The Impact Of Social Media On Customer Management: A Case Study Of Emirates Airline Essay.

The Role of Social Media in Customer Management

Discuss about the Crisis Communication and Emergency Management.

The rise of social media has a great impact on the process through which a customer makes decisions regarding purchases along with making interaction with the brands with the customers with the help of purchases cycle.  Most of the organizations understand the concept of promotion using social media. However, few people comprehend the way to make value for particular attribute. In the present study, use of social media in order to manage business is described.

Newman (2017) stated that Emirates Group is one of the top global brands with strong corporate culture. The organization has entered through cargo shipping and continuously enhances as well as renews their services in the airline. In addition, the organization manages the requirements of target audience and decision for focusing on diversified market. The company does not provide several places in the USA.  However, it focuses on their high-end acquisitions as well as diversification. However, the company does not provide facilities for budget travelers as well as personalized services (White 2016). The company has developed continuously for new generations and advanced airline with the aviation services. The competitor organizations for instance Gulf Air and Eihad are considered as major threats.

In present situation, it becomes difficult to manage customers effectively as competence is increasing day by day. Rapid development of information and communication technology helps organizations to communicate with customers and know their demands. However, it becomes difficult to use appropriate social media tool that can provide competitive benefits to the organization.

Social media produces a massive amount of data related to the customers in real time (Piotrowicz and Cuthbertson 2014). Through daily activity as well as social listening, related customer data as well as use of information makes the business smarter. On the other hand, it increase brand awareness as well as loyalty. Social ads are considered as one of the most inexpensive ways in order to promote business as well as distribute content. These are powerful in terms of targeting options so that it is helpful to research to right audience. Apart from these, use of social media is helpful to generate higher converting leads. Social media is also helpful for increasing sales as well as customer retention by making regular interaction along with timely service. In addition, use of social media is helpful to provide rich customer experience.  A report by Aberdeen Group has shown that the organizations involving in social customer service can gain more profit.

Kotter 8-Step Process for Change Management

Social media such as Twitter is also one of the largest places for an active group of people known as ‘trolls’. These people have the sole intention of negatively impacting anyone who is not aligned with their ideals. The queries or the feedback posted by an unhappy customer might be a troller in disguise. They might post various comments on the twitter account page of Emirates Airlines. This will impact the business of the company as not many people are aware of the concept of trolling and might consider the negative feedback from such a person as true (Pearlson et al. 2016). On the other hand, there is immediate future as well as long term to be the best in the projects. There are various process lied in the success of the organization.

Knox, Marston and Imort (2016) commented that provided birth to social media. Social media has been used in various context associated with distinctive technologies and the thing for accomplishment. Hajli (2015) stated that the process makes the web-based technologies in order to transform as well as media monologues into the social media dialogues.

The social media technology supports democratization of knowledge as well as transforming information from the content consumes to the producers. Hence, people can rely more on the social media in order to learn regarding the events. There are several social media websites like Facebook, Orkut, MySpace, Google+, LinkedIn, Youtube and Twitter (Siamagka et al. 2015). LinkedIn is used for mainstream social networking sites. On the other hand, Facebook, Orkut, MySpace and Google+ have the purposes for mainstream performance.  Wikipedia is used as the open-source online source encloypedia.

Kavanagh and Johnson (2017) stated that various advantages are generally observed as it raises marketing return on the investment as well as development of product quality. The social CRM form has technological standpoint bridges with traditional CRM. Hence, complete picture can be developed when various elements weaved across social media and integrated as the part of operations. Organizations working closely with the customers need to co-create ideas for product service.

 Kotter 8 step process is helpful to analyze the strategy taken by Emirate Airline. In the first step, it is required to create urgency. For change to happen, it assists the entire organization to work on it. Development of the urgency plan would be helpful to achieve the need of changes. It is important to identify threats and develop scenarios for future. Analysis of the opportunities could be exploited through it. In the second step, it is required to develop a powerful coalition where it is required to convince people that change is essential.

Challenges of Social Media in Customer Management

Finding effective change leaders in the organization is helpful for the organization. Use of Twitter can be useful to influence people requiring work as a team.  In addition, using Twitter is useful for creating vision of change. Communicating the vision as using Twitter is helpful to generate strong competition with others. On the other hand, removing Obstacles as privacy and security issues need to be assessed (Stieglitz et al. 2014). Moreover, creating short-term wins as short-time benefit for using social media for customer management is helpful for the organization. Apart from these, develop on the change of demands and anchor the changes in making corporate culture is required to achieve for implying social media as Twitter for the organization.

