Modelling CRM in a social media age

Customer relationship management is a continually evolving domain that has been particularly affected by social media, which have revolutionised the way businesses and consumers interact. This paper on social CRM builds on a previous model of CRM prior to the growth of social media (Jayachandran et al., 2005). We present a new model for social CRM, including a new construct of customer engagement initiatives and adaptations of other constructs to cater for the impact of social media. An online survey was used to collect data from a population of marketing practitioners and partial least squares analysis was used to test the model. Findings show the importance of an underlying customer relationship orientation; how it impacts on social media technology use and customer engagement initiatives, and also directly on customer relationship performance. A relationship is also shown between engagement and relational information processes, which is viewed as a performance outcome of social CRM. Thus, from a managerial perspective, one recommendation we make is that organisations should utilise the rich customer information that is created with every customer engagement through social media to drive future marketing decisions. (C) 2014 Australian and New Zealand Marketing Academy. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.