Analytical Social CRM: Concept and Tool Support

Abstract The Social Web offers new opportunities, such as direct market access, interactive customer contact or a better understanding of market demands, in the field of customer relationship management (CRM). Consequently, firms develop new strategies, processes and technologies to utilise the Social Web for their needs. From the perspective of CRM, the Social Web creates an opportunity to directly include customer knowledge and shape a field called Social CRM (SCRM). Even though methods and tools for data extraction and media monitoring are already available, the analytical requirements of SCRM and necessary functionalities are open for research. This research explores the role of analytical SCRM and examines available tools with the required functional and technological components. The findings show that existing tools still have a limited functional scope which makes a ‘best-of-breed’ approach necessary. Finally, a concept for an integrated analytical SCRM system is proposed that comprises necessary SCRM components.