Customer Knowledge Management ― Leveraging Soft Skills to Improve Customer Focus

Customer focus is the most important challenge of the future. Providing good customer service depends on how well companies know their customers and clearly identify their needs. Availability of customer knowledge, which is knowledge from, for and about the customer, thus becomes crucial in offering customized products or services. This can be gained most efficiently from direct interaction with customers, but requires the use of interpersonal and organizational soft skills. This book presents the interrelationship between customer knowledge management, customer focus and soft skills and also provides concrete advice on how the management of customer knowledge can be optimized.

Prof. Dr. Soumit Sain is a full time professor of International Management at University of Applied Sciences for Economics and Management in Essen, Germany. He also lectures International Marketing at the Fontys University of Applied Sciences in Venlo, The Netherlands. His main research areas are in the field of Knowledge Management, International & Global Strategies and Intercultural Studies of multinational and global conglomerates. Prior to his academic career he has worked as software developer and analyst for a global company in India and USA.

Silvio Wilde, MBA, studied International Strategy and Sales Management and International Entrepreneurship in Dusseldorf at the University of Applied Sciences in Economics and Management. Thanks to his previous employments at Siemens, BASF, Bayer and Lanxess, he can look back on a broad range of experience in different corporate knowledge cultures. He currently works as a sales expert, including direct interaction with customers. This enables him to be close to customers and their knowledge and to gain insights into the management of this customer knowledge day by day.