Second Life CRM Strategies, Assessment Example

The modern day business world is rife with competition. As businesses seek to take advantage of globalization of regional and international markets, it becomes imperative that they be able to retain existing customers as well as acquire new ones. In order for a business to be able to effectively manage the relationships with their customer’s, it has to be able to collect, filter and analyze information pertaining to its customers. Customer relationship management strategies can be employed to enhance the management of customer information.

CRM strategies can be employed to understand customer behavior. CRM strategies include the application of technology to collect customer information. However, these technologies have been developed and adapted for the analysis of customer information so as to identify underlying trends and patterns in customer buying strategies (Payne & Pennie, 2013). By effectively managing customer information, business are able to modify operations to guarantee customer satisfaction.

CRM strategies in Second Life are considerably different from those employed in the real world. Owing to the fact that Second Life is a virtual online platform that connects business and customers globally, companies have to adopt interaction techniques and modes that are best suited for the virtual environment (Zhang, Zhang, Ordóñez de Pablos, & Sun, 2014). Notably, business in the real world lose the ability to take advantage of a personal touch that is associated with face-to-face interactions, characteristic of the real world.

In conclusion, as a result of Second Life being operational on a virtual online platform, face-to-face interaction is considerably limited. As businesses have to employ virtual world interaction techniques, they lose the potential effect that the personal touch of face-to-face interaction holds. CRM strategies are therefore developed to ensure information that is collected from these strategies are as accurate as possible.

References

Payne, A., & Pennie, F. (2013). Strategic customer management : integrating relationship marketing and CRM.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Zhang, J. X., Zhang, H., Ordóñez de Pablos, P., & Sun, Y. (2014). Challenges and Foresights of Global Virtual Worlds Markets. Journal of Global Information Technology Management, 17(2), 69-73.