Perceived Risks of Customer Knowledge Management

Customer knowledge management (CKM) has become an important topic for both academicians and practitioners in recent years as customer knowledge is vital for improving customer service and enabling the company to make appropriate strategic business decisions. CKM applications, some of which may be accessible online, support the exchange of customer knowledge. However, embedding CKM applications that customers may access within a company’s website may actually be an obstacle to the increase of e-commerce as it could cause an increase in consumers’ risk perceptions about that website, and in turn, a backward step in customer’s purchase intentions through that site. The objective of this chapter is to analyze the differences that might exist in CKM tools when they are implemented in a website and compare the results in two different moments of time 2005 and 2010. The results obtained from this research will be useful for managers to analyze which CKM initiatives are more advisable to obtain and manage customer knowledge management in the future.