The Role of Social CRM in Social Information Systems: Findings from Four Case Studies

Social Information Systems (SIS) are larger systems of open and voluntary collaboration between involved parties and based on Social Media. Recent research about SIS describes characteristics, constituting elements and research streams. However, detailed analysis about the effects and system design of SIS are still limited. This paper investigates the concept of SIS from the perspective of Customer Relationship Management (CRM). It illustrates similarities and differences between SIS and Social CRM implementations by drawing on existing research and the examination of four cases studies. The findings show benefits and requirements for the adoption of SIS in the field of CRM. On one hand, SIS provide new means for CRM by fostering the creation and nurturing of relationships between business and the market. On the other hand, for realizing these opportunities companies need to further integrate Social Media, CRM and Social CRM from an inside-out and outside-in perspective

Usability of CRM Systems as Collaboration Infrastructures in Business Networks

Collaboration among companies is a major development in business and electronic business concepts. While groupware, teleconferencing or e-mail-systems are widespread and crossfunctional in nature, support for collaboration in business processes has mainly been studied in the engineering and supply chain area. Virtual organizations and networked business also require collaboration in customer-oriented processes such as the management of offer generation, campaigns, customer data or complaints. While the concept of collaborative customer relationship management (CRM) has been discussed by several authors already, the technological scenarios available to implement these processes are still open for research. This paper investigates the role of CRM systems as application architectures for collaborative CRM. The findings show that CRM systems provide only basic functionalities for inter-organizational collaboration and seem currently not able to support collaborative CRM without help of additional supporting tools or extensive customizing of system functionalities

Social Customer Relationship Management: State of the Art and Learnings from Current Projects

The Social Web is transforming the relationship between companies and customers. It offers the means to redesign the fundamental structure of customer service systems and to refocus on the relationship aspect of customer relationship management (CRM). Although various examples illustrate how companies may use Social Media in the field of CRM, the necessary IT systems are still open for research. This paper investigates the use of Social Media in CRM processes and their functional requirements using a collection of case studies from the literature. The findings show that firms may use Social Media in several forms to enhance their CRM processes, but also that Social Media-specific processes arise that require dedicated functionalities in the field of Social Media monitoring, management and interaction

Enhancing Collaborative CRM with Mobile Technologies

Mobile technology offers a high potential to significantly transform the ways how a company can interact with their customers and even with own employees. In recent years researchers started to analyze those potentials from the perspective of customer relationship management (CRM) but mainly concentrated on traditional business-to-customer (B2C) relationships. The concept of collaborative CRM extends this view of traditional CRM to virtual organizations and networked businesses. While the concept of collaborative CRM has been discussed by several authors already, the impact of mobile technology is still open to research. This paper investigates the role of mobile technology in collaborative CRM based on existing research, scenarios and supporting systems. The goal is to increase insight about the current role of mobile devices such as smartphones or personal digital agents (PDA) in collaborative CRM business scenarios and the support of these scenarios by CRM systems. From the broad scope of collaborative CRM the focus of this research is on collaboration with customers. The findings show that current mobile scenarios merely incorporate the collaborative CRM concept and that CRM systems provide only basic functionalities for incorporating mobile devices in collaborative CRM processes

Analytical Social CRM: Concept and Tool Support

The Social Web offers new opportunities, such as direct market access, interactive customer contact or a better understanding of market demands, in the field of customer relationship management (CRM). Consequently, firms develop new strategies, processes and technologies to utilise the Social Web for their needs. From the perspective of CRM, the Social Web creates an opportunity to directly include customer knowledge and shape a field called Social CRM (SCRM). Even though methods and tools for data extraction and media monitoring are already available, the analytical requirements of SCRM and necessary functionalities are open for research. This research explores the role of analytical SCRM and examines available tools with the required functional and technological components. The findings show that existing tools still have a limited functional scope which makes a ‘best-of-breed’ approach necessary. Finally, a concept for an integrated analytical SCRM system is proposed that comprises necessary SCRM components

How Companies are Implementing Social Customer Relationship Management: Insights From Two Case Studies

The Social Web offers a realm of opportunities for the interaction with customers. For the first time many companies have the opportunity to directly and immediately contact consumers or other stakeholders regardless of their position in the value chain. Among the opportunities are: to obtain more comprehensive market insights, to interact in real-time or to incorporate consumers into the service provisioning. Despite these potentials a great uncertainty remains about the existing options to use Social Media for customer relationship management (CRM) purposes and, especially, the required IT systems and the value of such investments. Based on a comprehensive architecture for an integrated Social CRM (SCRM), this research investigates how companies have actually implemented SCRM. Two case studies are examined regarding the contribution of SCRM activities to CRM and the established SCRM infrastructure. The paper concludes with a discussion about observed patterns in SCRM implementations and functional requirements on integrated SCRM systems

The Role of Cross-Domain Use Cases in IoT – A Case Analysis

The strong rise of Internet connected things contrib- utes to the big data phenomenon. Data is increasingly becoming available from various devices in large vol- ume, variety and velocity. However, many Internet of Things (IoT) applications still seem to be used to solve single problems and infrastructural elements (e.g. sen- sors or data) are not openly available for other use cases. This paper argues that a growing need for cross- domain applications is approaching within the sharing economy and other ecosystem-based business models. It investigates the current state of such cross-domain ap- plications by analyzing currently deployed IoT case studies. The analysis shows that most cases remain in the silo mentality and focus on a specific domain. Only a few cases feature some cross-domain characteristics. These are especially present in smart city cases, which engage multiple stakeholders and promote the share of resources

Social Media Analytics in Social CRM – Towards a Research Agenda

Social Media have emerged as an additional source of information for companies. Regarding an analysis of the huge data volumes within the Social Web, other approaches than manually analyzing social content are needed. Thus, Social Media Analytics (SMA) applications have emerged in recent years and have become inevitable for automatically generating valuable in-sights. However, these tools still suffer different shortcomings, which inhibit a deeper analysis and understanding of data. This research investigates and categorizes currently available ana-lytics methods by outlining literature and analyzing practical applications. Furthermore, it draws a line between descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive analytics in the field of Social Media Analytics. As a result, this research complements existing research with strategic ques-tions, possible outcomes of SMA applications, and enabling methods to compute these out-comes, and finally defines a research agenda

Managing Customer Data in Data-driven Service Innovation: A Framework of Data Principles

While customer data has been collected in enterprise systems since decades, the emerging consumer technologies create new sources of data. Although the need to co-create services with customers has been recognized, a systematic approach of how to include this sensitive source of innovation in the service innovation process is still lacking. This research explores the potential of data governance practices for data-driven service innovation. Data principles for the governance of customer data are collected and assessed by practioners in order to provide conceptual support for organizations and to facilitate the service innovation process. The results of this research integrate data principles of different research streams and offer a framework of data principles that can be applied in the design and management of data-driven services