INVESTIGATING THE IMPACT OF SOCIAL CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT IN HIGHER EDUCATION

CRM is a new paradigm of marketing (Chen & Popovich, 2003; Payne & Frow, 2004) and is all about managing customer data to better understand and serve their needs (Sunder et al., 2012). Also CRM defined as an integration of technologies and business processes that are adopted to satisfy the needs of a customer during any given interaction (Bose, 2002) and building a long-term relationship with customers. On the other hand, social CRM is a different thinking about customer relationship management and just emphasizes on enhancing customer engagement through using social media (Heller and Parasnis, 2011).

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the implementation of social CRM and identifying the critical success factors in higher education. As higher education stakeholders such as existing and prospective students, employees, alumni, and parents are vital and consider as an important asset for the organization so it is necessary to identify CSFs and help organization to move forwards attract, retain, and better customer service that is the purpose of social CRM.

The authors have investigated the role of CRM within a learning context by assessing how social media (and in particular Facebook), has been used by students engaged in individual and group learning activities. The paper provides detailed discussion on analysis from pilot studies involved social CRM in student groups. The paper also explains how the investigation of social media use has helped to identify a number of factors that can be used to assess the maturity levels for the deployment of CRM solutions.

Finally this paper describes the current work relating to the use of social media (in particular Facebook), for building relationships between HE stakeholders. The study reflects on the relationships between students acting in CRM scenarios within an educational context. The proposed approach identifies a range of dimensions and associated factors that can be used for evaluating the implementation of social CRM in higher education.