Exploring customer knowledge management implementation in customer-centric organizations / Nurdiana Abdul Kuddus

In today current scenario, organizations started to realize the importance of customers to enhance organizations performance. Hotel industry is one of the unique industries that deal with customers from all over the world. In Malaysia, there are different organizations managing the hotels. Some are managed by local organizations and some are managed by international organizations. Mostly the hotels ranked as 5-star are managed by international organizations. Due to the high competition in hotel industry, more efforts are put to capture customers' attention. The focus is no more on the products but more on customers' requirements. Organizations are collecting customers' data in order to understand customers' behavior and to fulfill customers' wants and needs. However, these data have not being fully utilized and ends up to be used for promotional purposes only. Customer Knowledge Management (CKM) has been identified as an approach to manage customer data and information to turn it into insightful knowledge to improve the quality of the products and services offered by organizations. This approach is derived from the combination of Knowledge Management (KM) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM). However, based on the literature review, there is no research written on the implementation of Customer Knowledge Management (CKM) in Malaysia. The purpose of this study being conducted is to explore on the implementation of Customer Knowledge Management in customer-centric organizations. Personnel from hotels ranked as 5-star with working background on customer management are chosen for the study. The 5-phase research design is used to conduct the dissertation, where it started with research initiation in the first phase, follows by literature review in the second phase, data collection in third phase, analysis and finding in fourth phase and finally the conclusion and recommendations in the final phase. The finding shows that CKM implementation in customer-centric organizations in Malaysia still minimal and more towards the implementation of CRM. Nevertheless, the current stage of CKM implementation is presented at the end of the research.