Translating Customer Knowledge Management Into Perceived Customer Communication Value and Purchase Intention : A Study on Indian Ecommerce Firms

Customer relationship management has undergone a lot of development with the advent of new technology and interactive communication channels. Customers are actively participating in the gathering, collection, and dissemination of knowledge about products and brands with other customers in the digital world. With the changing times firms are required to have an in-depth understanding about their customers. This helps in faster process of information and knowledge from the customers thereby helping the firm to gain a competitive advantage against its competitors. The success of any ecommerce firms depends on the fundamental of customer knowledge; how better the firms know their customers and can utilize the customer knowledge to generate better customer value than the competition. The objective of this paper is to empirically study the customer perception of ‘customer knowledge management (CKM) translation into customer communication value and the impact on intention to purchase from Ecommerce firms in Indian context'. The research studies the perception of customer towards two direct communication channels: email and social media; which are extensively used by the Indian ecommerce companies for relevant and personalized communication to the customers. The communication practice is divided into different components of communication such as relevancy, frequency, reliability, satisfaction and how each of these components independently and jointly influence the customer's purchase behaviour. The results imply that all the four variables of communication effectiveness – communication relevancy, communication frequency, communication reliability and communication satisfaction have a positive correlation with the customer intention to purchase