Chapter 8.8, Problem 8.2ARQ

Explanation of Solution

Social media contributes to sales and marketing:

• Generally customers are already interacting with brands through SM. So, social media is a powerful way for spreading businesses to the customers.
• Organizations control their relationships with customers using organized processes and related info-system in the past.
• Traditional customer relationship management (CRM) manages customer.
• Social CRM is a social media-based CRM process and it is a dynamic process. It creates the relationship between organizations and customers.
• Social SRM is a peer-to-peer sale, which means buy or sell products and services directly with each other.
  • For example, in “Amazon.com” the customer can quickly look at the products and their reviews and buy the necessary products via online.

Social media contributes to customer support:

• Companies mention about themselves in SM for finding the customers. The customers are attracted by the companies’ blogs, wikis and then finally connect with the companies.
• Social media is one of the best ways for marketing business. Posting images, status about the business using social media for customer service can bring the business to the next level.
• Handling customers’ service issues through SM is a more convenient way to get in touch with customers.

Social media contributes to inbound and outbound logistics:

• Companies profit purely depends on the efficiency of their supply chain. The supply chain has long used info-system to improve both the proficiency and effectiveness of organized supply chain processes.
• Social media communities may offer better and faster solutions to difficult supply chain problems.
• The SM is designed for temporary content creation and feedback between networks of users and that characteristic simplifies the iteration and feedback needed for problem solving.

Social media contributes to manufacturing and operations:

• Social media play a vital role in developing supplier relationship, designing products and improving operational efficiencies.
• One of the SM process is crowd sourcing; it is a dynamic process of employing users to participate in product design and re-design.
• SM has been widely used in B2C (Business-to-Consumer) relationships to market products to end users.
• Manufacturers use SM by starting a blog that discuss the post interviews with experts, latest industry-related news and comments on new product innovations...