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Top1. Introduction
Customers are through a transformation, and are changing their habits, thoughts and behavior across the commercial continuum and the world (Baker, 1998). Present day buyers are well educated, challenging, connected through technology and above all they are very social (Wagner, et al, 2011; Mittal, 2001). Today’s consumer and business customers are chatting on well-known social networking sites and this is the development of past few years. Everyone have now a wish to be connected with their peers through communities. The community members on various social networking sites try to establish a dialogue with other members at every level. The dialogues between the community members may be positive and negative both. The dialogue between the members on social platform energizes the companies to review their strategy of customer relationships.
Though the consumers are well informed but always want to increase their knowledge about products and services (Fournier, et al, 1998), especially when they are interested to purchase or recommend (Khalilabad, et al, 2006). Today getting information of a product is easier than years back. Just by clicking a search option on the Google can fulfill the desire. Time has made searching information easier through search engines. At the same time customers can tap into social media at any time, in any location, and from incredible devices (Khalilabad, et al, 2006; Olaf, et al, 2010). It would not be difficult to say that consumer demand is being understood and attempted throughout the networked world by uncontrollable power. Uncontrollable power is other companies’ community pages which propagates the negative issues of products and services. It is pertinent to mention that a satisfied and convinced customer can increase the gravity of a brand (Caceres, Paparoidamis, 2007) and can enhance the brand image overnight and at the same time dissatisfied and unconvinced customer can damage it through socially networked member (Wagner, et al, 2011). If a loyal customer due to negligence of a company moves to new product, than it is difficult to convert again him a loyal customer (Chaffey, 2010), on the other side it shall be an opportunity for competitors.
In the light of the above discussion, it can be said that the penetration of social media has now reached at amazing level and has now started affecting every sector of the business. The velocity of penetration is hastening and attacking the companies (Caceres, Paparoidamis, 2007). The answer for this attack is only social CRM (Morgan, & Hunt, 1994). In this paper, author offers a viewpoint on the challenges of CRM in present business scenario along with functioning of SCRM to leverage customer relationships in the emerging social marketplace by exploring and explicating detailed SCRM with examples.