Social Customer Relationship Management

Social Customer Relationships Management (CRM) is a current business trend providing new channels of two-way communication with customers through social media sites, such as Facebook, Twitter etc. Social CRM enables companies to interact in an easy and contemporary way directly with customers as well as to track customer interactions and their social influence. In this paper we examine the importance of CRM, e-CRM and Social CRM for businesses. We provide perspectives on objectives and types of CRM, the working cycle of CRM, the stages of a CRM Strategy and technology tools that are used in CRM. Social CRM is in particularly analyzed, since this new trend requires active engagement by customers and other stakeholders. The engagement process is essential to successful Social CRM and to successful social business practices. Finally, we describe experiences from three family businesses that introduced Social CRM as a result of a project carried out as an assignment in the ‘Social Media Networking’ module of the MSc course in ‘Web Intelligence’ at the Department of Informatics of Alexander Technological Educational Institute of Thessaloniki. The assignment of the groups was to create a Social CRM Strategy in collaboration with a company. This study is a follow-up of the outcome of the projects carried out in the autumn semester 2014 and 2015. The results show that all three companies consider that Social CRM is an excellent tool for obtaining real time valuable data about customers and a cheap way to reach them.