473 Customer Knowledge Management (CKM): Perspectives & Practices Dr. Shanthi Venkatesh Assistant Professor, TRP School of Management, SRM University, Kattankulathur 603203 Kancheepuram District, Tamil Nadu, INDIA. Te l: +91-44-27455764, Mobile: +91-9840097489, Fax : +91-44-27452343. Email : shan_venky@yahoo.com / shan.venky@gmail.com ABSTRACT While Customer Relationship Management (CRM) refers to building strategies and tools for managing relationships with customers, Customer Knowledge Management (CKM) refers to strategies that help companies derive valuable insights about customers that get stored in the form of customer data / information to be shared across the value chain, which when preserved would become a knowledge repository for the future generation of managers. CKM is an art of managing business and attempts to integrate implicit and explicit knowledge and aligns it with CRM goals for realizing long term business objectives of sustained efficiency and competitive advantage. CKM aims at preserving customer knowledge for truly understanding how customers behave based on the changes in the environment from the insights obtained about the customers over a period of time. Thus the dynamics of CKM emerge from the fact that it records changes in the customer behavior across the customer lifecycle and also provides for co-creation effort with customers. This characteristic feature provides an edge for CKM to score above CRM. This paper would attempt to provide insights on those areas that truly distinguishes between CRM and CKM and would explain why companies should have broad strategies defined to achieve common goals of CKM in the long-run. It would also place a discussion on how companies can stand to gain a competitive advantage by preserving customer knowledge through a few best practices caselets. Keywords Customer Knowledge Management, Knowledge Management, Customer Relationship Management, Customer Service using KM. 1.0 INTRODUCTION In the last two decades, business practices are experiencing a turn-around due to transformation in the outlook of the companies towards their core objectives. With the emergence of hyper-competition in almost all the businesses – from normal products and generic services to matrimony and jobs - companies have realized the need to be customer-centric to gain sustainable competitive advantage. Most customer- centric organizations of today have understood the value of customer information or customer data and have learnt to manage this resource effectively and efficiently with the help of technology. Along side increasing thrust on the objectives of customer-centricity, shot to fame a powerful managerial tool called CRM – Customer Relationship Management. CRM encompasses anything and everything that a company has to do with its customers - physically or virtually, voluntarily or involuntarily, directly or indirectly. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) refers to building strategies and tools for managing relationships with customers. CRM is built on the foundation of information, pillared by technology, cemented by processes and architectured by people. To be precise, CRM beats around “ know your customers” philosophy. CRM is a path breaking approach to solving business problems, to have evolved in recent times. It has been successful in understanding the depth, length and width of relationships the company has with its customers over the lifetime of its customers. CRM is treated more as a science - the science of using tools and processes to identify and correct business problems. CRM aims to achieve its objectives by aligning or integrating the disparate processes to get a meaningful and one-point view of the customers. But CRM confines itself to a designated route. Hence, CRM is criticized on the grounds that it is a closed and static approach which confines itself to the defined set of processes, strategies and tools and holds good for achievement of the stated objectives. Hence, companies nowadays are finding CRM to be one-sided, because as they grow into holistic customer-centric organizations, they realize an urge to also understand “ what the customers know”, in order to build a stronger bond with them (customers). Thus the concept CKM - Customer Knowledge Management was born. Customer Knowledge Management (CKM) refers to tools that enable framing strategies that help companies derive valuable insights about customers, not from the information gained from knowledge repositories that lie within the organization but from the customers’ thoughts and deeds. These insights are stored in the form of