The effect of Customer Knowledge Management to Deepen Customer Relationship

In the rapidly varied age, “knowledge” has been widely recognized as the most valuable resource to an enterprise. Traditional knowledge economics emphasizes an enterprise how to develop, store, and apply its tacit knowledge resources, so that enterprise’s capability can be further enhanced, and the productivity can be better enlarged. The extreme purpose of these internal viewpoints is to offer and produce the better services and products for existing customers. However, many enterprises have started to apply knowledge sharing method to transfer necessary knowledge to customers and make knowledge sharing combined with people relationship, which would increase customer values, deepen customer relationships, and achieve differentiated services. This kind of external viewpoints makes an enterprise equip with the capability of continuous differentiate, which becomes the main source of enterprise’s core competitiveness.

This type of professional knowledge services is familiar like lawyers, investing advisor, accountants, etc. Mention about the manufacturing fields, semiconductor foundry industries have the features of short technology lifetime, mass customerization, intensive information exchanging and close relationships with customers and suppliers. A Taiwan-based leading manufacturing foundry especially emphasizes the deeper partnership, therefore, positions itself as a “service industry” in order to rise the whole service quality and enhance its competitiveness.

By applying the architectures of knowledge management and customer relationship management, the main themes of this research are to observe how a semiconductor manufacturing foundry interact with its customers, what are the knowledge flows during the interactions and how to manage these customer knowledge to maximize the utilization of customer knowledge. Through this research, it helps us discover the values and possible challenges of customer knowledge management to a manufacturing enterprise, which has the features of highly complex and multifarious customer knowledge.

Key words: customer knowledge management; customer knowledge flow; knowledge-based customer relationship, customer relationship; semiconductor foundry industry.