Influence of Social Media on Customer Relationship Management - Dissertation Example

Download file to see previous pages Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is about managing the relationships between a business organization and its customers, clients, and sales prospects (Bhattacharya, 2011, pp. 45 - 46). CRM involves using technology to organize, automate, and synchronize business processes to deliver customer retention, creativity in customer relations, customer loyalty, and cost reduction in maintaining customer relationships. In addition, CRM should deliver caring relationships that continue.

Thus, CRM delivers to a firm by focusing on the identification of customer needs and assisting with customer contact to deliver satisfied customers. Improved strength of relationships with customers, understanding of customer’s expectations, an enhanced understanding of customer’s prospects, and interactive management to maintain customer loyalty are important aspects of CRM, which comes into play from the very first contact with clients. CRM is important because it is expensive for firms to convert new contacts into clients, and because it makes sense to retain existing clients by meeting their needs, caring, and delivering. CRM is an essential function for all organizations that interact with clients to fulfill their mandate.

In the present day and age, the rise of social networking and social media has created new social structures, new ways for interacting with customers, and new opportunities for understanding needs presented by customers (Agarwal, 2011, pp. 696 – 697). With more than 1 billion people accessing the web on a daily basis, the Internet has changed lives forever to present a new culture of instant communication and active participation in discussions involving a vast spatial spread.

The new innovative tools that characterize Web 2.0 now take users beyond simple browsing, searching, and publishing of static websites and social media now presents highly accessible and scalable publishing techniques to deliver the ‘wisdom of the crowds’ to all those who may want to benefit from this. Social Networks, News & Bookmarking, Blogs, Micro-blogging, Video Sharing, Photo Sharing, Message boards, Wikis, Virtual Reality, Social Gaming, etc. are now available to all those who interact with the web. Wikipedia, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, SecondLife, Upcoming, Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Flickr, Zooomr, del.icio.us, World of Warcraft, Amazon, etc. are now household names. Thus, we now live in an age of Internet-enabled CRM and it makes sense to examine how social media has influenced CRM in the present day and age (Chang, 2009, pp. 85 – 86).

The research presented in this dissertation, which should be of interest to all those with an interest in marketing, CRM, social media, and the web, examines how social media has influenced CRM.

1.1 Overview
According to Goldenberg (2010), increasingly sophisticated (yet easy-to-use) social media tools and techniques will make creating and sustaining lifetime customers central to customer-centric business strategies within the next fifteen years. Thus, new opportunities now exist for enhancing customer engagement, mobility, and the people/process/technology mix, which are the three essentials of CRM. ...Download file to see next pages Read More