International Journal of Management, Knowledge and Learning, 3(2), 261–279
Exploring Customer Knowledge
from Social Media to Improve
the Performance of Strategy
Tzu-Chun Weng
National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, Taiwan
Customer knowledge refers to the understanding of the customers’ needs,
wants, and aims. It is essential for an organization to align its processes,
products, and services to build customer relationships. Managers need to
understand how the acquisition and the use of customer-related knowledge
create value for an organization. Customer knowledge management, which
integrates knowledge management systems and customer relationship man-
agement systems, is a strategy that focuses on the task of gathering infor-
mation, including finding effective ways to extract data from customers, as
well as to locate and absorb information from other sources. Consequently,
an organization can achieve the creation of new knowledge. This paper analy-
ses the categories of customer knowledge, investigates the domains of cus-
tomer knowledge, and explores customer knowledge management framework
of social media. Then, information retrieval and information extraction of the
social media are integrated to discover customer knowledge. Finally, cus-
tomer knowledge management structure for workflow integration is proposed
to align and integrate the strategy maps.
Keywords: customer knowledge management, knowledge management
systems, information retrieval, information extraction, social media, strategy
maps
Introduction
Gaining corporate advantage depends on how quickly organizations can ac-
quire business knowledge and fulfill customer requirements in the rapidly
changing market (Dickson, 1992). Organizations have long recognized
knowledge management as an important business strategy (Hull, Coombs,
& Peltu, 2000). How to apply customer knowledge effectively to improve
business strategy in order to enhance corporate advantage is an impor-
tant challenge. With global competition, rules of the market change, thus
forcing enterprises to adapt swiftly. Exploration and management of the
remaining knowledge in customers’ mind can help enhance the predict-
ing, responding, and value-creating abilities of an enterprise to strengthen
its competitive advantages in a dynamic environment (Gibbert, Leibold, &
Probst, 2002). Jussila, Kärkkäinen, and Leino (2012), indicated that organi-
www.issbs.si/press/ISSN/2232-5697/3_261-279.pdf
262 Tzu-Chun Weng
zations can increasingly quickly learn about market needs and technological
solutions from customers in various ways with the use of social media to
respond to the quick and often unpredictable changes in their business
environment.
Knowledge is considered to be a key factor in global competition and
is viewed as the foundation of potential competitive advantage for an eco-
nomic entity to identify or develop core competences (Vargo & Lusch, 2004).
Knowledge management is a specific systematic and organized process.
The function of knowledge management is to acquire, organize, and com-
municate knowledge through the use of knowledge, thus creating knowl-
edge, so that other people can use knowledge to further improve perfor-
mance (Alavi & Leidner, 2001; Huber, 2001). Quaddus and Xu (2005) de-
fined that knowledge management system is designed to handle knowledge
generation, preservation, and sharing inside and outside an organization.
Knowledge management systems promote value-added service for knowl-
edge management.
Analysis of knowledge for the customers can satisfy the consumer re-
quirements for information about products, market, and other relevant is-
sues. Exploring knowledge about the customers can capture a customer’s
background, motivations, expectations, and preferences for products or
services. Comprehending knowledge from the customers can help under-
stand the patterns of the customers’ needs and/or experience of a product
and/or service consumption (Su, Chen, & Sha, 2006). Customer knowl-
edge can be a critical resource of competitive advantage. In the recent
years, many researchers are widely discussing customer knowledge man-
agement. Customer knowledge management is a dynamic combination and
application of customer’s experiences, demands, and insights in the frame-
work of customer’s contacts with a company (Harald, Malte, Lutz, & Walter,
2005). Customer knowledge management provides information related to
the customers and their experiences to help organizations effectively de-
velop strategic planning to improve competitive advantage.
In most companies, operational and management control systems are
built around financial measures and targets, which bear little relation to the
progress of a company in achieving long-term strategic objectives. Thus, the
emphasis most companies place on short-term financial measures leaves a
gap between the development of a strategy and its implementation (Kaplan
& Norton, 1996a). A strategy map is a diagram that describes how an orga-
nization creates value by aligning strategic objectives in explicit cause-and-
effect relationships in four balanced scorecard perspectives (financial, cus-
tomer, internal processes, learning and growth) (Kaplan & Norton, 1996b).
