Managing customer relationships in the social media era: Introducing the social CRM house

Edward C. Malthouse*, Michael Haenlein, Bernd Skiera, Egbert Wege, Michael Zhang

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

586 Scopus citations

Abstract

CRM has traditionally referred to a company managing relationships with customers. The rise of social media, which has connected and empowered customers, challenges this fundamental raison d'etre. This paper examines how CRM needs to adapt to the rise of social media. The convergence of social media and CRM creates pitfalls and opportunities, which are explored. We organize this discussion around the new "social CRM house," and discuss how social media engagement affects the house's core areas (i.e., acquisition, retention, and termination) and supporting business areas (i.e., people, IT, performance evaluation, metrics and overall marketing strategy). Pitfalls discussed include the organization's lack of control over message diffusion, big and unstructured data sets, privacy, data security, the shortage of qualified manpower, measuring the ROI of social media marketing initiatives, strategies for managing employees, integrating customer touch points, and content marketing.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)270-280
Number of pages11
JournalJournal of Interactive Marketing
Volume27
Issue number4
DOIs
StatePublished - Nov 2013

Keywords

  • Customer insight
  • Customer relationship management
  • Employees
  • Engagement
  • Information technology
  • Key performance indicator
  • Social media

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Business and International Management
  • Marketing

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