Olaf Reinhold

Social-Customer-Relationship-Management (Social-CRM)

The interaction between Internet users is at the heart of the Social Web, which has seen a rapid growth in recent years. According to current estimations, more than 1.2 billion Social Media users exist worldwide (eMarketer 2012) with some 29.6 million in Germany (Destatis 2012). While a majority (74 %) of the German population was online in 2010 (Initiative D21 2011), more than half (64 %) of this share was also active in the Social Web (Faktenkontor 2011). This social activity combines a passive part (e.g., the consumption of content in forums) and an active part (e.g., the production of content by users) (Parker and Thomas 2012). Although widespread end-user devices, such as PCs and laptops, constitute the primary access technologies, the diffusion of mobile technologies, in particular smartphones, is expected to foster a further growth of locationand context-specific postings. Indeed, two in five Social Media users already access these services via mobile devices (Nielsen 2011). For businesses, the Social Web means a challenge in the area of customer relationship management (CRM). Social Web users not only share private information (Foster et al. 2010), but also use the Social Web to search for products or to share recommendations and experiences with friends or other users (Tripp and Grégoire 2011). From a CRM perspective, this represents a shift from the traditional indirect customer contact through sales representatives, customer advisors, and call center agents towards a direct customer contact with consumers. Remarkably, more credibility is attributed to the postings and opinions of other users than to corporate communication: in a survey among 4,230 German Internet users, a mere 22 % trusted corporate communications, whereas the majority (67 %) felt more inclined to believe information from private contacts (Faktenkontor 2011). On the one hand, the Social Web enables companies to learn about opinions, experiences, and developments which may be useful to develop and improve products. In addition, escalating discussions in the Social Web may have negative impact on a company’s image and often come to corporate attention by accident. On the other hand, companies may communicate and interact directly with consumers, either in campaigns or for service purposes. Currently, most companies lack a systematic strategy and organization for their Social Web activities, and establishing a profile page or membership on a social network is often regarded as sufficient. However, the Social Web is an additional communication channel to potential customers and requires the definition of company-wide policies, strategies, processes, and information systems (IS). Based on a collection of application examples, this paper motivates the main activities of Social CRM and the IS which are necessary to tap the potentials of interactive “one-to-one” relationships with many customers. For example, knowledge from the Social Web may enrich existing market data with insights from consumers, and ultimately also enhance the reach and the effectiveness of customer interaction. Thus, Social CRM activities have the potential to increase customers’ identification with a company or a brand, to improve the information quality of campaigns with statements or classifications from other users and to make the interaction more interesting by employing appropriate location-based loyalty and incentive mechanisms. Overall, the Social Web is turning into a competitive necessity for CRM, particularly in sectors with end-customer contact.

Social Customer Relationship Management (Social CRM)

The interaction between Internet users is at the heart of the Social Web, which has seen a rapid growth in recent years. According to current estimations, more than 1.2 billion Social Media users exist worldwide (eMarketer 2012) with some 29.6 million in Germany (Destatis 2012). While a majority (74 %) of the German population was online in 2010 (Initiative D21 2011), more than half (64 %) of this share was also active in the Social Web (Faktenkontor 2011). This social activity combines a passive part (e.g., the consumption of content in forums) and an active part (e.g., the production of content by users) (Parker and Thomas 2012). Although widespread end-user devices, such as PCs and laptops, constitute the primary access technologies, the diffusion of mobile technologies, in particular smartphones, is expected to foster a further growth of locationand context-specific postings. Indeed, two in five Social Media users already access these services via mobile devices (Nielsen 2011). For businesses, the Social Web means a challenge in the area of customer relationship management (CRM). Social Web users not only share private information (Foster et al. 2010), but also use the Social Web to search for products or to share recommendations and experiences with friends or other users (Tripp and Grégoire 2011). From a CRM perspective, this represents a shift from the traditional indirect customer contact through sales representatives, customer advisors, and call center agents towards a direct customer contact with consumers. Remarkably, more credibility is attributed to the postings and opinions of other users than to corporate communication: in a survey among 4,230 German Internet users, a mere 22 % trusted corporate communications, whereas the majority (67 %) felt more inclined to believe information from private contacts (Faktenkontor 2011). On the one hand, the Social Web enables companies to learn about opinions, experiences, and developments which may be useful to develop and improve products. In addition, escalating discussions in the Social Web may have negative impact on a company’s image and often come to corporate attention by accident. On the other hand, companies may communicate and interact directly with consumers, either in campaigns or for service purposes. Currently, most companies lack a systematic strategy and organization for their Social Web activities, and establishing a profile page or membership on a social network is often regarded as sufficient. However, the Social Web is an additional communication channel to potential customers and requires the definition of company-wide policies, strategies, processes, and information systems (IS). Based on a collection of application examples, this paper motivates the main activities of Social CRM and the IS which are necessary to tap the potentials of interactive “one-to-one” relationships with many customers. For example, knowledge from the Social Web may enrich existing market data with insights from consumers, and ultimately also enhance the reach and the effectiveness of customer interaction. Thus, Social CRM activities have the potential to increase customers’ identification with a company or a brand, to improve the information quality of campaigns with statements or classifications from other users and to make the interaction more interesting by employing appropriate location-based loyalty and incentive mechanisms. Overall, the Social Web is turning into a competitive necessity for CRM, particularly in sectors with end-customer contact.

Customer Context and Social CRM: A Literature Review and Research Agenda.

