Emerged in 1994 customer relationship management is one of many marketing strategies that objectively to acquire and maintain a sustainable relationship between company and the customer (Lee et al., 2014). This concept has a broad scope of activities that cover entire customer life-cycle, involving company resources from front end to back end (Hasani et al. 2016; Malthouse et al., 2013). According to Steel, et al. (2013), CRM implementation can give benefit to increase customer loyalty, satisfaction, retention, and help companies to gain more revenue. Therefore, many companies that have been prioritising the effort of generating CRM (Yoon & Sims, 2014.)
Based on one previous study, the process of CRM implementation without technology is inefficient and wasteful (Hasani et al., 2017). Hence, in the era of the internet, technological development had brought innovative methods regarding new types of CRM, which is social CRM (Kubina & Lendel, 2015). Social CRM can be defined as the integrated strategies of CRM that utilise the dynamics of social media environment; where the customer has the power to influence others in their social network (Baird & Parasnis, 2011). Over the last ten years, the social media adoption has reached massive numbers; 500 million active Facebook user, 20 billion tweets were sent, and there were 85 million LinkedIn users located from 200 different countries (Baird & Parasnis, 2011). This statistic is a prove that social CRM has growth with amazing pace (Yoon & Sims, 2014.). On the other hands, one out of five key trends in CRM application; social CRM has growth over 50%, but only indicates below than 5% of all CRM spending (Chaffey & Smith, 2013). Therefore, without being affected by the massive amount of social media adopters, it is worth noting that the level of social CRM execution is still low, and the effectivity remains undiscovered (Trainor et al., 2014).
Finally, to close the gap on the latest studies, this research is conducted to discover the influence of social CRM in terms of purchasing fashion product in the online store. In the following section, literature reviews related to social CRM, fashion retailer, and consumer behaviour towards social CRM will be investigated.
Literature Review
Social CRM
With the massive number of social media adoption in the global scope, companies are started to feel the necessity to change their CRM game-plan, from traditional to social CRM (Baird & Parasnis, 2011). On the other hands, based on one of many past studies that investigated social CRM, the most significant problem of social CRM implementation arise because the business was lack of fund, there is skepticism of the result from management, and lack of data about technology and the market (Kubina & Lendel, 2015). Similarly, although many organisations have implemented CRM projects, there was a massive number who were not satisfied with the result due to knowledge deficiency (Steel et al., 2013).
According to Baird and Parasnis (2011), there are many companies understand how social media is an excellent channel to engage the customer and have aggressively implemented social CRM. However, the companies still have many doubts regarding the return on investment, scarcity of the new approach. Additionally, Chaffey & Smith (2013), also found that the critical problem with social CRM in the company are still poorly executed and has not entirely explored, due to unfamiliarity with the most current social CRM method and how to proceed the strategy.
As the result of this, it is noteworthy to stated that social CRM can be used as new added value, but most of the retailers are unable to match their expectation or hesitate with the execution of this strategy. The fear of un-known exist due to lack of knowledge, funds, management skepticism, and risk-averse behavior towards the innovation.
Although many studies have investigated about adoption of social or electronic CRM in terms of organisational context, one review points out that “the future research studies may also take up the opportunity to explore deeper customer insight into the how customers utilize the unstructured information available on multiple social channels to take decision” (Awasthi and Sangle, 2012, p. 461).
Fashion Product in Online Retail
In Indonesia, the industry of online retail has been rising at a significant rate. Based on the report regarding online retail in Indonesia by Marketline (2016), fashion product value share was approximately at 36%, which was the highest percentage compared to the other product category. Moreover, all of the product categories are expected to continue to keep growing actively in the future. Therefore, to narrow down the scope, this research will be focus on how to maximize social CRM from customer perspective on fashion online purchasing, as forecasted to be the highest value growth in 2015, compared to the other category in Indonesia. (Cunningham, 2015).