Managing customer services: Customer knowledge management in service innovation

With the development of service economy, service functions can be seen to be prominent all over the industries, and thus, service innovation is fast becoming the key driver of socio-economic growth. Knowledge management is crucial for service innovation. As for the service characteristic of customer interaction, customer knowledge is the main component of knowledge management. The importance of knowledge management in service innovation has been duly recognized, however, the potential for customer knowledge management has not been studied in any great depth. This paper reviews the extant literature relevant to knowledge management, customer knowledge management and service innovation. Building on the prior research, the paper proposes a conceptual framework to analyze the roles of service organization, customer-contact employees and the customers in customer knowledge management, and indicates that it is a critical process for achieving effective service innovation. This work contributes to the literature on knowledge management and customer relationship management, and provides service companies with a basic framework to shape their customer knowledge management strategies.