Customer Knowledge Management: Toward Social CRM

Customers are often cited as one of the most important ‘assets’ of contemporary organizations. However, value of both customer relationships and the knowledge ‘extracted’ from them are often limited to the information technology (IT) domain, as the issue of implementing customer relationship management (CRM) software packages. In addition to a more embedded view of CRM, the ‘social’ trends relevant for customer relationships, , exemplified in the use of social networking tools and other ‘social software’ (such as Wiki-based pages, fora, chat pages, etc.) on the Internet, are identified and analyzed. It is argued that the ‘social CRM’ could be improved by taking into account the already existing theoretical and practical tenets of the virtual community model, as developed by contemporary sociology and communication sciences