Customer Relationship Management is used to support Business and Community Engagement. If you do not have clear BCE processes and procedures and these are not seen as integral to your institution then it will be problematic to implement CRM at your institution.
JISC have developed a useful toolkit to help institutions embed Business and Community Engagement which will encourage and support cross-institutional working and collaborative working. This toolkit will help you in identifying where the processes overlap within your institution, looking at BCE central co-ordinating units, Finance, Human Resources, Facilities Management and IT and Information Systems.
Throughout this handbook there are sections to help you in developing and supporting processes working together including; Stakeholder Management, Raising the profile of BCE and Business Process improvement.
Good Practice Example
Shrewsbury College of Arts and Technology was involved the JISC Infonet project that piloted the Embedding BCE toolkit. Although the main focus of the college is 16-18 year olds, 45-50% of income for the College comes from employer engagement. In undertaking this project they realised that a lack of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) had made it difficult to coordinate with external organisations. However, the momentum of the embedding BCE project has enabled them to look at purchasing a CRM System, although there was concern that leading on from this project that expectations were high but they understood that these needed to be managed during implementation. They also made changes in their management structure in response to meeting the BCE agenda. The restructuring reflected the need to organise roles for a more integrated approach to Business Engagement and allowed them to identify both their strengths and weaknesses.
Ian Jervis, Head of Business Development, Shrewsbury College of Arts and Technology
Operational Models
There are a number of different approaches that an insitution can take in regards to their operational model. Below is a an overview of the three operational models that have emerged from the Evaluation of the Higher Education Transforming Workforce Development Programme Report.
An account management approach is becoming more popular and in the report one of its key recommendations is to 'Ensure that existing relationships with employers are optimised'. Prior to the Programme, many HEIs admitted to taking a tactical and rather uncoordinated approach to managing their customers. Often, several individuals from one HEI would contact the same employer, using different approaches but essentially on the same mission; to persuade the employer to work with them. These efforts were not appreciated by employers, who became increasingly frustrated with their uncoordinated methods. It became clear that HEIs would not achieve their objective if they continued to use such an approach.
An extract from the Evaluation of the Higher Education Transforming Workforce Development Programme Report on Account Management can be found here.
