Customer Engagement through the Social Media - Case Study Example

Name: Subject & Code: Tutor: Date: Social media- Facebook Companies can use Facebook within the context of customer relationship management (CRM) to nurture long-term relationship with the customers. Essentially, integrating the social media and CRM into a system, for customer feedback and engagement, gives businesses absolute power (Bolosic). CRM is in itself a strategy for managing business interaction with existing and potential customers. It enables a business to increase productivity, boost customer satisfaction and loyalty, as well as close more business because of its speed in reaching a wide customer base and capacity to improve quality (Bolosic). Pros a) Speed Customer engagement through the social media is critical for businesses that look to speedily build their brands. In using Facebook, a business can reach a wide customer base at the same time (Novak). This speedy relay of information enables businesses to speedily build competitive advantage. This triggers interaction with a wide customer base to strengthen brand position in the market. Facebook also provides businesses with an opportunity to reach wide customer network fast, through active communication and constant update of content to effectively engage the customers (Baird and Gautam 3-5). b) Quality Providing Facebook links to customers enables companies to invite customers for interaction and participation in active discussion. Customers are to discuss product features, in their normal conversations. The pattern provides a powerful phenomenon that companies can tap into, so as to improve the quality of their services or products (Novak). Additionally, in situations where customers have a negative experience with the company’s products or staff, the customers may use the company’s Facebook account to post their experiences. This in turn alerts the company to the existing problems. The company may use the information to resolve the quality problem. Facebook can lead to increased customer loyalty because of the dependability of quality service trusted by customers. This in turn leads to improved brand attributes and features. Further, it attracts a more loyal customer base. Consumer engagement is a critical strategic factor that enables organisation to build and maintain competitive advantage, by allowing them to predict future direction and customer demands. This can ensure that a company comes up with quality products that reflect customer perspectives (Zailskaite-Jakste and Kuvykaite 194-202). Facebook enables businesses to avoid negative impacts of the brands to the community, by constantly communicating to the customers. This can also foster a loyal and reliable customer base. Engaging customers through Facebook can lead to active consumer communication on issues that are pertinent to product quality. Constant interaction between businesses and customers, through Facebook, enables customer engagement. The company can take advantage of this to convince customers of the superior product attributes. This can promote brand equity dimensions, such as brand associations, brand awareness and brand loyalty (Zailskaite-Jakste and Kuvykaite 194-202). Cons Unclear accountability and ownership of a company’s Facebook account can have diverse effects on a company. In particular, lack of involvement and oversight in setting up the direction of using Facebook for customer initiatives may hinder the business from attaining its customer commitment, since anyone within the company can post content that infringe on the company’s policies and get away with it. This may happen in situations where the business fails to assign roles and responsibilities in employing the social media platform (Baird and Gautam 3-5). Due to the addictive nature of social media platforms, there is a likelihood that overuse of Facebook may lead to adverse effects, such as lost focus on building business capability and creating business value. In using Facebook to engage customers, there is a likely trap of concentrating efforts on social networking to build company image, instead of building business capability and value. Additionally, some customers may begin to post negative reviews of comments that portray a company’s products negatively. This may reach the larger customer base speedily due to networking. Use of Facebook is time-intensive. This is because; it is interactive and at the same time, a form of two-way commitment. Effective use of the social media platform would require that significant amount of time is invested in creating content and responding to customer comments (Baird and Gautam 3-5). This may imply an extra expense on labour force, as the business has to appoint someone to be in charge of responding to the comments, posting content on products, answering questions and generally interacting with the customers. Using Facebook for customer engagement and brand promotion may cause privacy, security and trust issues. In the case of trust, certain unique features of transactional privacy and security play a significant role in promoting customer loyalty. However, social media marketers may engage in practices that infringe on the company’s privacy policy. For instance, they may disclose some confidential company information on Facebook that would otherwise have needed the executive management’s decision (Baird and Gautam 3-5). Recommendations Companies using Facebook for customer engagement and brand promotion should ensure that they have their own comprehensive policies that govern data collection and disclosure. This may include privacy policies that govern use of customer data or third party conduct, on the social networking channels. This would ensure that marketers do not engage in practices that violate the company’s privacy, such as disclosing confidential information on Facebook (Sitel 7-9). The company should have a strategic plan on how to implement the use of Facebook. This may include having sufficient planning on managing the Facebook account. For instance, employing a social marketer to manage the accounts may prevent the risks of having unclear accountability and ownership of the company’s Facebook account. By failing to mitigate such conceivable risk factors, there is a likelihood of missing out important customer opportunities. The social media platform should be used as a listing platform. This implies that businesses should examine what customers say about the company and its products and develop strategies anchored in data-drive insights. To ensure effective commitment, the company's executive should show support to the social media strategies. Their involvement and support should be followed by putting together a cross-functional team of ‘Facebook champions' from the relevant departments, such as marketing, sales, corporate communication, customer services and IT. They should all collaborate in the social media initiatives (Sitel 8-9). There should also be intense collaboration between departments. At this stage, the planned and current social media initiatives should be determined to have a better insight into how Facebook can be used to positively impact the organisation. This is since feedback is essentially a two-way street. Hence, implementation plan should be shared across departments and if possible, collaborative efforts be used. Works Cited Baird, Carolyn and Parasnis, Gautam. From social media to Social CRM: Reinventing the customer relationship The second in a two-part series. IBM Global Business Services, 2011. 29 June 2014, Bolosic, Jim. "8 Ways Businesses Can Use Facebook and Customer Relationship Management." CMSWire.com. N.p., 19 Nov. 1012. 29 June 2014. < http://www.cmswire.com/cms/customer-experience/8-ways-businesses-can-use-facebook-and-customer-relationship-management-018308.php> Novak, Kenny. 4 Reasons Why You Should Link to Your Social Accounts. Boostlikes. 30 April 2014. 29 June 2014, Sitel. Social Media Customer Engagement, n.d. 29 June 2014, Zailskaite-Jakste, Ligita and Rita Kuvykaite. "Consumer Engagement in Social Media by Building the Brand." Electronic International Interdisciplinary Conference, (2012) 194-202 Read More