What do we know about customer knowledge management, and what more do we need to know?

This article is part of a series on customer KM.

As summarized in section 5 of the RealKM Magazine explainer What is knowledge management (KM)?¹, one of the specialized areas of knowledge management (KM) is customer KM (CKM), as advanced by KM practitioners including Aprill Allen² and Dr Cynthia J Young³.

However, customer KM has not been as extensively researched as other aspects of KM. A paper⁴ presented at the recent 23^rd European Conference on Knowledge Management has started to address this knowledge gap. The paper, by Victoria Yousra Ourzik from Université Paris Dauphine-PSL, documents a systematic review⁵ of existing customer KM research literature, analyses the nature of this existing research, and then outlines a future research agenda.

The systematic review covered the period of 2000 to 2020, and identified 75 relevant articles published in academic journals specialising in the fields of management, information systems, and marketing. The 75 articles were then analysed to identify a range of factors, including:

• proposed definitions of customer knowledge and customer KM
• antecedents, consequences, and moderators of customer KM
• suggested avenues for future research.

Defining customer knowledge and customer KM

Ourzik identifies several definitions of customer knowledge and customer knowledge management (CKM) in the reviewed research literature. These definitions, with the year of publication of the paper they are from, are:

From these definitions, I note that only two of them – the first 2004 definition in the list and the 2020 definition – make reference to customer needs, preferences, and behaviours, which are seen as factors associated with customer experience⁶. The other definitions focus on either or both of the knowledge that organisations gather about their customers and/or the knowledge that customers have on the product or organisation. This suggests that customer KM (CKM) and customer experience KM (CXKM) are actually two distinct areas, with CXKM potentially being an aspect of CKM.

From the definitions above, Ourzik has proposed the following synthesised definitions of customer knowledge and CKM:

However, these definitions don’t adequately reflect the CXKM aspect. Customer experience knowledge can be part of the three defined components of customer knowledge, but the growing importance⁷ of customer experience indicates that CXKM should be specifically referenced.

In addition to customer experience, customer support⁸ and customer service⁹ are also common concepts related to customers and organizations. One of the papers reviewed by Ourzik had a customer support focus, and a number of the papers had a customer service focus. However, Ourzik’s definition doesn’t reflect these aspects either.

These issues suggest a need for further research and investigation into the scope of KM in relation to both customers and the relationships between organisations and their customers, including the better delineation of different aspects of this customer KM.

Antecedents, consequences, and moderators of CKM

Ourzik’s review and analysis has identified four antecedents, seven consequences, and three moderators of CKM.

The antecedents of CKM (that is, the factors influencing CKM) are:

• CKM strategy, which embodies customer knowledge as a value-creating asset. Senior management needs to be committed to CKM and define clear lines of knowledge flow.
• Knowledge from and about customers, in which employees play a major role. The ability of a customer-facing employee to collect customer knowledge depends on two variables: competence and motivation.
• Organizational support, which involves the implementation of business intelligence infrastructure such as customer relationship management (CRM) and other software and hardware systems to facilitate customer data collection, processing, and dissemination.
• Inter-functional cooperation, which is needed because CKM is transdisciplinary and many departments within an organisation will potentially be involved in activities of knowledge acquisition, analysis, and diffusion.

The consequences (that is, outcomes) of CKM implementation include numerous positives such as customer satisfaction, customer relationships, sales performance, new product development (NPD) performance, technological distinctiveness, innovation acceptance, and fast decision-making processes. In regard to customer relationships, Ourzik advises that the current environment is characterized by a paradigm shift, where CKM is no longer about creating value for customers; rather, it is about co-creating value with customers.

The moderators of CKM influence the link between CKM antecedents, the customer knowledge transfer process, and CKM consequences. They are the frequency of interaction with the customer, the nature of the exchanged knowledge, and the information available to customers on alternative options.

As with the definitions above, some of the identified antecedents, consequences, and moderators are related to the CXKM aspect of CKM. For example, the customer satisfaction and customer relationships consequences.

Suggested avenues for future research

From the findings of the review and analysis, Ourzik also identifies the suggested CKM research agenda shown in the following table. Ourzik further reports that only 15% of the 75 reviewed articles made use of qualitative methodology, which supports the call by a number of researchers for more qualitative and longitudinal research on the effects of customer knowledge.

Some of the suggested future research questions are relaed to the CXKM aspect of CKM. Two of the questions include direct reference to customer experience, despite the limitations of Ourzik’s definitions of customer knowledge and CKM that I identified above.

Editor’s note: This article was updated on 26 June 2026 to (a) reflect the writing of the RealKM Magazine explainer What is knowledge management (KM)? since the article was first published, (b) update the now non-functioning link to the article by Aprill Allen, and (c) to update the referencing format.

Header image source: Christiann Koepke on Unsplash.

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