Customer knowledge can effectively provide reference and basis for strategy
planning around the four perspectives.
International Journal of Management, Knowledge and Learning
Exploring Customer Knowledge from Social Media 263
This paper integrates information retrieval and information extraction to
discover customer knowledge from the Web. Customers can provide their
experience, creative ideas, and satisfaction or dissatisfaction with products
or services. Having customer feedback, the system can effectively analyze,
explore, and comprehend customer knowledge to assist organizations with
conducting the alignment and integration of strategy objects in strategy
maps.
The contribution of this paper consists of (a) analysis of the categories of
customer knowledge and investigation of the domains of customer knowl-
edge, (b) exploration of the customer knowledge management framework
of social media, (c) integration of information retrieval and information ex-
traction of social media to discover customer knowledge and (d) proposal
of a customer knowledge management structure for workflow integration
to align and integrate strategy maps. The remainder of this paper is orga-
nized as follows. In the second section, some related literature is reviewed.
Next, we describe how to apply customer knowledge management to iden-
tify strategic objectives in the third section. Finally, the concluding remarks
are presented in the fourth section.
Literature Review
According to the following literature review, we propose some different
contributions to several streams of literature. Customer knowledge man-
agement can be regarded as a comprehensive concept, which integrates
customer relationship management and knowledge management (Gebert,
Geib, Kolbe, & Brenner, 2003). It emphasizes ‘knowledge about customers’
and can be viewed as an extension and development of customer rela-
tionship management. Customer knowledge management uses knowledge
gathered through the interactions with customers required for the organi-
zation (Nazari, Ansarinejad, Miri-Nargesi, Dalfard, & Kamran, 2011). Cus-
tomer knowledge management is mainly used to increase revenue, reduce
potential risks, and avoid the production of products that do not match the
customers’ needs. It helps to enhance mutual understanding between a
company and its customers. The processes of customer knowledge man-
agement, which include acquisition, analysis, and integration of customer
knowledge, can help an organization to record, analyze, share, and create
customer information (Lin, Su, & Chien, 2006). Through these processes,
enterprises transform data into customer information and integrate the in-
formation throughout their business model to develop customer knowledge
competence (Campbell, 2003).
Customer relationship management emphasizes sustainable long-term
relationship with the customers and cultivates customer loyalty that reflects
a customer-oriented strategy. Customer relationship management should
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264 Tzu-Chun Weng
be used instead of the processing of customer knowledge to pursue the
goals of relationship marketing. Knowledge flows in customer relationship
management processes can be classified into three categories including
knowledge for the customers, knowledge about the customers, and knowl-
edge from the customers (Rowley, Beata, & Leeming, 2007). Knowledge
management emphasizes effective capturing, sharing, and diffusion of cus-
tomer knowledge in an organization. Knowledge asset is an important ele-
ment of creating value for an enterprise. It includes customer’s information
regarding products, market, and suppliers (Rowley, J., 2002). Through the
interactions with the customers and by accumulating knowledge, a com-
pany can sustainably grow. This paper analyses the categories of customer
knowledge and investigates the domains of customer knowledge. Next, cus-
tomer knowledge management framework of social media is explored to
gather tacit customer knowledge.
Data mining was proposed as a useful approach in the domains of data
engineering and knowledge discovery. Recently, it has been successfully in-
troduced into the research of web data management. Web mining is the
extraction of interesting and useful knowledge and implicit information from
activities related to the Web (Kosala, & Blockeel, 2000). The term ‘web
mining’ originally denoted the use of data mining techniques to automati-
cally discover web documents and services, extract information from web
resources, and uncover general patterns on the web (Etzioni, 1996). Over
several years, web mining research has been extended to cover the use
of data mining to discover resources, patterns, information, and knowledge
from the web and web-related data to extract, analyzes, and create new
information and knowledge for an organization. This paper integrates in-
formation retrieval and information extraction of social media to discover
customer knowledge.
Strategy map is a component that represents cause-effect relationships
among the strategic objectives, as well as summarized depictions of the
main parts of a business system that link to drive a firm’s sustainable com-
petitive advantage (Quezada, Cordova, Palominos, Godoy, & Ross, 2009).
