Managing Customer Knowledge

http://www.cio.com/archive/060198_think.html

This article starts by pointing out that cliches about customer abound: "Know your customer. Fire your worst customers. Have a relationship with your customer. Market one-to-one. Virtually every manager would agree that more and better customer knowledge can bring economic benefits to a company. Yet after participating in two recent studies on customer knowledge management the Thomas Davenport, this article's author, concluded that the state of the art in the field of customer knowledge is rather primitive.

Questions:

1. According to the article, what are some of the practical difficulties in dealing with knowledge about customers?

2. What are some of the article's examples of effective treatment of customer knowledge?

3. What is tacit knowledge, and how is this related to the topics in this article?

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