Enhancing Customer Relationships with Customer Knowledge Management and P2P (Peer-To-Peer) Technology

Abstract

For the rapid advances of Internet technologies in recent years, electronic commerce (EC) has gained many attentions as a major theme for enterprises to keep their competitiveness. Amongst all possible endeavours for the EC, research has shown that effective management of customer relationships is a critical source for enterprises to succeed their EC business. Therefore, it is commonly recognized as an important objective for an enterprise to promote its customer relationships through an effective information system to achieve the EC. In this paper, we present a generic architecture for such a customer relationship management information system (CRMIS) that supports an effective management of customer relationships by emphasizing on the use of knowledge from customers (or the so-called customer knowledge management, CKM). In addition, as peer-to-peer (P2P) networks have been spreading and their practical applications on business are promising, our CKM architecture also employs the P2P model to enhance further its effectiveness on customer relationships. To illustrate, the architecture is applied to an exemplified CRMIS for book publishing.