The concept of strategy mapping was originally developed by Kaplan and
Norton as a part of a balanced scorecard system, a means of assessing
how successful a company is in terms of delivering on stated goals. The
balanced scorecard of a strategy map has four perspectives: learning and
growth, financial, customer, and internal processes. Strategy map presents
how a number of indicators are integrated in a company’s strategy through
the balanced scorecard and also develops the strategy in an efficient way. In
business operations, organization must comprehend the market and meet
the expectations of the target customers in order to find a unique value
proposition. In other words, in the strategic planning process, an organiza-
tion must find the target to implement (Kaplan & Norton, 2004). The pur-
International Journal of Management, Knowledge and Learning
Exploring Customer Knowledge from Social Media 265
pose of a strategy map is to help execute the strategy, that is, after drawing
up the measure of indicators for the organization’s strategic objectives, the
employees’ abilities and skills are improved in order to achieve better cus-
tomer satisfaction, loyalty, and performance. The effect of the strategy map
will reflect on enhancing the turnover and shareholders’ value.
Methodology
Business model describes how an organization captures, creates, and deliv-
ers value. In order to maximize the customer value, it is crucial to integrate
the internal and external elements to form a complete high efficiency and
unique operating system with core competiveness. Thus satisfying the cus-
tomer demand and realizing customer value through optimal forms. As well
as, at the same time, achieve the profitability goal. The process of business
model construction is a part of a business strategy. A business provides
types of products or services based on the propositions of its customers,
technology, and operation. Among them, the proposition of the customer
is the most difficult to comprehend. How to understand the customer re-
quirements, meet the customer expectations, and manage the customer
complaints is a challenge in strategy planning. If businesses wish to know
the customer, they need not only to quantify the customer-related informa-
tion, but more importantly, they need to comprehend customer knowledge
by organizing and analyzing it. Integrating customer, knowledge, and man-
agement becomes a practical action to execute.
Customer knowledge management can be classified into the following
four categories:
•Management of knowledge for the customers: this is knowledge that
company provides to satisfy the customers’ knowledge needs. Exam-
ples include knowledge on products, markets, suppliers or services
(Gebert et al., 2003).
•Management of knowledge about the customers: this is accumulated
knowledge to understand the customers’ motivations and interests.
This includes customers’ profiles, connections, requirements, expec-
tations, and their purchasing behavior (Gebert et al., 2003).
•Management of knowledge from the customers: this is knowledge that
customers own with regard to perceptions, insights, and reactions
of/to products, services, suppliers, and markets. Through interac-
tions with the customers, this knowledge can be gathered to sustain
continuous improvement (Daneshgar & Bosanquet, 2010).
•Management of knowledge co-creating with the customers: knowledge
management seeks to facilitate the interactions between the cus-
tomers and the company for the development of new knowledge
(Smith & McKeen, 2005).
Volume 3, Issue 2, 2014
266 Tzu-Chun Weng
Customer
Knowledge
Management
Management
of Knowledge
for
Customers
Management
of Knowledge
about
Customers
Management
of Knowledge
from
Customers
Management
of Knowledge
Co-Creates with
Customers
Provide special benefits
Provide specialized knowledge
Provide integrated information
Set up customer service workbench
Set up customer workrooms
Knowledge management of global customer
Visits and meetings with customers
Set up a complaint system
Hire an antropologist
Monitor customer satisfaction and loyalty
Developing front-line management tools
Develop communities of customers
Figure 1 Conceptual Model of Customer Knowledge Management
(adapted from Rowley, F. E., 2002)
When providing products or services, we should know the customer de-
mand first and provide the products or services that could satisfy the cus-
tomer demand. Consequently, an analysis of the customer motivation of
consumption should be performed to develop a good marketing plan and
attract the customers. After customers use products or services, the level
of customer satisfaction and customer experience should be observed. The
advantages and disadvantages of products or services should be explored
in order to further improve business operations. Interaction with the cus-
tomers inspires innovative thinking to provide new products or services
in the future. Customer knowledge follows the following process: for the
customers–about the customers–from the customers and co-creating with
the customers. Customer knowledge model constantly circulates to make
the products or services advance and improve continuously. Figure 1 de-
scribes the management cycle of knowledge.
