CUSTOMER RELATION MANAGEMENT THROUGH SOCIAL MEDIA

Abstract

Today’s customers are harder to win and keep. To meet this challenge, companies are focused on fostering customer engagement: creating deep connections with customers that drive purchase decisions, interaction, and participation over time. Customer engagement drives clear benefits for organizations that serve both businesses and consumers, such as improving sales and loyalty, exposing valuable leads, and providing better customer insight. A well implemented Social Media strategy can be valuable to any company and provides an opportunity to engage in a conversation with its customers real-time. In this new world of Social Media, conversations can now be facilitated, monitored, measured, managed and directed. They are done to support a wide variety of business decisions relating to advertising, marketing, sales, product development and/or customer service initiatives. Companies can test or launch new marketing offers and fine tune brand messaging based on the real-time responses in the Social Media environment. Companies can build trust and confidence by managing its presence on Social Media world with an emphasis on identification and resolution of customer issues. Social Media can allow companies to identify emerging trends and catch repeated customer issues on a near real-time basis. By monitoring social media they can address issues before they escalate into product recalls and prevent bad publicity. Additionally by applying business analytics tools to the Social Media content it can reveal behavior patterns, enabling more precise customer targeting, relevant offers and more immediate solutions to customer issues. The purpose of this study is to analyze the extent of participation by Indian customers and organizations on such conversation on virtual communities.