Factors influencing the adoption of social media for effective service delivery: case of Safaricom Limited, Nairobi County, Kenya

Abstract

Social media is changing consumer behavior and workplace expectations. The important role of social media is to quickly discover trends, extract structured insights to the marketplace and quantify perceptions of an organization's products and services. Information about an organization's products and services are easily accessed via social networks, blogs, tweets, videos, pictures, and numerous other online tools. When customers perceive that the information is positive, the organization can benefit with new and repeat sales. If, however, the information is negative, and the organization does not respond, the organization can suffer. Social media has currently been embraced to offer services online via the social media platforms available currently such as twitter and Facebook. The purpose of this study is to analyze the factors influencing the adoption of social media for effective service delivery, a case of Safaricom limited. The objectives of the study was to assess the influence of reliability, accessibility and immediacy of social media on effective service delivery at Safaricom limited and also to assess the influence of social media to ease traffic on other channels of service delivery at Safaricom limited. The data was collected by means of questionnaires administered to 384 customers using the social media social sites for Safaricom limited. The data was collected from the respondents by use of a questionnaire administered to the respondents during the Safaricom Open days based in Nairobi and at the Safaricom retail outlets in Nairobi. A number of quantitative methods and techniques were used to collect and analyze data. Simple random sampling method was used to choose the respondents that participated in the study. The researcher pilot-tested the instruments by subjecting the instrument to a randomly selected social media users and then made necessary adjustments to the instrument. The scores obtained from the pilot objects were correlated to determine the instruments reliability. Obtained raw data were systematically organized, coded, analyzed through descriptive statistics with aid of a computer SPSS and Microsoft excel, finally data was presented using percentage, frequency distribution and cross tabulation tables. The study engaged respondents from social media users and as for reliability of social media in delivery of services 99% of the respondents were found to use social media to access services online cumulatively and 53% of the respondents never experience outages on social media channels meaning that the social media platforms or Servers supporting social media are quite reliable and 66% found the connection for assessing the social media fast. The respondents found it easy to access social media with 45% saying it's affordable, 17% of the respondents also indicated that they were served immediately when they seek services online and that 9% of the respondents would prefer to be served online as compared to other channels and cumulatively 49% of the customers were satisfied with the services received online. The study recommends the need to embrace this channel as a tool for delivering a reliable, accessible and timely service to customers and clients