Leveraging Customer Knowledge in Electronic Knowledge Repositories for Service Expertise

This study examines how three dimensions of electronic knowledge repositories (EKRs), namely customer knowledge level, customer knowledge integration and accessibility of customer knowledge, contribute to increasing customer service representatives (CSRs)’ service expertise and their customer knowledge utilization and acquisition. Furthermore, the study empirically tests the proposition that service quality is influenced by CSRs’ service expertise and their customer knowledge utilization and acquisition. To test the proposed model and hypotheses, data were collected on CSRs working for call centers using EKRs such as knowledge management systems. All the hypothesized relationships were found to be significant except that between customer knowledge acquisition and service quality. Service expertise was strongly affected by customer knowledge level. While customer knowledge utilization was strongly increased by the accessibility of customer knowledge, customer knowledge acquisition was strongly increased by customer knowledge integration. This study offers an insight into how EKRs, which will have been accumulated by firms over time, ultimately influence the performance of CSRs.