On demand customer relationship management (CRM) software company, RightNow, has announced that North Carolina State University's Virtual Advising Centre has achieved a 7500:1 ratio of students to advisors as a result of implementing its online system.

The company says that the use of its website has allowed the service that students at the American university receive to increase, by freeing advisors from answering the high volume of simple, redundant questions. This, it says, allows them to devote more time to providing personal counselling to students who really need it.

The Virtual Advising Centre at North Carolina University was created in 1999 to provide an information resource for students to get answers to their questions about all of the University's programs. This is said to be a particularly important mission at North Carolina State, because the undergraduate student population is geographically divided at the outset by their areas of interest.

Universities and other educational institutions around the world continue to discover new ways to use the web to serve tech-savvy student customers, observed Sean Forbes, vice president of Marketing and Business Development at RightNow.

‘RightNow's CRM fits this strategy perfectly by enabling institutions to gather knowledge from across its diverse functional departments and make it available in a single centralised, easy-to-use service portal,’ he told SM365.