Skilling up for CRM: qualifications for CRM professionals in the Fourth Industrial Revolution

The 4th industrial revolution (4IR) describes a series of innovations in artificial intelligence, ubiquitous internet connectivity, and robotics, along with the subsequent disruption to the means of production. The impact of 4IR on industry reveals a construct called Industry 4.0. Higher education, too, is called to transform to respond to the disruption of 4IR, to meet the needs of industry, and to maximize human flourishing. Education 4.0 describes 4IR’s impact or predicted impact or intended impact on higher education, including prescriptions for HE’s transformation to realize these challenges. Industry 4.0 requires a highly skilled workforce, and a 4IR world raises questions about skills portability, durability, and lifespan. Every vertical within industry will be impacted by 4IR and such impact will manifest in needs for diverse employees possessing distinct competencies. Customer relationship management (CRM) describes the use of information systems to implement a customer-centric strategy and to practice relationship marketing (RM). Salesforce, a market leading CRM vendor, proposes its products alone will generate 9 million new jobs and $1.6 trillion in new revenues for Salesforce customers by 2024. Despite the strong market for CRM skills, a recent paper in a prominent IS journal claims higher education is not preparing students for CRM careers. In order to supply the CRM domain with skilled workers, it is imperative that higher education develop curricula oriented toward the CRM professional. Assessing skills needed for specific industry roles has long been an important task in IS pedagogy, but we did not find a paper in our literature review that explored the Salesforce administrator role. In this paper, we report the background, methodology, and results of a content analysis of Salesforce Administrator job postings retrieved from popular job sites. We further report the results of semi-structured interviews with industry experts, which served to validate, revise, and extend the content analysis framework. Our resulting skills framework serves as a foundation for CRM curriculum development and our resulting analysis incorporates elements of Education 4.0 to provide a roadmap for educating students to be successful with CRM in a 4IR world

When Blockchain Meets CRM: An Evaluation of Enterprise CRM Vendor Blockchain Capabilities

The emergence of Blockchain technology has begun to manifest in various business and technical domains. Despite the transformative potential of Blockchain and other distributed ledger technologies, the distributed paradigm is markedly different than the relational database model underlying prototypical CRM systems, presenting a novel integration challenge. Resolving CRM-Blockchain integration challenges is a precondition to realizing the emergent paradigm known as CRM 4.0. The top 6 CRM vendors are identified, and their Blockchain capabilities are investigated. We conclude that while many of these vendors once implemented Blockchain capabilities, such capabilities have since largely been deprioritized, obfuscated, or outright abandoned. This paper extends the existing literature on CRM and Blockchain through the lens of industry

In Search of the Optimal CRM Curriculum: A Skills Framework for the Salesforce Administrator Role

Customer relationship management (CRM) systems, the enterprise systems used to digitize aspects of the sales, support, & marketing functions, are heavily adopted throughout industry, resulting in demand for skilled employees. Higher education is generally expected to respond to industry needs, and assessing these needs is a long-standing task in Information Systems (IS) pedagogy. A recent paper suggests that CRM curricula in higher education is often inadequate and proposes a skills framework for a CRM Analyst. We leverage this skills framework to perform a content analysis of 61 job listings for Salesforce Administrator roles. Our framework indicates that a CRM curriculum should generate student competence in the categories of data & middleware, soft skills, project management & business analysis skills, and to obtain a baseline Salesforce Administrator certification. These findings can assist instructors in developing CRM courses and programs and expand our existing understanding of CRM pedagogy

Do Asynchronous Courses Work? Comparisons of Student Performance in a Multimodal Undergraduate Database Course

Advances in digital learning technologies and connectivity tools coupled with the COVID-19 pandemic have led to increased online course offerings. As online courses gain popularity, it becomes more important to assess their efficacy in assuring student learning. In the domain of Information Systems (IS) pedagogy, the teaching of database courses is under-researched. This study employs quantitative methods to evaluate differences in academic performance between students in an on-campus modality compared to an online asynchronous offering of the same introductory undergraduate database course. In particular, we compare mean scores across the performance evaluation categories of attendance, quizzes, assignments, final exam, and cumulative final scores. Results indicate the raw mean scores for the on-campus section exceeded the online section across every category, but only assignment and attendance averages were significantly higher for the on-campus section when bootstrapped across 1000 samples. These results inform remedial measures to improve student engagement in these categories

Is CRM Ready for Industry 4.0? A Historical Technological Framework

The 4th Industrial Revolution, sometimes known as Industry 4.0, has disrupted the business and technology landscapes. Industry practitioners remain under pressure to adopt these innovations for competitive advantage. Enterprise systems (ES), such as customer relationship management (CRM) systems, are not exempt from these pressures, and indeed CRM may be at the forefront of company investments. Although CRM systems have been studied substantially, we did not find a summative framework integrating CRM innovations with their enabling technologies. We developed this framework by searching the academic literature on CRM, industrial revolutions, and technology innovation, juxtaposing the various phases of CRM evolution within the technical landscape that precipitated them. We identified a lag between the inception of technologies and their adoption within CRM systems. The purpose of this paper is to provide a technological perspective of CRM’s history and state of the art, and its readiness to capitalize on Industry 4.0 innovations

A Case Study in the Use of a Gamified Learning Platform to Teach a Course in CRM Implementation

The transition to virtual learning environments resulting from COVID-19 has led to the need for innovation in teaching. Teaching CRM implementation is challenging in a classroom setting due to the complexity of popular CRM platforms and students’ unfamiliarity with CRM’s business context, and such challenges may be compounded during virtual course delivery. Because of these challenges and in order to minimize disruption from virtual learning, we chose to utilize Salesforce’s proprietary online learning environment, Trailhead, as the foundation for content delivery and competency assessment. In this paper, we present the context of Trailhead, its approach to gamification, our rationale for its selection, and our course design and learning objectives. We invite any feedback on this approach, particularly as it surrounds exercises to improve student outcomes, as well as recommendations for assessment and measurement methods to bring the most rigor and usefulness to the final version of this paper