An exploration of the factors influencing social CRM adoption: Evidence from Australian firms

Businesses around the world are placing increasing emphasis on effectively improving relationships with customers by using social media. This idea is called social customer relationship management (Social CRM) – an emerging concept that includes strategies, processes and technologies to link social media with traditional CRM processes. Despite growing attention being paid to this concept, there is very limited empirical evidence on what determines the adoption of Social CRM by private firms. Using a large-scale sample of 1,025 Australian firms, we explore several factors (firm size, industry sector, type of market served, and the perception of barriers) that may affect Social CRM adoption. We find that the uptake of Social CRM increases with firm size, and service firms are more likely than manufacturing firms to adopt Social CRM. Firms that sell to individual customers tend to adopt Social CRM more than those that sell to other companies or other divisions of their firm. Three types of barriers negatively associated with Social CRM adoption include costs outweighing benefits, rigid organisational culture and lack of management support, whilst a positive association observed for the barriers related to high financial cost and employee misuse of social media tools.