Exploring the role of customer relationship management (CRM) systems in customer knowledge creation

This study explores how customer relationship management (CRM) systems support customer knowledge creation processes [48], including socialization, externalization, combination and internalization. CRM systems are categorized as collaborative, operational and analytical. An analysis of CRM applications in three organizations reveals that analytical systems strongly support the combination process. Collaborative systems provide the greatest support for externalization. Operational systems facilitate socialization with customers, while collaborative systems are used for socialization within an organization. Collaborative and analytical systems both support the internalization process by providing learning opportunities. Three-way interactions among CRM systems, types of customer knowledge, and knowledge creation processes are explored. 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. * Corresponding author at: McColl Building Suite 5102, Campus Box 3490, Chapel Hill, NC 27599, USA. Tel.:+1 919 638 9293; fax::+1 613 533 2755. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (F. Khodakarami), [email protected] (Y.E. Chan). 1 Queen’s School of Business, Goodes Hall Room 414, 143 Union Street, Kingston, Ontario K7L 3N6, Canada. Tel.: +1 613 533 2364, fax: +1 613 533 2755. 2 Tacit knowledge is highly personal and difficult to capture, codify, adopt, and share among people, while explicit knowledge is easy to capture, formalize, and distribute within an organization. 3 We use the term ‘‘interaction’’ not in a precise, mathematical sense but loosely to refer to connections and relations.