Customer Knowledge Management and Potential Risk Identification: Does Customer Feedback Have any Impact on Product and Service Safety Improvement of Japanese Organizations?

Customer Knowledge Management (CKM) is a term describing a business-level strategy used by organizations, in collaboration with their customers, to capture, share and disseminate customers' knowledge about their needs, wants and expectations. CKM is recognized as one of the most important product and service improvement strategies of the manufacturing and service sector. In many business fields, including healthcare industries, customer feedback contributes to service improvement. Relating to this paper, there are two research areas: the first area is customer feedback and service improvement in the field of healthcare; the second area covers risk management in the field of healthcare. This empirical study builds on existing research by focusing on the links between customer feedback and potential risk identification which results in product and service safety improvement, mainly in the healthcare field. As a comparison, CKM is also examined in the transportation service field. The first purpose of this study is to specify risk-related customer feedback in pharmaceutical and food industries, hospitals, and transportation service industries. The second purpose is to investigate whether riskrelated customer feedback has any significant impact on potential risk identification of products and services. The third purpose is to analyze how organizations assess the severity level of risk, based on a risk matrix. The severity levels are categorized as high, medium and low risk. The research results provided examples of specific cases where risk-related customer feedback has resulted in implementation of product and service safety improvements, or risk mitigation efforts in Japanese organizations. Typical risk-related customer feedback included requests arising from product design, material, labels, packaging, and facility maintenance and services. The questionnaire survey showed that customer feedback departments recognized the value of customer feedback for both service improvement and risk identification. In almost all industries which were included in this study, customer feedback departments recognized that customer feedback contributed to potential risk identification of low severity-level, rather than potential risk identification of medium or high severity-level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]