While adopting social CRM, there are several challenges. The vital part is privacy of the user data. Using social listening tool can only access public data. There are regulations for preventing storage as well as usage of the information. Social media uses the applications for newer channels like micro blogs as well as communities that lead to higher customer association with the organizations as well as brands (Stieglitz et al. 2014). However, the ID of social media requires to be verified for preventing information with the unauthorized persons. It also provides different aspects that look to the readiness for adopting SCM for gaining future opportunity.

Customer relation management tool is used for understanding the role of social media in business. In the current context, Emirates Airline has been selected as case study organization. Moreover, as an internal solution Yammer is considered. The use of twitter in customer relation management is described in the study. 

However, there are several limitations faced by Emirate Airline in using Twitter as customer management tool. The most important limitation is selecting mixed method approach as it can lead to make the process effective. On the other hand, in order to clarify tendency of the process, it is required to make direction of the process (Simon et al. 2015). Cross-functional strategies would be helpful for creation of enhanced shareholder value by making proper relationships with the customers as well as customer segments. CRM is viewed as the strategic management approach concerned with the use of data as well as technology along with the process of integration. Strategic management approach is helpful for diffusion of the knowledge of customers. In order to sum up the attempts for establishing the functions and management of the process, long-term relationship as well as customer exchanges for customer relationship lifecycle would be useful.

Customer Relationship Management and a Holistic Approach

The perspectives are sales, relationships as well as management activities for differentiating each other in the process. The network perspective includes highest depth of the asset of customers as well as scope of the process (Parveen et al. 2015). It is important to give attention on the perspectives for important interactions between the organization as well as its customers. A holistic approach can be helpful for making cross-functional approach, which is supported by strategies and technologies along with the process involved in the system. There are several advantages of using social media platforms in order to provide beneficial value.

Westerman, Spence and Van Der Heide (2014) mentioned that generation of proper market intelligence for current as well as future requirements can be helpful for market orientation. Stemming from the implication of market orientation is one of the approaches for gaining better relationship in marketing principle implied a competitive benefits gained as well as sustained by fulfilling the demands of the customers. Sharing is one of the comparable ideas of information reciprocity where consumer interacting as well as sharing information is encouraged by multiple activities. It leads to a positive effect on the ability of the organization. Sharing SM tools can be helpful to give advantage on the user exchange.

Emirates Airlines has one of the largest customer bases among other competitor airlines that currently dominate the global airlines market. Social media can be used to reach the highest number of customers who use their services (Xu et al. 2016).  IBM  has signed ten-year technology service agreement with Emirates Airline that is approximately $300 million. In this perspective, it is important to develop effective communication plan that could be achieved with the help of social media.

People check their social media accounts more frequently than their email accounts and therefore social media is one of the greatest tool that can be used to promoting a healthy customer-airlines relationship. Emirates Airlines can use Twitter to connect with their customer base to handle their queries and any issues that they might have faced while using the service at Emirates Airlines. The customer can post their queries or issues on the Twitter account page of Emirates Airlines. A select team of experts will attend to such queries and would solve them within a fixed amount of time. Such a technique is useful as most of the time the customer might face technical troubles while calling the company and the calls does not always connect to the right department who would sole the issue (Prpi? et al. 2015). Many times, it has been observed that connecting to the right department to solve a particular issue takes time and the customer might not be able to always afford such time. It only takes a few seconds to post a complaint or a query on the account page and therefore it saves a lot of the customer’s time.

Benefits of Social Media in Customer Management

Twitter has one of the highest user base and therefore it can be safely expressed that most of the customers of Emirates Airlines will be able to sue this tool. Familiarity is one of the best tools that can be used by a company to make a customer comfortable in an unknown environment. Therefore, a customer might be hesitant to call or email to leave a feedback to the company, they would be easily using their Twitter access to do the same. Leaving a few words of feedback on the Emirates Airlines Twitter account page will therefore be beneficial for the customer and for the company. However, several issues like dealing with privacy are one of the major challenges of the organization. Hence, it is required to use DPA principle for using social media in marketing management.

The first principle of Data protection principle needs to be processed lawfully. Second principle shall be obtained for more specified process. Third principle shall be adequate, related as well as not excessive related to the purpose of the organization. Personal data in Twitter of Emirates Airline need to be accurate, whereas fifth principle processes personal data. Seventh principle implies technical as well as organizational measures. On contrary, eighth principle help to ensure personal data that should not be transferred out of the nation or territory.

