Defining the knowledge that an organisation requires to create customer capital from a customer perspective

Consumer capital is a very important asset for an organisation as it is the result of an organisation's relationship with its customers. This paper sets out to confirm that organisations need to create customer capital in SMEs (Small Medium Enterprises). As part of this study, four types of knowledge have been identified (i.e. customer knowledge, individual knowledge, collective knowledge, and machine-readable forms) and this paper investigates the relationships between the different components of knowledge and the process to obtain customer capital from the external perspective of the company. This involved an empirical study of 365 customers. Two structural equation models have been used, resulting in the conclusion that before obtaining customer capital it is necessary to convert individual knowledge, collective knowledge (C_LK), and machine-readable forms into customer knowledge.