Using Social Media to Influence CRM and Loyalty

This chapter explores the influence of social media in Customer Relationship Management that leads to Customer loyalty. The social media in restaurant is recognized as an essential component of the customer satisfaction and therefore it is a cornerstone of the success of CRM and customer loyalty through social media nowadays. The purpose of this chapter is to investigate how Restaurant industry can harness the power of social media by utilizing CRM that leads to Customer loyalty. The problem is approached applying both the restaurants perspective and the customer perspective. The recent explosion in social media usage, combined with the transformation of the consumer into a “consume' activist”, has permanently changed the relationship between a restaurant and its customers. There were two interviews conducted for 384 restaurants collected and analyzed for the research. The results proved that Social media can be an excellent channel for building long-lasting customer relationships in restaurants.

Gamification Impact on Customer Relationship Development in Virtual Environment

The chapter analyzes gamification conception presenting different perspective towards gamification. Game elements, game mechanics and game dynamics are discussed within the chapter as a main component gamification. Customer relations development stages are presented analyzing acquisition, retention and enchantment stages. The proposed conceptual model describes game elements impact on customer relations development and perceived value. The proposed model empirical validation results in Lithuania market are discussed.

Electronic Word of Mouth Marketing

Social networks as new form of popular and widely used communities (especially among Iranians) are considered as places to talk about brands and sharing comments, experiences, interests and help users to play more prominent role in their own and others informed choices. Purpose of this chapter is to find a logical relationship between brand loyalty on one hand, and participating in eWOM and individuals' identification through specific brands (Adidas in present chapter) on the other. Research results show a significant and positive correlation between brand loyalty, participating in eWOM and brand identification among consumers. Model presented in this chapter explains the same process. Regarding objective methodology and data collection method, this is an applied descriptive and surveying study. We used Regression approach and SPSS software to test hypotheses.

The Effects of Fan Personality on Participation in Social Media Based Brand Community

Facebook as the greatest social network has offered a new marketing tools for companies, agencies, organizations and even people like celebrities. We are witnessing a growing trend in emergence of online brand communities both in and out of social media. However, one of the important aspects that needs to be magnified is how brand's fans participate in their favorite brand pages? This study tries to answer questions like this. We introduce new variables which should be counted in the 3M model of personality in order to stimulate brand fans to participate on the brand page more than before. Entertainment, monetary and normative incentives are introduced as potential variables which affect situational traits of participants. Finally, we advise brand managers to not forget about entertainment mixed with promotions or representation of products over their online brand community; entertainment along with monetary and normative incentives can motivate fans to participate.

CKM 2.0

This chapter explores the affective role of Web 2.0 on customer knowledge management (CKM) in two ways. At first, a new conceptualization of customer knowledge regarding knowledge “for”, “from” and “about” customer is introduced through categorizing them in a detailed typological manner. The second part, attempts to find the relationship between Web 2.0 and three types of customer knowledge in a way that demonstrates each type of customer knowledge could be supported by using any kind of Web 2.0 tools. These parts are integrated as a comprehensive model which is named “Grape Model”. This model encompasses different types of customer knowledge in detail as “grapes” which is related to Web 2.0 tools as “leafs” which support encompassed grapes. The”Grape Model” was applied in four different Iranian industries so as to evaluate each industry in making benefits from CKM and using Web 2.0 tools in order to facilitate the CKM process.

Electronic Customer Relationship Management (E-CRM) Practices of Micro, Small, and Medium Scale Enterprises in Ghana

This book chapter is aimed at finding out how SMEs in Ghana employ electronic customer relationship management (E-CRM) to improve their business performance.Case studies were used and five companies were selected and their managers interviewed. The study found that there is a growing awareness among SME owners about social media platforms. It also found that SME owners use such platforms for marketing and e-CRM purposes. The most reported social platforms used for e-CRM were found to be Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram. Regarding the effectiveness of these platforms for marketing and e-CRM, the SME owners interviewed intimated that they are fast, convenient, and cost effective marketing platforms. This study concludes that SMEs in Ghana are aware of and use mostly free internet platforms such as Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram for e-CRM. Specifically, SMEs use such platforms to share information with clients and build and maintain relationships.

Adoption of Facebook for Customer Relationship Management for SMEs

This study has explored organizations' motivations to adopt Facebook for customer relationship management purposes. Interviews with twenty small to medium sized Australian organizations in this study showed that market pressures, direct customer service, brand promotion, and testing and experiencing are among key motivations for organizations to begin having presence on the Facebook. Ease of use, ease of receiving customers' feedback, availability of rich tools, and the opportunity to reach a large number of potential and existing customers are found to be amongst the key benefits of such presence. Furthermore, the findings show that dealing with negative comments, finding qualified human resources, ensuring the reliability of Facebook policies, and scalability of Facebook pages are some of the key issues that organizations have experienced with using this website for managing relationship with their customers.

The Impact of CRM and Social Media Technologies on Customer-Orientation Process and Sales Performance

The purpose of this chapter is studying that technology, such as customer relationship management systems and social media, improves the understanding of how to manage interactions with customers in today's digital era. Iran's auto industry has passed the first states of a new born auto industry (assembling the imported parts) and before the revolution, some of the car factories were upgraded to factories with the ability of design and production of spare parts. In order to examine the research model, data was gathered from survey of car representatives of IRAN. Participants included different levels in sales. Data was collected using an emailed link to an online survey supported by two reminder emails. 843 respondents completed the 130+ item. No significant difference between the data was evidenced. Results show that CRM and social media positively influence customer orientation activities, which in turn positively impact sales performance. Managerial implications are provided regarding the potential power CRM and social media has on sales performance.

Study of the Automatic Evaluation of Website Quality from Customer Insight

Effectiveness of websites is largely dependent on the quality of the website. The biggest share of the quality`s new concept is that the technical aspects of products and services combines with customers usage and understanding. Therefore websites evaluation based on the maximum usage and perception of the customers is considered an important issue to announce to the related organizations the success of website from customers' views. This customer relationship need a kind of management that first step of that for future decision needs knowledge about the websites features, customer insight and the position of websites among the competitors. One of the available media is the online news websites which their success is highly dependent on the relationship of their users. In this article achieving the information of websites is automatic and without the intervention of human so that the instant evaluation could be possible and used method is TOPSIS combined with information entropy to rank 791 news website which have most visitors of the Iranian users based on Alexa ranking report.

The Effects of Social Media-Based Brand Communities on Brand Loyalty and Brand Equity

Nowadays, the concept of brand community is tied with media. So, the new concept of social media based brand community without constraint of geography is built. In this chapter, we investigate the effects of social media based brand community on elements of the customer centric model, brand loyalty and brand equity through its antecedents (i.e., brand loyalty, brand trust, perceived quality, brand awareness/ association). An online survey with 170 users of brand community of Cinere Company on Facebook was conducted and path analysis technique was applied for data analysis. The results show that brand community of Cinere on social media has positive effects on all elements of the customer centric model. customer/ other customer and customer/ brand relationships have positive effects on brand loyalty with mediating role of brand trust; and loyalty, perceived quality, brand awareness/association have positive effects on brand equity. Interestingly, brand trust contributes only indirectly to brand equity. Finally, implications for practice and future research opportunities are discussed.