The Role of Customer Knowledge in Digital Transformation: Customer Knowledge Management as a Competitive Advantage Through Social Media Platforms

Abstract

Today companies need to digitalize their traditional processes to understand the behavior of consumers, who can also be present in the digital world due to advances in social media applications and technologies for accessing them, to react quickly to needs and expectations. The digital transformation process in organizations has three critical areas, according to Westerman et al.(2014); these are business models (changing the way of doing business), operational processes (increasing performance by digitizing processes), and customer experience (understanding the customer). Based on this approach, this section focuses on customer experience and explains how enterprises can integrate customer knowledge management in their digital transformation processes with social media applications. According to Nguyen et al.(2015), continuous social media knowledge acquisition may improve a company's ability to spot opportunities, impact brand innovation, and act as a moderator between knowledge acquisition, market orientation, and brand innovation. It is a strategic approach that increases efficiency in the decision-making process in terms of discovering customer needs, developing new products and services, and making knowledge flow more compelling for customers by obtaining knowledge from customer experience, preferences, and behaviors by analyzing the content provided by users on social media. In this context, analyzing the contents on social media shared by users is an approach in the new era that increases efficiency in the decision-making process in terms of discovering customer needs, developing new products and services, and making knowledge flow more compelling for customers by obtaining knowledge from customer experience, preferences and behaviors (Del Vecchio et al., 2020).