Introduction

This book explains the application of knowledge management in e-business relationship management which focuses not only on customers but also on channel partners such as distributors, suppliers, collaborators, and ally business partners.

E-Business: Internet-facilitated integration of processes, applications, and information systems to facilitate rapid collaboration, coordination, and relationship formation across traditional organizational boundaries. Electronic commerce is a subset of e-business.

Knowledge Management: Management of business, customer, and process knowledge and its application for adding value and competitively differentiating product and service offerings.

Customer Relationship Management: The process of managing relationships with existing customers to maximize their loyalty, increase revenues from them, and retain them while selectively attracting new customers.

Knowledge-Enabled Customer Relationship Management (KCRM): Managing customer knowledge to generate value-creating lock-ins and channel knowledge to strengthen relationships and collaborative effectiveness. Knowledge-enabled CRM is more of a business model/strategy than a technology-focused solution.

Customer Knowledge Integration: As customers increasingly contribute knowledge to businesses that they transact with, it is still the business’ job to be able to assimilate and integrate this knowledge. Firms that can convert knowledge in the heads of their employees and customers (human capital) into actual capabilities (structural capital) and relationships (relationship capital) are the ones that will lead the way.

Relationship Management in E-Business: The Web is a marketer’s dream for relationship building for three reasons: (1) inexpensive, individual addressability, (2) two-way exchanges between buyers and sellers that supercede the broadcast strategy of traditional marketing, and (3) its instantaneous, real-time nature.

Click-stream Analysis: Analysis of a series of mouse clicks from customer’s computer when she is visiting a Website to discern behavioural patterns. These patterns may, for example, reveal that she puts an expensive dress in her shopping cart every time she visits the site but never checks out with it.
 

Seven broad areas of KCRM are described along a conceptually simplified seven-step road map. The road map consists of three phases

Phase I: Evaluation and strategic alignment

1.       Aligning Strategy and Technology Choices

2.      Audit and Analysis

Phase II: Infrastructure development and technology deployment

3.      Designing the Team

4.      Blueprinting the Technology

5.      Development and Results-Driven Deployment

Phase III: Leadership, change management, measurement, and refinement

6.      Leadership, Change Management and Culture

7.      Evaluation, Measurement and Refinement