It has been considered as a means for sustaining a competitive advantage for companies to build and maintain long-term relationships with customers. It is without any doubt that many companies have tried to initiate Customer Relationship Management(CRM). For the effective management of customer relationships, it is critical that they acquire, share and use customer information and knowledge.
In this paper, we identified the factors affecting the quality of customer information and knowledge in terms of customer relationship management. We deduced 9 important factors for the quality of customer information and knowledge from the literature reviews on CRM, and developed the questionnaire to measure these factors. The factors are again categorized into organizational system, employees and information technology(IT). We analyzed data collected from 30 companies in the finance, distribution and communication industries. The result of data analysis demonstrates that the employees' analytical skills and appraisal and reward system are closely related to the quality of customer information, and analytical skills and IT support for communications with customers connected with the quality of customer knowledge. In addition, the quality of customer information and knowledge is involved with the degree of a company's understanding on individual customer. The results suggest that companies should consider organizational factors with IT when they initiate CRM.
