Two definitions:
"The Six Million Dollar Man of relationship management: CRM software allows the institutions that use it to enjoy the benefits of the digital world by providing a technological way to combat the faceless disconnection associated with that sphere, thus unifying digitization with the customer expectation of high-quality, personalized service that has been brought about by the paradigm shift to user-centered commerce which has occurred in the last half-century." - Me
"CRM (customer relationship management) is an information industry term for methodologies, software, and usually Internet capabilities that help an enterprise manage customer relationships in an organized way." - Digital Dictionary
2. Why use CRM in a library?
In a world where we often minimal have face-to-face contact with library patrons, especially in academic libraries, CRM software is a way to fight disconnection by replicating the type of personalized service found in at neighborhood branch library where the staff knows their patrons by name.
CRM is also useful as a back-end organizational tool. Most CRM software is located on a cloud, which makes it accessible to anyone with a username and password to the site. Since everything (emails, meetings, tasks, projects) is recorded in one place, it is easy to share with all employees, instead of being stored only in individual people or in someone's email or files on their work computer. This also helps prevent the loss of information if job duties are transferred from one person to another.
However, because it is located on a cloud, it is good practice to keep a back-up of all files on local computers in case a server crashes. Cloud computing is great for sharing, but bad for storage: don't put all your eggs in one basket, no matter how shiny and pretty that basket may be.
3. How much does it cost?
Short answer: free to $$$$$$
You can get opensource CRM; Sugar is one popular company that has a free commmunity edition. The drawback to opensource software is that you are your own tech support.
Many smaller companies are very economical. I use Highrise from 37 Signals, whose prices ranges from $30/month for a single user to $150/month for unlimited users.
Then, of course, there are the giants like Oracle, which can be very expensive--thousands of dollars a year--depending on the size of your company.
4. What can CRM do, specifically?
A lot of things. CRM has a very wide range of functionality. You really need to look at your individual library and see what you need, and then find a software that does that.
Some questions to ask yourself:
- Do you want to use it to keep track of contacts with individuals or entities, such as professors or distributors or vendors? (Liaison/instruction librarians, reserves, technical services)
- Do you want to use it as a call center to report database and software problems? (Serials and journals)
- Do you want to use it to communicate with coworkers about projects? (many departments)
- Do you want it to have a calendar?
- Do you want it to keep track of tasks?
- Do you want to use it to display reports or data for employees to see?
- How many people are going to use this software?
5. CRM and bibliomining
CRM can hold a lot of data about a large range of things. This makes it useful for data mining, or biblio-mining as it's called in libraries. This is the process of using machine learning programs to go through large data sets and find patterns humans would have trouble seeing.
The data mining software can do the complex math for you, but it's up to you to apply your librarian expertise to see what the patterns and relations mean and if they're useful to you.
I will close this post with a couple screenshots from the free version of SugarCRM. Click on the images to see a larger version:
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