International Journal of Business and Social Science Volume 9 • Number 2 • February 2018 81 Improving E-Retailers Performance via Social CRM Capabilities Roberto Chierici Alice Mazzucchelli Francesca Ceruti Laura Gavinelli University of Milano-Bicocca Department of Business and Law Italy Abstract The widespread usage of social media has deeply transformed the mechanisms that e-retailers adopt to acquire customers’ information, interact and build relationships with them. In order to be successful in this new context, e-retailers need to integrate their customer relationship management (CRM) system with social media applications in order to develop new marketing capabilities, namely social CRM capabilities that are useful to achieve a superior competitive advantage. Hence, the aim of the study is to analyze the role and the impact of social CRM capabilities on customer relationship performance and financial performance, as outcomes. Data retrieved from 102 European e-retailers that actively use Facebook to engage customers have been processed with structural equation modelling technique. Findings contribute to marketing literature highlighting a strong relationship between social CRM capabilities and customer relationship performance and suggesting that only when those capabilities improve customer relationship performance, firms can significantly increase also financial performance. Keywords: Customer relationship management (CRM); Social CRM capabilities; Firm performance; Social media; E-retailer, 1 Introduction Traditionally in the retail environment, customer relationship management (CRM) has received a lot of attention from both academicians and practitioners (Doherty & Ellis‐ Chadwick, 2010; Guha, Harrigan, & Soutar, 2017; Lee‐ Kelley, Gilbert, & Mannicom, 2003), highlighting the importance of building and maintaining relationships with customers. This because retailers and, especially, e-retailers have shown a great ability and interest in monitoring customer decision-making process and buying behavior, and collecting information that can be useful to provide a superior customer experience (Constantinides, Romero, & Boria, 2008; Nadeem, Andreini, Salo, & Laukkanen, 2015; Oberoi, Patel, & Haon, 2017). More recently, the progress of CRM systems and processes and the advent of social media applications have sparked interest in their integration and in the development of new capabilities that allow firms to acquire a competitive advantage. Within the marketing literature, evidences have suggested that the merge of CRM systems with social media, namely social CRM (Greenberg, 2010; Malthouse, Haenlein, Skiera, Wege, & Zhang, 2013; Trainor, 2012), contributes to the development of a new concept of social CRM capabilities (Trainor, Andzulis, Rapp, & Agnihotri, 2014). It has emerged that social CRM capabilities, leading to a more collaborative and interactive organizational approach, enhance relationships between firms and customers. Therefore, social CRM capabilities can be seen as a combination of firms’ ability and competencies, social media resources, and customer-centric management systems that play a crucial role in fostering firms’ performances (Trainor et al., 2014; Z. Wang & Kim, 2017). Even if the extant literature have demonstrated that firms’ performances are affected by the ability to transform resources into capabilities (Barney, 1991; Day, 1994; Newbert, 2007), how to acquire and maintain superior business performances still remains of great interest for both academics and practitioners.