Cardiff University has teamed up with Fujitsu (News - Alert) in order to implement Salesforce.com rollouts for two of its customer-facing departments: the Knowledge Transfer Centre and the Centre for Lifelong Learning. With this implementation, potential customers for both departments will experience significant improvement in response times along with a much-needed central point in which to track customer engagement.

The Centre for Lifelong Learning at the University specializes in professional certifications as well as part-time training courses aimed at postgraduates, businesses and the public. In the past, The University has relied on a spreadsheet-based, offline system to manage and keep track of its courses, which made it difficult to share information and provide staff with a full view of the status of courses. This offline approach resulted in missed opportunities.

The university’s Knowledge Transfer Centre (KTC) needed a reliable method to store and manage contact with businesses and government departments who were interested in their research and innovation.  Having no way to track conversations, business opportunities were being lost and it also resulted in multiple contacst with the same companies.

Cardiff University, in order to address these issues realized they needed an integrated customer relationship management (CRM) system, and decided to ask Fujitsu to help in configuring and supporting a Salesforce.com (News - Alert) deployment.

In a release, Simon Parker, director, Knowledge Transfer Centre and Cardiff University, said

“Fujitsu’s advisors quickly understood our needs, converting these into simple enhancements to Salesforce.com, which we now use on a daily basis. Salesforce.com has since become invaluable in managing multiple simultaneous projects, ensuring we optimize our time in talking to companies and following leads.”

Fujitsu offers a number of different services for business-critical applications along with CRM and cloud products such as Salesforce.com Mark Peplow, senior consultant at Fujitsu UK and Ireland, said “Fujitsu prides itself on recognizing and deploying the most effective and flexible solution in improving organizations’ efficiency, and quickly identified Salesforce.com as an ideal package for the University’s various requirements. We believe that many other higher education establishments can benefit from similar deployments.”