Customer knowledge management activities should focus primarily on
knowing what the customer wants. There are three domains of knowledge
related to the customers (Wayland & Cole, 1997) and each domain is de-
fined on a psychological basis associated with the customer. These do-
mains are:
•Conversational knowledge: understanding what the customers need
International Journal of Management, Knowledge and Learning
Exploring Customer Knowledge from Social Media 267
Figure 2
Management Cycle
of Knowledge
Knowledge
for
Customer
Knowledge about
Customer
Knowledge from
Customer
Knowledge
Co-Creating with
Customer
via interactions between the customers and the employees, the em-
ployees and the suppliers, and so forth;
•Observational knowledge: observing how the customers feel about the
use products and services;
•Predictive knowledge: predict the customer behavior based on analytic
models.
Observational knowledge is the most difficult to gather and acquire from
the customers. How to observe and obtain the customers’ usage of prod-
ucts and services is a critical point. Tacit knowledge acquisition is a very
difficult task, which requires a large number of customers with direct and in-
direct connections in the form of observation or experience exchange. With
the rise of Web 2.0, web content services move towards the emphasis on
‘interactive sharing’ and ‘user experience.’ By effectively observing, captur-
ing, organizing and analyzing web content, we will be able to have a better
understanding of the tacit customer knowledge. After the emergence of Web
3.0, we are entering the age of intelligence systems. We could predict future
trends more clearly by using and analyzing the gathered intelligence
Because of increasing sophistication and changing of the customers’
preferences, we should apply a dynamic customer-centric approach to ob-
serve, capture, organize, and analyze customer knowledge. Social media
refers to the means of social interactions among people using online ser-
vices. People can create and share information and ideas in virtual com-
munities and networks through highly accessible and scalable web-based
publishing techniques (Dutta, 2010). Social media can support a multi-way
communication between organizations and their customers with relatively
lower costs and higher levels of efficiency than traditional communication
channels (Gallaugher & Ransbotham, 2010). Many researchers emphasize
the importance of social media in bringing the customer’s aspect into the
customer knowledge management.
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268 Tzu-Chun Weng
There are four emerging social media services that organizations often
use to communicate with their customers. These services include micro-
blogging services, social networking services, location-aware mobile ser-
vices, and corporate discussion forum services.
Micro-blogging services, such as Plurk, identi.ca, Tout, Twitter, Yammer,
Tumblr, and Weibo, allow the users to publish, exchange, share small ele-
ments (usually less than 140 words) of content, such as short sentences,
status updates, commentaries, individual images, or video links (Kaplan
& Haenlein, 2011). Micro-blogging services are different from a traditional
blog. Not only in relation to its data, such as words, sounds or videos,
but also due to the fact that the capacity is often smaller than that of a
traditional blog. However, the users still use it at the same level for work
and personal reasons. Many micro blogs provide short comments or news,
which concern a company at a face to face level, for example, products and
services.
Social networking services, such as Facebook, Friendster, Bebo, Quazza
.com, and MySpace, provide a platform to build social networks or social
relations among people who can construct and present their profiles, share
their interests, activities, backgrounds or real-life connections (Gao & Bai,
2014). The main role of the social networking services is to build the so-
cial media for a group of people who have the same habits and activities.
Social networking services are based on the ‘Six Degrees of Separation’
framework, namely to include friends of friends to expand the social net-
work. The service is based on the Internet to provide people with every
kind of connections. Social networking provides a new channel for informa-
tion sharing and exchange. Recently, the social networking services have
become a mainstream communication channel for their users.
Location-aware mobile services allow the users to check-in online at real-
world locations and receive context-sensitive information based on their lo-
cations. Location-aware mobile services provide the push-services. Server
could also initiatively provide information for the users. Location-aware ser-
vice will play an important role in the next generation information systems.
By capturing the relative locations of users, they could reach many services,
such as service forwarding, path inquiring, image-based guidance system,
and so on. Many location-aware mobile services have been proposed for
public spaces, such as museums and libraries (Kaasinen, 2003; Dhar &
Varshney, 2011).
