How Social Media Contributes to Retailing and Its Impact on Customer Relationship Management

HOW SOCIAL MEDIA CONTRIBUTES TO RETAILING AND ITS IMPACT ON CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT

Ng Hoong Fong

SNHU Department

Help College of Arts and Technology

Fraser Business Park, Kuala Lumpur

nhf_1993@hotmail.com

Rashad Yazdanifard

Help College of Arts and Technology

Fraser Business Park, Kuala Lumpur

rashadyazdanifard@yahoo.com

ABSTRACT

The retailing industry has found itself constantly evolving and transforming in the past two decades. Globalization and advanced technology developments have a very big impact on the retailing landscape. One of the major reasons for this process is the drastic increased growth of the internet and social media. The concept of social media has existed since the days of cave paintings but the internet has made things possible on a whole new scale. In this era, social media is one of the best opportunities available for a brand to connect with its customers. Social media is hot and it is the trend. Globally, customers that are buying the items that they wanted via virtual media had increased drastically. Traditional customer relationship management is not sufficient for a company to interact with customers. Social media has definitely changed the way big companies communicate with their customers. This study explains how social media contributes to retailing. Besides that, this study will also describe about the impacts social media have on customer relationship management.

Keywords: social media, customer relationship management

1. Introduction

Internet is now one of the most important channels of distribution right after high street retailing ever since its commercial launching about fifteen years ago and it is one of the major sources of empowerment and also customer information (Constantinides, Romer and Boria, 2008). The recent developments of internet, information technology and some other Web services had created a bigger area of opportunities in businesses especially retailing. The...