Social CRM Adoption and its Impact on Performance Outcomes: a Literature Review

Background and Purpose: Social customer relationship management (social CRM) is an emerging concept that integrates traditional CRM and social media in order to provide benefits for organizations and customers. Despite the benefits that social CRM can bring, many organizations are still at the early stage of adoption. To move beyond social marketing and to exploit opportunities offered by sales and customer service, organizations need to be aware of factors that drive social CRM adoption and different implications of social CRM adoption for performance outcomes. This paper aims to provide a review of scholarly literature on social CRM adoption with the focus on factors and performance outcomes. Design/Methodology/Approach: To provide a comprehensive view of social CRM adoption and its impact on performance outcomes, the publications of interest include scholarly journal papers from information systems and marketing disciplines and conference proceedings. Selected publications were reviewed, and findings classified into three categories: the extent of social CRM adoption, the factors influencing CRM adoption, and the impact of social CRM on performance outcomes. Results: It appears that several issues regarding social CRM adoption and its implications for performance outcomes as well as the actual use of social media in the context of CRM need additional empirical support. Conclusion: Our observations have confirmed that many researchers proposed social CRM models based on existing theories and concepts of traditional CRM. Nevertheless, some specifics of social media implications on CRM have been overlooked. The researchers therefore suggest further adjustment/extension of their models.