Social Media e CRM - Gli effetti delle nuove tecnologie sulla gestione della relazione con il cliente

The aim of this thesis is to propose a study that explains whether and how social media support firms to develop a better customer relationship management and if they affect customer relationship performance. CRM is a continually evolving domain and since early 90’s it has always been one of the most studied research domain for marketing scholars, which aim to support a core role for the organizational process focused on establishing, maintaining and nurturing long-term relationships with customers (Jayachandran et al., 2005; Payne & Frow, 2005). Companies are moving towards a customer-centric approach, trying to identify, establish and maintain relationship with long-term customers. Taking note of studies which demonstrate that customers have different economic value to the firm, managers are interested in evaluate customer lifetime value (CLV) in order to increase company’s profit. Starting from 2000’s the traditional view of CRM have been changed with the inclusion of 2.0 technologies, in particular social media. Today, consumers are increasingly turning to social media to gain knowledge about products and companies (Moore et al., 2015). These tools are not only transforming the ways of communication between firms and customers, but they are setting new challenges for traditional customer relationship management approach: due to social media success, companies have less control on relationship, while consumers are driving the conversation and can overcome firms’ marketing, sales and service effort (Baird & Parasnis, 2011). In this scenario, managers need to set up new strategies using social media technologies as tools to develop a deeper and wiser customer relational process. Furthermore, using social media to improve CRM allow companies to improve their customer relationship performance (Trainor et al., 2014). This phenomenon led to a new concept that has been labelled as Social CRM (Greenberg, 2010; Trainor et al., 2014; Harrigan, et al., 2015) which is the incorporation of everyday social media technologies into the CRM armory (Harrigan & Miles, 2014) in order to implement collaborative real time processes of relationships with customers. Despite the rise of social media and the fact that the characterization of these social media technologies as CRM tools transforms the landscape of building relationships with customer, the effectiveness of Social CRM still remains a domain largely under investigated. In particular, various studies tried to shed some light on critical factors underpinning Social CRM, but a clear understanding of whether and when social media can increase customer relationship’s effectiveness along the different stages of the process, is still missing. In order to understand the role and usage of social media to affect customer relationship process and performance, an online survey was used to collect data from a population of marketing managers. Data collected have been processed through different statistic techniques to emerge the effectiveness of social media in each phase of customer relationship process and to understand whether exist a stage of the process in which new technologies play a more relevant role. According to managers’ perceptions, the study makes a step forward and contributes to the body of knowledge as it demonstrates the importance of social media usage in improving the CRM systems. Moreover, it highlights the effect of customer relationship orientation on social customer relationship process, it illustrates the role of social media technologies use in supporting social customer relationship process and it analyzes the role that social customer relationship process plays upon customer relationship performance.