Challenges of customer experience management in social commerce: an application of social network analysis

Abstract

PurposeAs social media applications have turned into popular platforms for interacting with customers, creation of a consistent customer experience in social commerce has attracted the attention of many practitioners and academics. The migration to create and manage customer experience in social commerce has become an essential issue that will bring new challenges for companies. Despite the increasing investment in this area, few studies have been conducted on the challenges of managing customer experience in social commerce. To fill this theoretical gap, the current study aims at comprehensively exploring the main challenges of customer experience management (CEM) in social commerce and investigating their importance and possible effects in relation to each other.Design/methodology/approachUsing the mixed method, first, the main challenges regarding CEM in social commerce were identified by reviewing the related literature. Then the challenges were enriched and categorized by expert opinions. Next, the challenges and the categorizations were confirmed by conducting a survey analysis applying the t-test and the factor analysis method. Afterwards, the main challenges were identified and weighted. Finally, the Social Network Analysis (SNA) approach was applied to investigate the causal relationship network among the challenges.FindingsThe results indicated that the main challenges of CEM in social commerce can be categorized into eight groups. Their weights and causal effects were calculated to identify the high priority challenges. By calculating the main SNA metrics such as degree and betweenness centralities, the high priority challenges of CEM in social commerce were identified. It was revealed that challenges with high out-degree centrality can create many other challenges and those with high betweenness centrality act as intermediary points, through which cause challenges may create effect challenges.Research limitations/implicationsThe research results can help marketers to get a big picture of the challenges to successfully implement CEM in social commerce and select the appropriate migration strategies more effectively. They are further recommended to pay due attention to customers' issues as well as the organizational challenges of CEM in social commerce.Originality/valueSocial media has become a priority for businesses to create and improve the customer experience; yet there is no tool to identify the challenges of CEM in this context. This study addresses the overlooked but critically important area of social commerce. The most important contribution of this research is an attempt to provide a comprehensive and integrated framework of the challenges in implementing CEM in social commerce and explore the causal effects they may have on creation of other challenges using SNA.