The impact of customer knowledge acquisition to knowledge management benefits: A case study in Indonesian banking and insurance industries

Business environment has shifted into a customer-oriented one, changing the way customers take part in creating value towards organizational increase of competitive advantages. More than ever, customers are considered as knowledge, leading to insights, innovations, and new ideas within a company. Knowledge acquisition, such as customer knowledge, is proven to be very difficult. This leads us to explore further concerning customer knowledge acquisition. Customer knowledge itself consists of knowledge `from´, `for´, and `about´ customers. This research is aimed to analyze the impacts of the three customer knowledge types towards knowledge management benefits, which in turn will affect a company´s performance. Business processes, customers, employees, finance, products, and market are six-aspects used to measure knowledge management benefits. This research had collected questionnaires from 50 respondents consisting of major banks and insurance companies in Indonesia. Then the verified data was analyzed using PLS technique. The results show that knowledge `for´ customers is most favorable towards knowledge management benefits, followed by knowledge `from´ customers, while knowledge `about´ customers is found to give minimum impact towards knowledge management benefits.