Search results

The concepts of customer relationship management (CRM) and knowledge management (KM) both focus on allocating resources to supportive business activities in order to gain competitive advantages. CRM focuses on managing the relationship between a company and its current and prospective customer base as a key to success, while KM recognizes the knowledge available to a company as a major success factor. From a business process manager’s perspective both the CRM and KM approaches promise a positive impact on cost structures and revenue streams in return for the allocation of resources. However, investments in CRM and KM projects are not without risk, as demonstrated by many failed projects. In this paper we show that the benefit of using CRM and KM can be enhanced and the risk of failure reduced by integrating both approaches into a customer knowledge management (CKM) model. In this regard, managing relationships requires managing customer knowledge – knowledge about as well as from and for customers. In CKM, KM plays the role of a service provider, managing the four knowledge aspects: content, competence, collaboration and composition. Our findings are based on a literature analysis and six years of action research, supplemented by case studies and surveys.

The aim of this paper is to identify key issues and successful patterns of collaborative customer relationship management (CRM) in financial services networks.

The study takes the form of a multi‐case analysis.

The paper finds that key issues of CRM in financial services networks are redundant competencies of partnering companies, privacy constraints, CRM process integration, customer information exchange, and CRM systems integration. To address these issues, partnering companies have to agree on clear responsibilities in collaborative processes. Data privacy protection laws require that customer data transfer between partnering companies has the explicit approval of customers. For process integration, companies have to agree on process standards and a joint integration architecture. Web services and internet‐based standards can be used for inter‐organizational systems integration. Data integration requires the development of a joint data model. Either a unique customer identification number or a matching algorithm must be used to consolidate customer data records of partnering companies.

Because of the limited number of case studies, generalizability is limited. The findings can serve as a starting point for researchers seeking to further explore the topic with quantitative methods.

The findings can be used by financial services networks to improve their collaborative CRM approaches.

The importance of collaborative CRM in business networks is likely to increase due to the continuing deconstruction of value chains not only in the financial services industry, but in other industries as well. Nevertheless, the topic has not received much attention in research.

This paper aims to explore and conceptualize service recovery as an organizational capability. It proposes a new construct labeled knowledge-enabled recovery effectiveness (KERE).

Measures capturing the KERE construct were developed through domain identification, item pool generation using focus group interviews with managers involved in complaint management and content expert validation.

A first pool of 73 items was generated and then reduced to 37 items. Focus group interviews confirm the theoretical relevance of the KERE construct. Recovery culture, recovery process and internal recovery resources are the different components of a firm’s knowledge that serve as inputs, or as a source of a firm’s service recovery capabilities.

A quantitative study is needed in future research to assess the KERE’s construct structure and validity.

Managers may use the proposed scale to foster effective and relevant marketing strategies by setting clear policies that consider service recovery as a knowledge-based activity rather than a control targeted activity.

This research demonstrates the mutual dialogue between service recovery and knowledge-based capabilities. Also, it proposes a new concept labeled KERE and a raw scale to further understand firms’ aptitude in service recovery.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a research model exploring the link between open innovation, customer knowledge management and radical innovation. It seeks to answer these research questions: is there any difference among the effects of different types of open innovation activities on radical innovation? How does the organizational learning ability influence the impact of customer knowledge management on radical innovation?

The paper is based on the data collected from a sample of 165 modern service enterprises located in the Yangtze River Delta region. The authors conducted a structural equation modeling analysis using SPSS and MPLUS to test the proposed hypotheses.

The results showed that different kinds of open innovation activities had different impacts on the path to radical innovation. Inbound open innovation activities directly influenced radical innovation while the effect of outbound open innovation activities on radical innovation combined with the organizational exploitative learning ability is indirect. Similarly, the empirical results also proved that customer knowledge management had an indirect effect on radical innovation through the organizational learning ability, and the influence of the exploratory learning ability was more prominent.

Under the background of the national innovation driven by the development strategy, this paper studies the impact mechanism of radical innovation from the perspectives of open innovation and customer knowledge management. Therefore, it is suggested that the enterprise should adopt open innovation activities to foster innovation performance, formulate a customer-oriented innovation strategy and invest information and communication technologies to enhance the organizational learning ability of the enterprise.

This study aims to investigate the attributes of the online programme that are considered and compute their relative importance in the purchase decision. This study aims to identify the most lucrative bundling of these attributes and their levels that can be used by online education companies to craft their product design strategy to attract customers with the most attractive offering.

This research paper endeavours to identify the attributes of online education, which customers consider for making a purchase decision. Exploratory factor analysis followed by confirmatory factor analysis was used to identify the key attributes of online education programmes. This paper uses the conjoint analysis technique to identify the most preferred bundling of attributes, which online education companies can package to attract customers.

Based on various attributes and their respective levels, it is evident the most lucrative design for attracting customers to buy online education programmes is to provide certification from a reputed international university, which requires an investment to the tune of 3,000–5,000. The duration of four weeks with asynchronous pedagogy and access to course material vial uniform resource locator (URL) is a preferred feature. Access via a mobile application is more preferred over Web access. A phone application is known to be optimised, and most people are using mobile phones to access the internet. Online certification or degrees that are considered as valid employment qualifications were most preferred over other reasons.

There is a dearth of studies on massive open online courses (MOOCs) from a product design perspective. There is a gap in the context of the features to be included in the MOOCs package so that the customer can find more value in it, and the companies can benefit by expanding their customer base. The research question which this study endeavours to explore is what attributes consumers of MOOCs consider when making a purchase decision. This study will also find the relative importance of these attributes.