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International Conference on Business Information Systems

BIS 2020: Business Information Systems Workshops pp 215–228Cite as

Outsourcing of Social CRM Services in German SMEs

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing ((LNBIP,volume 394))

Abstract

Outsourcing is a common market practice that supports companies to focus on the development of their core business. Innovative SMEs, especially, can highly benefit from this support. Although outsourcing is commonly adopted in the field of Digital Marketing, services are changing as companies require more analytical and technological skills from suppliers. These new demands overlap with the concept of Social CRM and its integration of social media data into CRM tools to improve insights on customers. Based on Social CRM services, as well as the reasons for companies to outsource, this paper provides insights on current practices derived from a questionnaire applied to SMEs in Germany. Results show that German SMEs outsource to increase customer satisfaction, focusing on core business, service quality and cost reduction. Additionally, they invest more on services related to the interaction between brand and customers on social media. These results support companies in the field to understand the current and future demands and service suppliers to focus on specific needs when approaching German SMEs.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://www.typeform.com/.

  2. 2.

    https://forumdigitalermittelstand.de/.

  3. 3.

    https://dmexco.com/de/.

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Acknowledgement

The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial support of this research by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) within the project ‘Social CRM as Specialization Subject in Brazilian Universities’ (57449332) and the Sächsische Aufbaubank and European Union within the ESF project SPE4CRM (100362354).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Social CRM Research Center, Leipzig, Germany

    Julio Viana, Olaf Reinhold & Rainer Alt

  2. Leipzig University, Leipzig, Germany

    Maarten van der Zandt, Olaf Reinhold & Rainer Alt

Authors
  1. Julio Viana
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  2. Maarten van der Zandt
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  3. Olaf Reinhold
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  4. Rainer Alt
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Julio Viana .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Poznań University of Economics and Business, Poznan, Poland

    Witold Abramowicz

  2. University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, CO, USA

    Gary Klein

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Viana, J., van der Zandt, M., Reinhold, O., Alt, R. (2020). Outsourcing of Social CRM Services in German SMEs. In: Abramowicz, W., Klein, G. (eds) Business Information Systems Workshops. BIS 2020. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 394. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61146-0_17

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61146-0_17

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