Channeling the feedback to the correct department has always been an issue in large companies. Most of the times, the call ends up at the wrong department or the email is lost among a huge stack of other more important emails. Therefore, the tweet on the Twitter holds an individualistic approach and the members at the company see to it that the feedback or the query of the customer reaches the correct department (Wang et al. 2018). The most important factor being understandability of the priority level. Every organization has to deal with different issues every day and it is the responsibility of the managers to segregate the issues based on their priorities and then act accordingly. Due to this segregation, it is seen that most of the time the customers might not be given enough priority (Ngai et al. 2015). However, customers are the source of revenue and must be treated with the highest priority among all other operations and using Twitter will definitely assist in achieving that.

Marketing strategies can be integrated with the Customer relationship management. CRM allows such marketing strategies whereas other marketing tools do not allow it. The company can solve the query or the feedback by the individual customers within a stipulated amount of time and use that to advertise their competency to their existing customers as well as to their potential customers. Shore, Bernstein and Lazer (2015) commented that customers can be reached out and communicated with easily using Twitter. Studies show that people are more open to replying to messages on Twitter than an email that they have received. The human mind works in such a manner that makes answering or getting a directed reply in a group or public chat group as more rewarding. The Social media tools such as Twitter utilize this aspect of the human behavior. The customers of the company will openly share their feedback and reply to messages if it is seen by them that they are being paid attention to.

Conclusion

Social media is very easy to use. However, implementing it effectively to serve the objectives of the company might be tough. The people chosen to handle the queries from the social media must be adept and diplomatic in their approach to the different problems that they might face while representing the company on such a huge platform. Additional training might have to be provided to the staff who are not familiar at handling social media and the CRM. Training is an absolute necessity when it comes to handling an important portfolio in a company such as Emirates Airlines whose revenue is entirely dependent on the satisfaction level of their customers.

Using a CRM with integrated social media like Twitter is more helpful for large companies such as Emirates Airlines, as it aids in minimizing information overload. Information overload generally happens when there are a lot of information to sort through that has arrived through emails. Information overload is one of the factors that affects many companies and creates a situation with poor customer management skills. Emirates Airlines can therefore use this tool for effective customer management as they will not be facing any information overload due to using the social media. All the queries will be viewed and solved by the right person at the company and none of the feedback will get lost in the huge mass of emails.

Social media is currently one of the most highly used platform that the people are using to connect with each other worldwide. Twitter is one of the platforms and there are several others such as Facebook and LinkedIn. The following is a list of recommendations for Emirates Airlines:

It is highly recommended that Emirates Airlines expand their social media presence from Twitter to Facebook. This is because there might be some users who would be using both of the platforms at the same time. However, the probability of that happening is very low. Most of the users are either on Facebook or on Twitter. Therefore, if Emirates Airlines expand their presence from Twitter to Facebook, then they would be connected with those existing and potential customers who use Facebook only and not Twitter. The company would be able to establish a more stable relationship with the customers on both the platforms. Facebook however also consist of ‘trolls’ who would be defaming the company on their Facebook page by posting various fake news and socially unacceptable and upsetting comments.

LinkedIn is another social media platform that has a lower number of users than Facebook or Twitter. However, all of its users are either corporate executives or business conglomerates. Large business conglomerates mean a large base of potential customers who can be approached to provide airline services. Emirates Airlines will be able to generate a huge number of revenue through targeted marketing strategy using this platform. The users of this platform generally do not use other forms of social media platforms such as Twitter or Facebook. This is because those platforms might have some content that the LinkedIn users are unwilling to view.

From the above discussion, it can be concluded that social media has an important role for managing customers in efficient way. In the present context, use of Twitter has been evaluated as customer management tool for Emirates Airline. In addition, social media holds unprecedented potential for the organizations in order to get the customers closer and facilitate the increased revue, cost minimization as well as market feedback research. CRM assists business in streaming operation as well as enhance dealing with customers. Nowadays, consumers like to use social CRM in order to share information regarding interests.

A suitable training module must be implemented by the company to train its employees in using social media both at a commercial level and at a personal level. This training module can be used to incorporate a subtle marketing as well as customer relationship regime in the company. The employee base and their connections across multiple social media platforms can be used for this purpose. The fundamental tactics behind this strategy is that the employee can partake in their individual attempt to satisfy the customers of the company by redirecting the queries and the feedback to the company’s social media pages. It must be advocated that this method will benefit the company and will be serving to achieve the common goals and objectives. However, in dire situations the company can also incentivize the process as that would motivate the employees to work effectively in the situation.

Therefore, by using this targeted approach, the company will be able to solve their queries, utilize their valuable feedback and use the opportunity to generate more business leads and a huge business pipeline. LinkedIn provides an added advantage as the platform is devoid of any ‘troller’. This is primarily because the platform only allows professionals.

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