Improving E-Retailers Performance via Social CRM Capabilities

The widespread usage of social media has deeply transformed the mechanisms that e-retailers adopt to acquire customers’ information, interact and build relationships with them. In order to be successful in this new context, e-retailers need to integrate their customer relationship management (CRM) system with social media applications in order to develop new marketing capabilities, namely social CRM capabilities that are useful to achieve a superior competitive advantage. Hence, the aim of the study is to analyze the role and the impact of social CRM capabilities on customer relationship performance and financial performance, as outcomes. Data retrieved from 102 European e-retailers that actively use Facebook to engage customers have been processed with structural equation modelling technique. Findings contribute to marketing literature highlighting a strong relationship between social CRM capabilities and customer relationship performance and suggesting that only when those capabilities improve customer relationship performance, firms can significantly increase also financial performance.