Social Media have emerged as further source of information for businesses. Data from Social Media have the potential to enable companies in better understanding and serving their customers. This requires the combination of two perspectives – the inside-out view underlying traditional CRM applications on the one and the out-side-in view inherent in the rather dynamic and situation-specific data from e.g. So-cial Media on the other hand. The latter form the basis for understanding customer context, which is explored in this paper. This paper contributes to existing research by developing a customer context model and related information through conducting a structured literature review. It then proposes a matching of Social Media data from Twitter to the model and discusses available data sources of context infor-mation. The overall aim is to support customer-dominant business strategies by building up on the Social CRM approach.

Social CRM: Biggest Challenges to Make it Work in the Real World

The ways of communication and social interactions are changing and web users are becoming increasingly engaged with Online Social Networks (OSN). This fact has significantly impact in the relationship mechanisms between companies and customers. Thus, a new approach to perform Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is arising, the Social CRM (SCRM). Aiming to identify state of art, a literature review was conducted to demonstrate the current state of knowledge about the topic. In addition, expert interviews and events organized by researchers involved in this project, helped in challenges validation. As main contributions, it is possible to highlight: (i) identification, categorization and discussion of SCRM most prominent challenges; and (ii) construction of a SCRM service portfolio; (iii) estimation of the distance between state of art and state of practice. Therefore, the results obtained point out a number of future research directions, demonstrating that Social Customer Relationship Management is an emerging and promising research topic.

Social Media Analytics Using Business Intelligence and Social Media Tools – Differences and Implications

The increasing amount of content created in Social Media platforms is calling for sophisticated filters that separate relevant from non-relevant content. Social Media Analytics (SMA) is a field that addresses this challenge by the development of strategies, methods and technologies to automate this filtering process. This work in progress paper presents an experiment, which examined two Social Media (SM) applications as well as two Business Intelligence (BI) applications for the analysis of tweets. The overall goal is to identify differences of these tool categories with regard to the analytics process itself as well as the obtained results. Using the scenario of a fitness tracking application for smartphones, data from Twitter was collected and analyzed with applications of both categories. The findings show (1) differences between BI and SM application, (2) challenges resulting from the different analytics processes, and (3) hints for decision makers as well as data analysts when to use which category for analyzing social content.

Exploring Context from the Consumer Perspective: Insights from eBusiness and Health Care

Many electronic services are not used in isolation, but in the context of a specific user. This user, customer or patient perspective is different from the perspective of service providers since customer processes usually involve multiple service providers. Information on the context helps to understand these user needs and to improve the coordination among services. This research in progress paper examines existing contributions as a basis towards an understanding of the concept and modeling of “context” from a context provider’s perspective and proposes a preliminary model, which also serves to analyze four use cases. The paper summarizes challenges observed in these cases and presents an agenda for further research.

A Semantic BI Process for Detecting and Analyzing Mentions of Interest for a Domain in Tweets

Social media posts and other time-stamped text can carry lots of useful information. However, their proper analysis requires capturing the semantics of what is mentioned in their contents, filtering what is of interest for particular application domains, and structuring the extracted information for analytical purposes. This work proposes an approach to analyze the incidences of mentions of interest for some domain in these texts, by combining Semantic Web and Business Intelligence (BI) technologies. This approach is supported by an automatic ETL process that semantically annotates textual clips with Linked Open Data (LOD), filters LOD resources of interest in the annotations by using bridges between LOD classes and a high-level domain ontology, and adapts existing LOD hierarchies accordingly to serve as analysis dimensions. Experimental results show that our proposal: (i) is able to find a considerable number of mentions to things of interest for business in tweets recently sent from Brazil; (ii) allows the identification of the most mentioned (classes of) things of interest; and (iii) enables new useful queries for information analysis on data cubes with some dimensions derived from existing LOD hierarchies.

Capturing customer context from social media: mapping social media API and CRM profile data

The evolution of the social web opens a new channel that allows bidirectional electronic interactions directly with customers in real-time. By accessing social media content via application programming interfaces (API), businesses may enrich their information on customers, which are usually represented in customer profiles. However, these profiles are often incomplete since additional meaningful data on the customers context are missing. Based on this idea, this research in progress paper describes first ideas on how data from social media, which are available through API, may be matched with customer profiles via a customer context model.

Improving relationship management in universities with sentiment analysis and topic modeling of social media channels: learnings from UFPA

Online Social networking (OSN) platforms such as Facebook, daily have a massive number of users and content being created. Users of such services have the power to share opinions and influence others. This creates an interesting scenario, where brands and institutions can have a digital presence to interact directly with their target audience. Universities around the world are also using those platforms for reaching out their students and staff, acting as a new channel for services and public relations. Social Customer Relationship Management (SCRM) principles can be applied in this scenario, for universities, and help them on the management of this relationship with their public. Thus, this work aims to apply SCRM methodology for a university Facebook fan page, through techniques of Sentiment Analysis (SA) and topic modeling (TM) using Latent Dirichlet Allocation, in order to find topics people are complimenting or complaining about in their comments. The main goal is to improve SCRM processes through the results and insights provided by those techniques. The final discussion with the communications professionals from UFPA university has revealed the experiments and insights provided in this work are valuable for their social media (SM) management workflow.

Social CRM-Anwendungsbeispiele

Vier Fallbeispiele aus der Unternehmenspraxis illustrieren in diesem Kapitel die Moglichkeiten des Social CRM. Nach einer Charakterisierung der Unternehmen gehen die Kapitel jeweils auf die verwendeten Social Media-Plattformen, die Anwendung in den CRM-Kernbereichen und die Realisierung des Social CRM ein.