Introducing e-CRM into academic libraries: Exploration of needs and possibilities

This paper gives theoretical insight into importance of introducing customer relationship management (CRM) into libraries. CRM is defined as system or software for storage or analysis of data, but also as strategy oriented to customer and change of organizational culture. One of reasons for CRM implementation is that companies sometimes more care for their products and services than for customers. E-CRM can help libraries to sophisticate their e-services which is an imperative for libraries as leading educational institutions. Namely, libraries have mission to gather, process, store and make access to information and that´s why they must make their e-services better to attract new users and to keep existing users. Working hypothesis in this paper is that level of readiness of Croatian academic libraries for e-CRM is low. According to research results this hypothesis is confirmed, namely discrepancy between possibilities and needs for introducing e-CRM into academic libraries is rather high.