Successful customer knowledge management implementation through social media capabilities
| Pages | 353-371 |
| Date | 14 August 2017 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/VJIKMS-11-2016-0066 |
| Published date | 14 August 2017 |
| Author | Sanaz Kargaran,Mona Jami Pour,Hossein Moeini |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Knowledge management,Knowledge management systems |
Successful customer knowledge
management implementation
through social media capabilities
Sanaz Kargaran,Mona Jami Pour and Hossein Moeini
Department of Management, Hazrate Masoumeh University (HMU), Qom, Iran
Abstract
Purpose –Nowadays, the recent advancesin information and communicationstechnology and the advent
of Web 2.0 technologyhave resulted in the increasing popularity of social mediaand provided enterprises and
companies with new horizons in establishing an effective significant relationship with clients. Despite the
recognized importance of socialmedia in knowledge management (KM) and customer relationships, there is
not any research to identify social media capabilities related to customer knowledge management (CKM).
Therefore,the purpose of this study is to recognize the social mediacapabilities related to CKM effectively.
Design/methodology/approach –To obtain research objectives,literature review, focus group method
and expert interview were applied to identifyand categorize social media capabilities. Analytical hierarchy
process (AHP)also used to prioritize capabilities important.
Findings –The results indicate social media capabilities such as conversation capability, sharing
capability, groups/communitycapability, relationship capability, speed and ease of access for the public are
the main capabilitiesrelated to exploit customer knowledge and manageit successfully.
Research limitations/implications –The results highlight the different social media capabilitiesfor
CKM approach which will enhance customer insight and personalized services. Because of thenewness of
CKM and social media implementation in Iranian firms, empirical study was not conducted for a better
understandingof their business value.
Originality/value –The main innovation ofthis study is identifying the social media capabilitiesrelated
to CKM and prioritizing them which allowmanagers to select the most appropriate social media tools based
on these results.
Keywords Web 2.0, Analytical hierarchy process (AHP), Customer knowledge management (CKM),
Social media capabilities
Paper type Research paper
1. Introduction
Recent advances and developments in information and communications technology (ICT)
and the advent of Web 2.0 technologies have opened new horizons for companies to
establish an effective meaningfulrelationship with customers (Zhang, 2015), resulting in the
increasing popularity of the social media (Hajli, 2015). Ngai et al. (2015) defined the social
media as a group of Web 2.0-based applications which allows users to produce, create and
exchange the content and enable them to interact virtually to create, obtain, share and
exchange informationonline.
The use of social media as a set of tools empowering enterprises to communicate,
cooperate and interact with customers can in turn facilitate creating value and sharing
the knowledge (Sigala and Chalkiti, 2015). Thus, the use of social media is considered
profitable for many organizations (Chua and Banerjee,2013) to get value for their business;
many large companies and enterprises seek to adopt social media with the intention of
preserving and increasing customerloyalty, improving customer satisfaction, building up a
Social media
capabilities
353
Received 1 December 2016
Revised 13 February 2017
Accepted 14 April 2017
VINEJournal of Information and
KnowledgeManagement Systems
Vol.47 No. 3, 2017
pp. 353-371
© Emerald Publishing Limited
2059-5891
DOI 10.1108/VJIKMS-11-2016-0066
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/2059-5891.htm
reputation and increasing their sales and incomes (He et al., 2013). Moreover, in today’s
knowledge-based economy, the main source of sustainable competitive advantage depends
on how to create, share and apply knowledge (Boateng, 2016;Beiryaei and Jamporazmay,
2010). Therefore, organizations which gather, manage and publish customer knowledge
across their departments are more likely to achieve competitive advantage than others
(Khodakarami and Chan, 2014) because customer knowledgemanagement (CKM) provides
organizations with the opportunities to acquire new customers and to keep their current
customers, which in turn enables organizations to be more efficient in competition and
affects the organizations’performancesignificantly (Chua and Banerjee, 2013). Therefore, to
cooperate and interact with their customers, companies should develop special systems to
meet the needs of customers and satisfy them. Also, they should provide a suitable
environment to have a better access to knowledge and ideas of their customers and to use
this knowledge in an innovation process.So it could be useful to build a knowledge-sharing
platform in developing an interactive environment. Such a platform cannot allow only the
company to do business, but it also creates an environment to share and exchange
knowledge between customers and the company (Taherparvar et al., 2014), leading to
innovation in products and services and creating values for both company and customer
(Tseng and Fang, 2015). Thus, given that social media are recognized community-based
tools for organizations to gather knowledge and to provide feedback on their new products
and services (Peppler and Solomou, 2011), the advent of these media has brought some
capabilities for CKM system. According to Statista’report (2016), from nearly 7.4 billion
people in the world, more than 3.4 billion are active internet users and more than2.3 billion
people have social media accounts.This report estimates that this statistics will rise to 2.95
billion in 2020 (Statista report,2016).
Researchers have demonstrated that technologies alone rarely create value for
companies, and instead, these technologies are most effective when integrated with other
company resources and capabilities(Trainor et al.,2014). While extant studies are conducted
in CKM and social media technologies, little research has yet categorized and identified
social media capabilitieswhich enhance CKM systems performance.
Thus, doing this study has threebasic logics:
(1) the increasing attractiveness of social media among customers;
(2) the important role of such media in CKM systems; and
(3) the lack of theoretical foundation for CKM and social media capabilities.
Therefore, the aim of the study is to identify and prioritizethe capabilities of social media to
implement CKM successfullyand effectively in social media age.
2. Literature review
2.1 Web 2.0 and social media
In the first generation of internet, which can be addressed as read-only web 1 or internet,
applications and systems consisted of only static contents and the contents of sites were
provided by certain individuals or resources, and the users of web 1 had only access to the
existing information to take advantage of it and they would not be able to create or change
the content.
In the new age of internet, users play a more active role and have more ability to select
contents to use (Schneckenberg, 2009), and they can create content by themselves, share
information with others, change the content and criticize. Thus,a part of data processing is
done on the client side and each user canbe considered as both the user and the producer of
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