Corporate discussion forum services, such as BrainKeeper’s Forum Soft-
ware+Wiki Software, allow the members of an organization to engage in
collaborative discussions and answer questions more effectively or provide
dedicated avenues for the customers to discuss the organization-specific
issues. The interactive discussion platform provides a whole host of fea-
International Journal of Management, Knowledge and Learning
Exploring Customer Knowledge from Social Media 269
Table 1 Customer Knowledge Management Framework Supported by the Social Media
Services Management of
knowledge for the
customers
Management of
knowledge from the
customers
Management of
knowledge about the
customers
Micro-
blogging
services
(MBS)
Serve as an avenue for
organizations to supply
knowledge for the
customers about their
products, markets,
offers, and also provide
customer service.
Allow organizations to
draw knowledge from
the customers by
actively seeking out
customer-driven
innovation in their
design and production.
Keep organizations
knowledgeable about
their customers and
better manage the
potential areas of
concerns among them.
Social
networking
services
(SNS)
Help organizations
provide knowledge for
the customers by
keeping them abreast
of changes in their
products and services.
Enable organizations to
gain knowledge from
the customers by
comprehending how
they react to changes.
Facilitate accumulation
of a body of shared
knowledge about the
customers, which in
turn helps promote
customer loyalty.
Location-
aware
mobile
services
(LMS)
Permit organizations to
provide knowledge for
the customers about
offers and discounts
available at a particular
branch, encouraging
them to check-in at that
location.
Allow the checked in
customers to leave tips
and comments, which
can be a useful source
of knowledge from the
customers.
Separate customer and
help organizations
acquire knowledge
about the variations in
the customers’
preferences based on
different locations.
Corporate
discussion-
forum
services
(CDS)
Allow organizations to
provide knowledge for
the customers by
publishing content
related to their existing
products and services,
as well as ideas that
are currently under
experimentation.
Encourage the
customers to express
their needs, doubts,
purchase intentions,
and to contribute novel
ideas, which are
valuable knowledge that
can be acquired from
the customers.
Promote exchange of
customer-to-customer
know-how, which may
be monitored to
unearth knowledge
about the customers in
the form of opinions,
preferences, and
electronic word-of-mouth.
tures to make it incredibly easy to get information into the system, find
relevant information, and notify the right people when essential information
is added. Company members can use this platform to share their areas of
expertise (Maswera, Dawson, & Edwards, 2006).
Social media supports customer knowledge management framework,
which integrates the social media services to facilitate the customer knowl-
edge management strategies (Chua & Banerjee, 2013). The framework is
shown in Table 1.
The highly developed information technology at the end of the 21st cen-
tury has brought another wave of revolution in the modern society. It affects
our modern life at an amazing rate, E-mail, Internet, E-commerce, social me-
dia and so on are a part of our life. Digital communication has changed the
Volume 3, Issue 2, 2014
270 Tzu-Chun Weng
Web mining
Web content
mining
Web structure
mining
Web usage
mining
Text/audio/
video
Record
structure
Hyperlinks
Document
structure
Web server
logs
Application
server logs
Intra-
document
Inter-
document
Figure 3 Types of Web Mining (adapted from Srivastava, Desikan, & Kumar, 2005)
old forms of communication, because it is not limited to time and space.
However, its low cost and convenience lead to too much information. It’s a
big challenge to transform the information into useful knowledge. Through
integrating and classifying customer knowledge and social media, as well
as effectively distinguishing the social media, we could achieve the key so-
cial media in customer knowledge. In this way we could manage knowledge
more efficiently in this age of information explosion.
Web mining is the application of data mining techniques to discover web
content, web structure, and usage of data from the web (Eirinaki & Vazir-
giannis, 2003). In 1997, the concept of web mining was proposed. With the
use of web mining on the World Wide Web, we could analyze, discover, and
excavate value-added information and knowledge from network data (Pal,
Talwar, & Mitra, 2002) with the goal of more effective analysis of the World
Wide Web data. Namely, a wealth of information is distributed everywhere
on the Internet, which is convenient for people to use, but also difficult to
utilize in-depth. In order to gather tacit customer knowledge from the social
media, we use web mining to automatically discover and extract information
from web documents and services. Web mining generally consists of web
usage mining, web structure mining, and web content mining as depicted in
Figure 3.
