Customer Relationship Management in Universities and Research Centres

Customer relationship management -CRM -is a broad term that can cover every mode of customer interaction. This concept has been widely used in business language, enabling companies to gain more knowledge about their customers which, in its turn, can be used to improve marketing and sales targeting, improving their results. University and research institutions (URIs), as any other organizations, also need to cater to the needs of their clients, which may be: society in general, their students, researchers and collaborators; other institutions -of a research or commercial nature with which they interact (supplying data, results from research work, consultancy work, and the execution of partnerships) -or governments that make use of their teaching practices and results from their research work. So, this work is a CRM proposal for URIs, studying the differences between the academic/scientific and business world and proposing an environment to manage all kinds of relationships in the academic and scientific scenario.