What should be the scope of CRM for your institution? 

For every institution the scope of CRM will be different, however, it is essential that you explore the scope of CRM and include this as part of your strategy. Your scope will be determined depending on the type and focus of your institution. It may also change and increase as you continue your CRM journey and embrace more departments/services and types of customers. It is essential that the scope is defined at the start of your CRM journey and is expressly stated in your Business Case and Strategy. The Learning and Skills Improvement Service have produced some very helpful toolkits for FE Colleges; particularly helpful is the section on what you need to consider within your scope.

The breadth and range of the HE/FE sector means that defining who is the customer is not easy. Each HE/FE organisation should carefully define the important relationships, be they with stakeholders, partners or customers that define their 'Business and Community Engagement' agenda.

The term ‘Customer Relationship Management’ should be considered in its widest sense. A strategy for CRM should define partner, stakeholder and customer groups and establish how they will be engaged, developed and how long term mutual loyalty can help achieve the university or college mission. These should be embedded in your strategy.

It is important before you even consider purchasing a CRM system that you take the time to understand how CRM can support and be integrated into your institution's overall vision and strategy. It is vital that as an institution you identify and understand your stakeholders. In the Change Management infoKit by JISC there is a guide to identifying your stakeholders with a downloadable Stakeholder Analysis template.  

Good Practice Example

At the University of Hertfordshire, to address the issues of scope they split their CRM project into three different stages. The centrally based Knowledge Transfer (KT) structure at the University aided them in the scope of their CRM. Although they have Business Development Managers based in their faculties, they have a central reporting structure.

First Stage: They reviewed how many different databases were being used across the University and focused in particular on the events team and careers service.

Second Stage: In this stage of development they worked with Business Development Managers and Knowledge Transfer staff, looking in more detail at the marketing aspect of CRM.

Third Stage: This stage focused on alumni and took longer than originally planned due to the complexity of the data.

Since this implementation, the University's IT helpdesk, Security helpdesk and spin out companies have also started to use the CRM system.

They also created an overall vision for CRM, which was ‘To be able to see all information in one place’, and specified that everybody involved in BCE would be using the system. A major learning point for the University of Hertfordshire was to understand who was going to be using the system right from the start and be clear around information sharing and data protection.

Their top tip in any CRM implementation, whether as a system or culturally, would be to determine your scope carefully and choose certain areas as this will influence everything else.

Russell Fenner, Business Development Manager, University of Hertfordshire

Clear Aims and Objectives

Good Practice CRM requires that you are clear in your strategy about what your overall aims are. This is dependent on the type of institution in which you are based and also on what the specific aims and objectives may be. Some examples of clear aims and objectives could be:

• Point of Truth for BCE Information
• Development of standardised processes and procedures across the institution
• Understand your relationships with your current customers to identify new opportunities

Resource

It is essential that you consider the resource required to implement CRM at your institution, not only in the implementation of a CRM system but also the resource that is needed to help change the culture of an organisation to enable it to become customer centred.

For each institution this can be different. Some institutions may employ a dedicated Change Manager, some employ a CRM Manager or Administrator, but in all those institutions that have embedded CRM successfully, there has been an infrastructure and a resource dedicated to CRM.

Institutions have different structures and approaches to BCE activity, however,  some organisations are adopting account management, a private sector concept to support their CRM strategy. An Account Manager can be the essential bridge between the customer and the institution and can help to translate customer requirements and marshal resources to deliver, project manage and secure further work.

Anecdotal and formal customer feedback often indicates the need of people external to the education sector to have a named contact who will help to navigate the maze of contacts and roles. There is often little understanding of faculties and schools and it is the lack of a designated point of contact which is a key factor in sustaining the reputation of both HEIs FECs as inaccessible to external organisations. 

A recent discussion of the benefits of account management in HE can be found in the evaluation of HEFCE’s Employer Engagement Programme by KSA in 2011.

A personal account of implementing Account Management at Teesside University was presented at the UALL Conference in June 2010.  

It is impossible to implement formal account management without a shared, accessible record of potential and current customers against which to log the named point of contact. The system can be used to flag those companies which have been identified as needing a strategic approach and alerting any system user that there is a protocol involved in working with this particular customer. This aspect should be covered in your Code of Practice for system users.

Key Questions

What are you aiming to do and why are you doing it?

How does the implementation of CRM fit in with the strategic direction of the institution?

Who are your BCE stakeholders across the institution? 

Who will be key to the success of CRM in your institution?