Empowering organizations through customer knowledge acquisition: An empirical study in Mexico

Knowledge is an important asset and create benefits when someone harnesses information and knowledge from both inside and outside sources. Customers are becoming more powerful and customer knowledge (CK) can empower organizations and improve their performance. CK is classified as: Knowledge FOR customers, ABOUT customers and FROM customers. However, the value of external CK has not fully been recognized, and its impacts have not been fully investigated. Thus, the present research aims to empirically assess the impact of acquiring each type. Researchers analyzed 63 Mexican organizations, results show that overall acquisition of CK is significantly positively linked to business processes benefits, employees benefits, products benefits, customers benefits, finance benefits and market benefits. However, by assessing the direct impacts of the three types of knowledge on these, demonstrated that acquisition of knowledge about customers significantly positively linked with employees benefits, customers benefits, finance benefits and market benefits.