CRM in the digital age: implementation of CRM in three contemporary B2B firms

Abstract

Purpose – The purpose of this study was to contribute to the current discussion on digitization in companies’ marketing from a customer relationship management (CRM) perspective by examining the role and objectives of CRM and the exploitation of social media to serve the objectives of CRM in contemporary business-to-business (B2B) companies. Design/methodology/approach – The data are collected through semi-structured themed interviews with key marketing/sales managers from three B2B firms. Findings – CRM seems to be moving closer to the company’s core activity and becoming everybody’s business to a greater extent than ever before, but its main goal, to enhance customer relationships, will not necessarily change. Understanding the customer is vital and requires different functions to cooperate closely to ensure the firm has the best possible understanding of its customers. Public social media tools played almost no part in CRM, but closed social media systems might have potential in the future. Research limitations/implications – The chosen research approach limits the generalization of the results. Practical implications – It seems likely that firms will benefit from a collaborative working style over the traditional silo approaches. For B2B firms, public social media does not seems to be the most suitable source to serve CRM but private social media channels might have potential in the future. Originality/value – The lack of empirical examination of the change from company ecosystem to customer ecosystem from a CRM perspective, and the lack of research on social media for CRM in the B2B context, determines the purpose of this study. Furthermore, digitization is a rather new and unstructured phenomenon and many companies are still considering how to reconcile to it.

Social Customer Relationship Management and Organizational Characteristics

“…The paper findings show that SCRM practices are more frequently employed with increasing organization size and also with orientation toward the final consumer. Building upon other research studies [11,15,28], this paper confirmed the significant influence of organizational characteristics such as size and market orientation on SCRM use and can serve as a good basis for the future research conducted for either geographical comparisons or comparisons over time of the state of the art in this field. Future research might be concentrated on other factors affecting the use of SCRM, such as the number of marketing staff, business nature, outsourcing of SCRM activities, and other research interests.…”

The use of social media in the B2B sales process: a meta synthesis

“…Other already consolidated tools in marketing and sales, such as CRM, continue to be used by companies. Because of the influence of social media, it is suggested that CRM be used along with social media (Cron, 2017) and thus it is presented as a social CRM concept (Lipiäinen, 2015). It is suggested that a company use social media in conjunction with the content marketing technique (material and text creation) published in different online media and with the support of other available tools.…”

“…These technologies influence the sales process (Bocconcelli, Cioppi, & Pagano, 2017;Järvinen & Taiminen, 2016;Karjaluoto, Mustonen & Ulkuniemi, 2015); however, they are modified when used because social media use and sales process stages suffer each other's influence. Finally, social media use in the sales process stages generates benefits for the organization (Andersson & Wikström, 2017;Bocconcelli et al, 2017;Karjaluoto et al, 2015;Lipiäinen, 2015).…”

Improvement Social Customer Relationship for Community Enterprise through using Gamification

“…And allowing customers to be able to control and do more activities on social media by themselves. These actions affect the brand image and customer loyalty [4] [10] in effect defines how businesses can personalize and build customer relationships [11].…”