Social CRM: A Review of the Literature and the Identification of New Research Directions

Abstract

Social customer relationship management social CRM is an emerging practice that utilises social media to engage with customers. In its most complete form, social CRM is a concept and a practice that integrates social media and social networking with traditional CRM technologies, processes and practices in order to bring about a superior engagement with customers including improved customer service, leading, hopefully, to improved revenues and profits for adopting businesses. This paper reviews the academic and practitioner literatures on social CRM, makes a broad comparison between the two literatures, and then, based on an assessment of the literature, specifies possible new research directions and opportunities. In terms of the findings, the literature review revealed that academic research in social CRM focused, unsurprisingly, on the theoretical notion of social CRM and on specifying the key processes for it, whereas the practitioner literature focused on how to respond to the challenges of social media and capitalise on the opportunities presented by such media.