Seeman, E. D., & O'Hara, M. (2006). Customer relationship management in higher education: Using information systems to improve the student-school relationship. Campus-Wide Information Systems, 23(1), 24-34.
What: Case study of the implementation of a CRM system in the North Carolina community college system
Why: The community college system (NCCCS) needed a better way to organize information than the information system they had at the time.
Summary: Seeman and O'Hara give a general overview of CRM, focusing on the benefits of such a system to a postsecondary educational institution, followed by a brief history of community colleges in the United States. They then get into the nuts-and-bolts of designing and implementing the system used by the NCCCS, and the challenges and benefits encountered thus far.
Conclusion: Despite the problems with the NCCCS's particular implementation, there have been positive results: student services staff in particular are excited about the benefits to students. The NCCCS's CRM is a student-centered service that not only allows increased efficiency and analytical capabilities for the administration, but also enables students to take ownership of their education by providing easy access to grades, course descriptions, scheduling, and graduation checklists.
Article Evaluation: While the article doesn't deal with academic libraries, it provides a useful explanation of the purpose of CRM, and allows readers to see a bigger picture of how CRM is useful to the college or university as a whole, of which the library is a part. One problem I had with the article is the author's frequent exhortation that "as colleges increasingly embrace distance
learning and e-business, CRM will become more pervasive." (ibid., 24, 32) While I don't disagree with the authors' position, they don't provide any clear justification in their article as to WHY distance learning will result in an increase in CRM use.
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