Managing customer relationships through social media: - A case of Pakistan’s millennials

Abstract

In past few years, the trend of online shopping has drastically increased in Pakistan, it motivates the researcher to investigate social media usage in managing and building strong customer relations. Also, the current study aims to explore the impact of social media on millennial buying behavior in Pakistan with mediating effect of customer relationship. Overall the study includes three variables with one independent variable which is social media, dependent variable is millennial purchase behavior and customer relationships as mediating variable. Survey was conducted via online questionnaire made on Google forms in the google drive and it consist of 520 respondents. Respondents were sampled from university students of Islamabad and Rawalpindi Pakistan. Data collected from online survey was analyzed and interpreted by a statistical software called SPSS where different tests were carried out such as regression, correlation & Cronbach’s alpha to examine the relationship among social media and generation Y purchase behavior and Hayes process was used to analyze the mediating effect of customer relationships. The results of these tests discovered that there is significant positive correlation among the depending variable purchase behavior and the independent variable in the presence of customer relationships which was playing as the role of a mediating variable. All variables were reliable and interrelated with each other when tested in SPSS total item reliability statistics mechanism. Model summary also shows the Cronbach’s Alpha value greater that 0.7 and significance level of less than 0.01. In short, the findings collectively indicate that majority of millennial use social media as a tool for purchasing their routine life commodities as well as for major product decisions they search on social media for a specific product reviews, comments and brands’ social media reputation (ratings). This research investigation also confirmed that there is a significant positive relationship among social media and customer relationship. As well as social media and customer purchase behavior on social media are correlated to each other and yes customer relationship work as a mediator between both the independent variable (social media) and the dependent variable (millennial purchase behavior). This study offers valuable feedback and insights for global managers in managing and building strong customer relations globally through the effective use of social media.