•Web structure mining is the process of using graph theory to ana-
lyze the node and connection structure of a website and to discover
useful knowledge from hyperlinks, which represent the structure of
International Journal of Management, Knowledge and Learning
Exploring Customer Knowledge from Social Media 271
the web. In order to extract the link model under the web link archi-
tecture, we are using the Topology theory, because network model
is structured according to hyperlink Topology architecture. Network
model could effectively classify and generate the related information
between websites. Besides, internet structure mining can also ex-
tract the topic, which internet formulated, and indicate the abstract
of a special topic.
•Web content mining is the mining, extraction, and integration of use-
ful data, information, and knowledge from web content including text,
picture, and link. Furthermore, we can mine forum postings and cus-
tomer reviews to discover customer opinions. In the recent years,
search engines, intelligent agents, as well as some of the recom-
mended content all use data mining in order to help users find the
required contents in the immense cyberspace.
•Web usage mining is the process of extracting useful information from
server logs and discovering user access patterns from web usage
logs. WWW server saves history data and records every user’s visit
and interactive information. The analysis of such data could help un-
derstand user behavior, as well as improve the structure of the web-
site or provide personalize service to the users.
Information retrieval and information extraction can be used to extract
content from the web. Information retrieval is an activity of obtaining and
collecting information resources relevant to the information need. Informa-
tion extraction is a task of automatically extracting structured information
from unstructured and semi-structured machine-readable documents. When
extracting web content with the use of web mining, there are four typical
steps: (1) collecting, i.e., fetching content from the web; (2) parsing, i.e.,
extracting usable data from formatted data; (3) analyzing, i.e., tokenizing,
rating, classifying, clustering, filtering, and sorting information; and (4) pro-
ducing, i.e., turning the results of analysis into something useful.
Extracting knowledge process includes extracting and arranging useful
data from everywhere. After extraction, transformation, and load, analysis
and mining tools are used, using appropriate query, to analyze and finally
change data into knowledge. This knowledge is presented to managers; fur-
thermore, it provides aid for managers in the decision making process for
business decisions of an organization or enterprise on the operational, man-
agement, as well as strategy layer. Organizations plan their strategy to de-
fine direction and make decisions regarding the allocation of their resources
according to their vision and mission. In order to determine the organiza-
tion’s future direction, it is necessary to understand its current position
and possible avenues through which to pursue particular courses of action.
Volume 3, Issue 2, 2014
272 Tzu-Chun Weng
Vision and
mission
Strategy map
External
and internal
analysis
Modified SWOT
matrix
Specific
objectives
Strategic
themes
General
objectives
Figure 4 The Process of Strategy Map Generation
Strategy map is a diagram that is used to document the primary strategic
goals pursued by an organization or management team. It also provides a
visual framework for integrating the organization’s objectives. Strategy map
portrays the cause-and-effect relationships that link specific capabilities in
human, information, and organization capital with process excellence, and
process excellence with the desired outcomes in the customer and financial
perspectives. Organizations pursue these strategic goals to improve their
competitive advantages in a dynamic environment (Quezada et al., 2009).
The process of developing a strategy map is depicted in Figure 4.
•Definition of vision and mission. A business establishes an organiza-
tional identity (vision) and where it wants to go (mission). The core
enterprise concept and future prospect are formulated by internal or-
ganization members. With team discussion, organization consistency
consensus is acquired and best actions for the future direction are
formed. Through development, targeting, and implementation of the
visions, an organization is built toward reaching success and maxi-
mizing the organizational power.
• Identification of strategic themes. Strategic themes provide vertical
links through the four dimensions, seeing the strategy as a parallel
and complimentary theme. Strategic themes are specific, itemized
business objectives, which can link business vision to the business
strategy.
•Definition of general objectives. General objectives are generated from
the vision and mission of a business. A method to select the most im-
portant objectives will be presented later. The objective is to achieve
the vision that an enterprise wants to accomplish. The objective has
the functions of guide, excitation, integration, etc. It could integrate
the employee actions and ensure effective planning and performance
of each employee. Furthermore, the definition of the general objec-
tives will increase economic efficiency, improve enterprise image, and
ensure reaching the final mission.
