Social Media as Social Customer Relationship Management Tool: Case of Jordan Medical Directory

Introduction

Medical tourism is the concept applied on travelling people from their country to another country for medical treatment purposes, either due to cost problems or to achieving a better experience either through better doctors or medical centers that are not available in their own communities (Horowitz, Jeffrey, & Christopher, 2007). Based on IMTJ Medical Travel Awards, Jordan present a wise and smart choice to rely on, due to their Private Hospitals Associations, highly qualified doctors and highly efficient equipped medical centers, Jordan attracts up to 250,000 international patients in 2012, with total revenues exceeding 1B US$, and won the Medical Destination of the year award in 2014, and was nominated to the position of International hospital of the year (IMTJ, 2014).

Medical tourism reflects a wide range of concepts and areas, where the main objective of the process is to gain medical care in all forms, either as routine checks, attending regular appointments, applying tests and simple surgeries, or more serious processes; patients still intended to gain more benefits of their travels by visiting tourism sites. Recently, this has created an evolutionary trend in Jordan, where an increasing number of licensed private businesses applied these services, where it creates huge benefits: economic wide, tourist wide, and social wide. To insure success in this domain, decision makers and managers should distinguish their services among other competitors, hence customers “patients” are the leader power of this business; then creating sustainable, robust, and efficient relationships with customers create main dimensions in any strategy.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) can be defined as the process of building a long sustainable relationship with current customers, encourage them to retain to business, and to attract new customers, by providing extra benefits and attention to customers and getting back extra revenue for the business (Injazz & Popovich, 2003). Information technology had provided a revolution in managing business in general including managing customer’s relationships, to manage this process electronically (Winer, 2001), creativity utilization of eCRM will enable institutions to: collect and analyze customer pattern data, customer behavior interpretation, products/services delivery to customers, and development of service-level increase models (Winer, 2001; Bahrami, Ghorbani, & Arabzad, 2012; Godfrey, Seiders, & Voss, 2011), customers and suppliers satisfaction can be enhanced by the following marketing and supply management tools (Hüttinger, Schiele, & Veldman, 2012):

• 1.

  Collecting extensive volumes, long-term commitments, and exclusivity agreements.

• 2.

  Sharing internal information and broad communication.

• 3.

  Display a readiness to change behavior in the purchasing organization.

• 4.

  Respond quickly to requests from suppliers.

CRM focuses on applying a full service with a fruitful experience through three different levels, pre-process, in-process, and post-process. Where it is essential to encourage new potential customers through pre-process activities such as providing a higher expected value through lower price to the potential customers, in-process provides a flexible honest process, and added value to the introduced product/service, while post-process activities include providing extra effort, to serve customers who have purchased. Retaining current customers require putting your attention on all three phases and focus particularly on the in-process and post-process phases,