Customer Relationship Marketing & Management (CRM&M) Certificate Program Details

CRM&M Overview | CRM&M Program Details | CRM&M Curriculum | CRM&M Course Descriptions

Customer Relationship Marketing and Management (CRM&M) is a business strategy designed to maximize the intangible relationship of customer loyalty in a manner that creates and sustains the long-term value of the relationship for both the customer and the enterprise. CRM&M involves the integration of marketing functions and customer information data to create a valuable knowledge base that is useful across the organization. Customer needs (actual or perceived) drive the relationship and organizations seek to (1) understand the need, and (2) find profitable avenues for meeting the needs. While CRM&M includes following the behaviors of customers through purchases and contacts, real value is created when firms have the ability to use rich information to not only identify and influence valuable customers in their database, but to extend this knowledge to identify and influence valuable customers in the overall market.

The Certificate Program offers a unique learning experience that enables students to gain the competencies needed to understand and apply CRM tools. Students will also gain the underlying skills to draw information correlations to extend and increase long-term customer value. The program reduces corporate training costs by providing potential marketing or customer service employees with critical entry-level skills in conjunction with their undergraduate program of study. The certification is appropriate for business or marketing majors, and it is also appropriate for individuals with career interests in other functional areas (e.g., engineering, technology, and the health and physical sciences) that interface closely with marketing functions such as sales and customer service. The program will be administered by the Department of Business Administration, and can be earned by completing 18 semester hours of course work that includes an internship experience (additional coursework may be required for non-business majors).

The curriculum and initial course descriptions are presented in Figure 1. Once program prerequisites (BUAD422 Management Concepts and BUAD430 Marketing Concepts) are met, students can choose between the consumer behavior (BUAD432) or business-to-business (BUAD434) track electives. Students are required to have an internship and will be advised to obtain it and register for BUAD498 during the summer following the completion of their junior year. All students in the program will be required to complete the Selling and Sales Management course (BUAD435) and three specialized program courses. The CRM&M concepts (BUAD 535) course provides the foundation for the CRM&M Technologies course (BUAD536) and the CRM&M Special Topics course (BUAD 539). In addition to the proposed program curriculum, changes are proposed in the existing marketing curriculum courses to insure that the educational content of all marketing courses address the subject in a more in depth manner.

The certificate is designed to augment undergraduate-level education for students enrolled in baccalaureate degree programs at North Carolina A&T State University. Receipt of the certificate is contingent on the successful completion of all baccalaureate degree requirements of students’ major degree program.