International Journal of Management, Knowledge and Learning
Exploring Customer Knowledge from Social Media 273
• Internal and external analysis. Strategic internal and external analyses
are carried out through SWOT analysis. SWOT analysis is a structured
planning method used to evaluate the strengths, weaknesses, op-
portunities, and threats in a business. Through SWOT analysis, an
enterprise could gather resources and actions in their own strength,
as well as determined possible opportunities. Further, it could aid in
clearer enterprise strategy. Generation of specific objectives. Specific
objectives are derived from a modified SWOT matrix. The consistency
between specific strategic objectives with business strategy on the
one side and general objectives derived from the vision and mission
on the other side should be revised.
•Generation of the strategy map. Strategy map is generated by es-
tablishing the cause-effect relationship between general and specific
objectives. It is a long way from completed strategy to actual strat-
egy implementation by each department. The most difficult part is to
transfer the strategy into clear and specific language and present it
to everyone who could understand. Strategy map is a tool used to
create the steps and modes of the strategy architecture, as well as
the best way to understand the strategy.
Strategy mapping encourages the managers to look beyond traditional
financial measures by applying four different perspectives. The four perfor-
mance perspectives are:
•Financial: What do investors expect and what should be followed to
reach the strategic goals of the financial perspective?
•Customer: Which strategy goals are to be set with regard to meeting
the customer needs in order to attain the financial goals?
• Internal processes: Which strategic goals are to be set for internal
processes in order to fulfill the expectations of the customers and
investors?
•Learning and growth: Which strategic goals are to be pursued to de-
velop the key potentials in order to provide an excellent basis for
outstanding results in the other perspectives?
Research Result
In the 21st century, successful enterprises are more and more dependent
on the quality of the knowledge they have. It is always a challenge for en-
terprises to create and maintain competitive advantage with the use of
knowledge. With the use of customer knowledge an enterprise can reach
excellence in knowledge management. Through interaction with the cus-
tomers, creation, communication, and application of customer knowledge
Volume 3, Issue 2, 2014
274 Tzu-Chun Weng
an enterprise can increase business value and maintain competitive advan-
tage. Customer knowledge comes from customer behavior analysis through
which it is possible to understand and distinguish the activities of consump-
tion from a variety of different perspectives in order to develop products
and support services to satisfy the customer requirements. Most of the
customer information gathered by traditional methods, such as statistical
surveys, is not adopted and properly used by organizations.
Customer knowledge includes the following domains: conversational
knowledge, observational knowledge, and predictive knowledge. Obser-
vational knowledge is the most difficult to gather and acquire from the
customers. Web mining is the application of data mining techniques to dis-
cover the patterns from the Web. Observational knowledge can be gathered
and acquired with the mining, extraction, and integration of useful infor-
mation and knowledge from web content. The goals of customer knowledge
management include extracting useful information, generating useful knowl-
edge, and creating new knowledge to achieve innovation, accomplish new
product development, establish or improve customer loyalty, and develop
marketing strategies.
We applied web content mining to gather and extract customer’s experi-
ence when using products and services. The following four steps are typical
when extracting web content information using web content mining:
•Collecting fetching content from the Web. Real data is very messy.
The tools to collect the data do not examine the data precisely, thus
resulting in the possible unavailability of collected data. Pre-process
has to conduct data purification, format conversion, and table links.
Furthermore, it should effectively deal with the hidden noise, incon-
sistency, missing and repetition of data, as well as understand the
effects of time evolution.
•Parsing – extracting usable data from formatted data. According to
plan, following pre-treatment, the required information is extracted for
analysis.
•Analyzing – tokenizing, rating, classifying, clustering, filtering, and
sorting of information. By using anomaly detection, association rule
learning, clustering, classification, regression, summarization, etc. in
order to find useful and interesting information or features.
•Producing – turning the results of the analysis into something useful.
The results of the analysis are presented through reports or visualiza-
tion.
