Exploring the Effect of customers’ perception toward company’s efforts to transact knowledge with customers on Word of Mouth(The Case of Iran’s Banking Industry)

today, customer knowledge plays a significant role in gaining competitive advantage for organizations, according to the dynamism and complexity of the organization’s environment and also growing expectations of customers, customers’ recognition is an essential principle. Hence, transacting knowledge with customers is a matter of great importance which requires special attention of organizations. The purpose of the current study is to explore the relationship between customers’ perception of the company’s performance in the field of customer knowledge management process (such as mutual knowledge exchange with customers, sharing product and sharing knowledge with customer and gaining customer’s knowledge) and word of mouth.

In order to measure customers’ perception of the customer knowledge management process, three dimensions have been used, including: knowledge for customer, knowledge from customer and knowledge about customer. After studying the theoretical background, an appropriate questionnaire has been designed and distributed among the customers of private banks in Tehran. Also in order to analysis the gathered data, Smart-PLS software have been used.

The results indicate that, customers’ positive perception of company’s knowledge management efforts has a positive and significant influence on customer willingness to spread positive words.

As customer loyalty mediate the relationship between customer knowledge management and Word of mouth, customer knowledge management could be a useful tool for organizations to improve customer loyalty and consequently increase customer’s inclinations to spread word of mouth.