Organisational Learning with SaaS CRM – A case study of Higher Education

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) generally has a reputation as a technology that does not live up to its over-inflated expectations. Yet, implementations in higher education remain on the rise. Higher Education institutions (HEIs) are embracing cloud-based CRM systems to upsurge performance, encourage better management practices, and enhance their relationship with staff and students. CRM success however relies heavily on an adaptive organisational learning (OL) process upon which proactive decisions can be made. This paper emphasises that committed learning in post-implementation use is paramount to attaining further understanding of the capabilities, features and functionality of the CRM. Investigating how SaaS CRM usage reflect an organisation’s learning in a Higher Education context, the paper presents theoretical and practical contributions in a framework for effective SaaS CRM utilisation, and recommends a continuous cycle of exploration-exploitation-exploration. Yet the reality is that organisations explore, exploit, and then stop exploring.