Usefulness of business simulations using CRM in the opinion of students of an economic and technical university

ICT systems play an important role in organisations. They support the work of virtually every department, facilitate communication, the flow of information, and aggregate big data that provides valuable information for every company - about the market, sales, customers, production, inventory, etc. One of these tools is CRM, which can be considered both as a customer relationship management concept and as a system. As previous research carried out, among others, in micro-organisations has shown that implementing a CRM system is, however, a challenge, which is primarily associated with a lack of training and low intuitiveness of operating the system, the author decided to check whether familiarising students of technical and economic studies with one of the more popular CRM systems in Poland - Livespace - might, in their opinion, be useful in their future work and interesting, and thus might contribute to reducing barriers to implementing and working with systems of this type. This is because these systems are becoming increasingly popular in companies, so the likelihood of working with them is increasing. The research was carried out over the last 5 years on a group of 173 students in the last semester of engineering studies at the Bydgoszcz University of Science and Technology. The results indicate that students find the familiarisation with the CRM system and the simulation of organisational activities (sales and marketing) interesting and unique to their studies so far. Most of them are of the opinion that perhaps knowledge of CRM will be useful in their future work. The respondents also confirm that one of the most important advantages was the opportunity to get to know the system and to work in a group, but they also point out the difficulty to use and the lack of intuitiveness of this type of system. It can also be assumed that the teaching of CRM to students is needed, appreciated by the students and it is worth continuing the project in the following years.