Title: Relative efficiency of social CRM software: a hybrid fuzzy AHP/DEA approach

Authors: V. Raj Kumar; L. Suganthi

Addresses: Department of Management Studies, College of Engineering, Guindy, Anna University, Chennai, 600-025, Tamil Nadu, India ' Department of Management Studies, College of Engineering, Guindy, Anna University, Chennai, 600-025, Tamil Nadu, India

Abstract: In today's tech-savvy society, social media platforms revolutionise the way in which people communicate and share information with each other. These platforms enable customers to instantly and openly convey their opinions, criticisms and praises on various topics pertaining to products and brands. Hence it becomes imperative for organisations to integrate social media information into their CRM strategy. In this paper, relative efficiency of the social CRM packages using fuzzy AHP/DEA: AR-CCR was determined by considering price as the input criterion and functionality, product quality and customer support as output criteria. Using fuzzy AHP it was found that product quality (41.66%) is the most important criteria followed by functionality (33.29%) and customer support (25.05%). Pipedrive and Really Simple Systems were found to be relatively more efficient. In this manner a social CRM package that best fits an organisation's customer-centric work culture is selected. The social CRM vendors can utilise these results to benchmark their packages against their competitors.

Keywords: customer relationship management; social media; fuzzy analytical hierarchical process; data envelopment analysis; relative efficiency.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBIS.2019.099525

International Journal of Business Information Systems, 2019 Vol.31 No.1, pp.27 - 44

Accepted: 26 Aug 2017
Published online: 08 May 2019 *

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