Customizing CRM for University Implementations

This paper tests a hypothesis about implementing Customer Relationship Management (CRM) in a university environment. CRM was designed for private sector companies for the management of customer relationships in the pre- and post-sales cycles. Our hypothesis is that CRM can be configured to meet the requirements of a university recruiting environment. We tested the hypothesis by actually configuring a commercial CRM system to meet the requirements of the university environment. Our conclusion is that there is a one-to-one relationship between the private sector “Campaign Management” business process and the university recruiting business process. Hence, the CRM methodology should be considered by universities as an option for enhancing the relationship between potential students and the university.