Problem 1: Critique the following article with a brief introduction and overview of the article.
Problem 2: Describe how the article either supports or disproves material.
Problem 3: State your point of view.
Problem 4: Summarize your thoughts and offer suggestions in support of your opinion.
Case Scenario: Technologies to Support Customer-Centricity
Customer relationship management (CRM) systems, while satisfying a considerable need to better understand the customer, fall short of enabling this more acute form of customer-centricity. CRM systems are unprecedented in their ability to capture operational customer information and enable companies to manage and use that information across a range of customer touch points. Yet they capture the information predominantly in ways defined by the organization (and the CRM system’s data structures), rather than by the customer. Consequently, customer insights and information sharing are rarely captured in CRM systems.
Technologies to support customer-centricity that complement CRM functionalities and enable customers to cocreate have recently gained popularity. These technologies, when sponsored by the organization, enable customers to quickly, easily, and securely share their ideas with other members of the community, giving customers a relatively free and flexible medium for sharing, while allowing some control and management of the interaction by the sponsoring organization. The three technologies receiving the most recent attention as a medium for such customer engagement are discussion forums, weblogs, and wikis. Common among these technologies is that they are “lightweight” because they do not require the extensive technology and support infrastructure that other applications such as enterprise software demand.
Consequently, implementation is often observed by user departments at the “grassroots” level. The language of interaction is simple, necessitating little or no “programming” (due to the use of simple codes or a word processor–like editor, instead of HTML).
New content is visible immediately after its posting.
Despite the similarities, there are differences between the three technologies. Weblogs promote a model of first-person storytelling and commenting, whereas forums engage customers in a process of question-and-answer (discussion). In both weblogs and forums, the content is organized chronologically rather than by topic. The wiki way, on the other hand, is intended as a medium for collaborative, topical writing and editing. Customers or organizational representatives can post an idea whereupon others, without special authorization, can modify the text to reflect their own thinking. Over time, with multiple edits, the resulting idea may be of higher quality because it has been exposed to reactions of both customers and organization insiders. At the most essential level, wiki design and use are founded on a set of 11 principles that jointly define a vision, process, and structure for free and open idea exchange (see the Appendix). These principles, when followed, are intended to lead to ENABLING CUSTOMER-CENTRICITY USING WIKIS AND THE WIKI WAY 21 open and incremental contributions, as well as serendipitous knowledge exchange.
For example, one user may ask a question and in so doing create a hyperlink to an as yet undefined term while another user—unaware of the question—may inadvertently answer the question by independently defining the term. As such, wikis enable idea exchange in surprising and collaboration-promoting ways, described by some as the “wiki magic.”1 Furthermore, unlike forums or weblogs, where new content is appended to the old, wikis let new information update and overwrite the old while preserving previous versions in a temporal database, together with a record of the change history. In a wiki context, then, customer engagement may be encouraged by customers and organizational representatives contributing knowledge to the wiki, both by posting linked wiki pages and by coediting wiki pages created by others. While wikis may foster customer engagement, they may also create new problems for the organization. The open engagement of customers in a coediting process makes the organization vulnerable to Web site defacing, destruction of intellectual property, and general chaos. Ideally then, customer-centricity involves not simply higher levels of customer engagement, but higher levels of “constructive” customer engagement. Therefore, our research question is: How do organizations use wiki technology and the wiki way to facilitate higher levels of constructive customer engagement? Our intent was to develop a theoretical model describing factors leading to constructive customer engagement when using wikis.