A CRM strategic leadership towards sustainable development in student relationship management: SD in higher education

Sustainable development (SD) is not just obligating society members to fulfill their responsibilities, but can also generate significant competitive advantage. Only recently, organizations increasingly consider SD as a business strategy because it can deliver larger shareholder value and provide access to capital and making stronger performance over time which can improve shared value for both business and society. Considering the present atmosphere where competition is the most important factor in asserting oneself and exerting influence in the developmental process, customer relationship management (CRM) and the significant influence it has brought about in the worldwide scene can be seen as one of the most influential factors contributing to the economic sphere. Applying this concept in higher education academic as a specialist manpower center of education, has led to a new concept named Student Relationship Management (SRM). This research by employing the CRM, a strategic leadership towards sustainable development in SRM and subsequently in higher education, addressed to identification of SRM factors with exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis (FA) in order to implementation of the SRM system. Thus, after identifying the quality elements of SRM, using FA through SPSS and Amos software, the new scale was standardized. The identification phase led to find the six factors along with 20 items based on literature, FA and this result is helpful for Universiti Teknologi Malaysia on how SRM could be linked to CRM and an improved the system would assist to place sustainability in higher education. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by ELsevier B.V.