Factors affecting customer information/knowledge quality in customer relationship management: Focused on service industry

It has been considered as a means for sustaining a competitive advantage for companies to build and maintain long-term relationships with customers. It is without any doubt that many companies have tried to initiate Customer Relationship Management (CRM). For the effective management of customer relationships, it is critical that they acquire, share and use customer information and knowledge. In this paper, we deduced 9 important factors affecting the quality of customer information and knowledge from the literature reviews on CRM, and developed the questionnaire to measure these factors. The factors are again categorized into organizational system, employees and IT. We analyze data collected from 30 companies in service industries such as the finance, distribution and communication industries. The result of data analysis demonstrates that the employees' analytical skills and appraisal and reward systems are closely related to the quality of customer information, and analytical skills and IT support for communications with customers are associated with the quality of customer knowledge. Implications of findings and future research directions are discussed.