Return to search

Leveraging customer engagement to improve the operational efficiency of social commerce start-ups

Yes / Despite the surge of literature on customer engagement (CE) in social media, few studies shed light on how to leverage CE to improve firms’ operational efficiency. This research proposes a fresh framework using social media data to improve demand forecasting accuracy, resulting in a cost-efficient inventory control strategy. Drawing upon the resource mobilization perspective in particular, this research quantifies the construct of CE from the view of input–output efficiency evaluation using the Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) model, and then leverages CE to forecast consumer online demand and reconfigure inventory management strategy. Using a 71-week data set from a social commerce start-up in China, this research shows that this new framework dramatically increases demand forecasting accuracy and reduces operational costs in inventory management. This study contributes to the literature by demonstrating the value of social media data in improving operational efficiency, particularly regarding inventory management. / National Natural Science Foundation of China (Project No. 71671152)

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:BRADFORD/oai:bradscholars.brad.ac.uk:10454/18673
Date23 November 2021
CreatorsLiu, Z., Han, S., Li, C., Gupta, S., Sivarajah, Uthayasankar
Source SetsBradford Scholars
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeArticle, Accepted manuscript
Rights© 2022 Elsevier. Reproduced in accordance with the publisher's self-archiving policy. This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)

Page generated in 0.0018 seconds