Customer Knowledge Management Competence: Towards a Theoretical Framework

Customer knowledge has been increasingly recognized as a key strategic resource in any company's success. Recent studies conducted in the fields of Knowledge Management and Customer Relationship Management have proposed that the two approaches can have great synergies. In this paper, our purpose is to provide an understanding of Customer Knowledge Management (CKM) as an integrated management approach and competence it requires. We describe CKM as an ongoing process of generating, disseminating and using customer knowledge within an organization and between an organization and its customers. In addition, we propose a tentative theoretical framework of CKM competence, i.e., the ability to integrate customer knowledge into customer relationship management processes.