pakistan

Two rising trends in the global market are a shift towards the importance of data and the rise of more informed customer purchases and preferences. For customer-facing business models, this means that companies must move away from traditional paradigms of managing information, knowledge or customer relationships and adopt an integrated model that considers the concept of customer knowledge, which includes knowledge from customers, knowledge about customers, and knowledge for customers, and seeks to deal with that information through dedicated customer knowledge management. While numerous studies have discussed the form of different customer knowledge management strategies or detailed the kinds of data that can be gathered, there is no clear way to assess how successful these strategies are in actually using customer knowledge. In this study, we reviewed the existing literature on customer knowledge management, paying special attention to the analytical and methodological studies, to define six success factors for assessing a company’s customer knowledge management strategy:1) To what extent do firms view customers as a source of knowledge;2) To what degree do companies understand different types of customer knowledge;3) To what extent do firm’s consider the differences in these types of knowledge in their customer knowledge management efforts;4) Does the firm adequately implement appropriate mechanisms to gather this knowledge and communicate with their customers;5) After this knowledge is gathered, is it appropriately managed and shared throughout the company; and finally6) To what extent do customer knowledge management efforts support innovation efforts that contribute to a given company’s success. To assess these success factors, we opted to conduct a case study on Mobilink, Pakistan’s leading telecommunications provider, who has a strong reputation as a market leader and well published initiatives on connecting with its customers. Using our literature reviews, we devised a novel methodology that paired an external source-based assessment model, known as the Butterfly Model, with a survey and questionnaire we developed a survey and questionnaire that would detail the company’s perceptions of customers and customer knowledge. Generally, we found that Mobilink succeeds on most of the metrics and likewise that our assessment methodology was quite good at externally assessing the success and nature of customer knowledge management strategies. We conclude this study by offering suggestions on improving future research into customer knowledge management, both conducted internally by company stakeholders and externally by academic researchers.