Customer Relationship Management system models application in higher education

The paper present a short description of Customer Relationship Management models that can be applied in the university environment. It focuses on evolution of the models and their approximation to real-life situations. 1. CRM in high school High schools worldwide are undergoing fundamental shifts in how they operate and interact with their customers: students, faculty members and staff members. Fox and Kotler [1] state that “the best organization in the world will be ineffective if the focus on ‘customers’ is lost. First and foremost is the treatment of individual students, alumni, parents, friends, and each other (internal customers). Every contact counts!” During the past years, many universities in Poland have begun reconstruction of their business processes. The reason was to cut the costs down and be much more efficient due to increasing competition of other schools or colleges. The possibilities offered by modern technology cause that high school management started to consider introducing information systems that will help with financial and accountant operations, inventory of equipment, deanery work support, etc. Nowadays, besides Enterprise Resource Planning class systems, we have to consider another type of important software and operation processes – Customer Relationship Management. According to Steve Billingham from Ernst & Young, “CRM is a philosophy and a way of doing things, not a technology”, first of all we should plan relation to the university client. Nevertheless, this article describes models of some CRM software parts and evolution in the Polish Virtual University. * E-mail address: [email protected] Pobrane z czasopisma Annales AIInformatica http://ai.annales.umcs.pl Data: 01/11/2017 12:56:28