We applied customer knowledge management to identify the strategic ob-
jectives in order to align and integrate the strategy maps. Financial perspec-
International Journal of Management, Knowledge and Learning
Exploring Customer Knowledge from Social Media 275
Financial Customer
Internal
processes
Learning and
growth
Management
of knowledge
for customers
Management
of knowledge
from customers
Management
of knowledge
about
customers
Management
of knowledge
co-creation with
customers
Collect Parse Analyze Produce
Micro-blogging
services
Social
networking
services
Location-aware
mobile services
Corporate
discussion
forum services
Strategy
map
Customer
knowledge
manage-
ment
Web
mining
Social
media
Figure 5 The Processes of Customer Knowledge Management
tive includes two important financial strategies, i.e., expansion of product
markets, as well as increased productivity. Customer perspective concerns
satisfaction of the customer requirements and customer expectations. In-
ternal processes perspective refers to the transformation of intangible as-
sets into customer and financial outcomes through operational manage-
ment in order to achieve value-creating processes. Learning and growth
perspective signifies that the foundation of the strategy rests on aligning
and integrating intangible assets and activities to achieve value creation.
We used web mining to automatically discover and extract information from
the social media. Through the process of collection, parsing, analysis, and
production, the customer knowledge can be extracted and organized. The
process is depicted in Figure 5.
Conclusion
The key purpose of customer knowledge management is to capture, or-
ganize, share, transfer, and control customer knowledge for organizational
benefits. It can help organizations address the specific needs of their cus-
tomers and make them more effective in enhancing customer satisfaction
(Plessis, 2007). Researchers have indicated that customer knowledge man-
agement can shorten the duration of service calls and improve the quality of
the provided service, enhance knowledge transfer to the customer, resulting
Volume 3, Issue 2, 2014
276 Tzu-Chun Weng
in higher customer satisfaction, higher loyalty, and higher revenue, as well
as facilitate more efficient content creation resulting in lower costs (Bueren,
Schierholz, Kolbe, & Brenner, 2005; Dimitrova, Kaneva, & Gallucci, 2009;
Dalfard, Jafari, & Alizadeh, 2012). Customer knowledge management ap-
plies the acquisition and use of customer-related knowledge through direct
and indirect interactions with the customers to create value for the organi-
zation.
Strategic objectives are derived from the organization’s vision and mis-
sion. They are classified into four perspectives, which include financial, cus-
tomer, internal processes, and learning and growth. Clearly defined, enter-
prise planning falls into four spindle strategies and clarifies the relationship
between the four spindle strategies to achieve specific value proposition of
the action route map. The financial targets are defined from the customers’
perspective. A concern about ‘who is the target customer’ and ‘how these
customers bring revenue growth,’ specifically developed the countermea-
sures to maintain long-term relationships with the customers. In order to
satisfy the customer demand, it will naturally influence the product design,
brand and market development, sales and other internal process. Hoping it
could create expected customer value, as well as product and service differ-
entiation. Finally, in order to reach the objective and promote the strategy,
further study of the next layer of ‘organization,’ ‘employee,’ ‘training,’ etc.
should be performed.
Past customer knowledge management mixed with customer information
and knowledge seldom explored how the enterprise obtains the informa-
tion through analysis and customer interaction. Hence, an enterprise could
not achieve larger contribution from customer knowledge management. The
contribution of this paper is in (a) analysis of the categories of customer
knowledge and investigation of the domains of customer knowledge, (b) ex-
ploring of the customer knowledge management framework of the social
media, (c) integrating information retrieval and information extraction from
the social media to discover customer knowledge, and (d) proposing a cus-
tomer knowledge management structure for workflow integration to align
and integrate the strategy maps.
Customer knowledge management is a new research topic, which is wor-
thy of research. Knowledge is the basis of business competition in current
business environment. The ability to manage customer knowledge is valued.
Using information systems to obtain customer knowledge has become an
important success factor in any business. We will further (1) study how cus-
tomer knowledge management can result in new organizational culture in
organizational learning, (2) analyze how customer knowledge management
can result in greater efficiency in cross-functional departments integration,
and (3) explore how customer knowledge management can be used in cus-
tomer collaboration.
International Journal of Management, Knowledge and Learning
Exploring Customer Knowledge from Social Media 277
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Tzu-Chun Weng is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Information Man-
agement of National Taiwan University of Science and Technology. His re-
search interests are operations research, production management informa-
tion system, decision support system, and system analysis & design.
D9509303@mail.ntust.edu.tw
This paper is published under the terms of the Attribution-
NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
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