Customer Relationship Management In Distance Education

In China, distance education has come into being a large scale for past seven years, with the amount of the student and network education school be increasing, with study resources' quality and quantity be rising, economic benefit be going up. Distance education becomes a new industry now. But more and more problems appeared when it developed so fast. With the macroscopic views on the distance education, there are some questions including what content must be given, how to balance the relationship between education object and economic object, why more and more people didn' t trust it, and how to protect it' s growth with laws about the distance education. With the microscopic views on the distance education, there are other problems, such as the specialty choice is too narrow, the learning resources is too short, the tuition fee is too high, and the online study ability is too absent. How to solve above problems? Maybe, we must recognize it again on the market' s view.Base on the value chain analysis, distance education value chain is combined with several parts, including the university or college' s hardware and software conditions, e-learning resources producing, interactions between teachers and students, service agencies, enrollment, online-study aids. Based on the Five Forces Model theory, distance education industry has more problems, such as distance education market structure inconsequence, service agency' s distributing imbalance, and no significant service differences between distance education experimental units. Distance education product is not as same as common commodities, which essence is the distance education service. Except for the four basic characteristics of common service, distance education possesses other four attributes: popularity, instruction, specialty, personality. The quality of distance education service is direct to student' s satisfaction and loyalty degree. So the CRM application in distance education is an effective way for improving the quality of distance education service.Distance education customer relationship management is a process that three factors - customer value, relationship value and information technology, interacts. This application can facilitate the communication between the both sides, satisfy the student' s personal study demands, and promote the management efficiency. This CRM' s object is to share e-learning resources and make all participants win.Who is our distance education' s customer? This is a key question. In fact, the student is the finally buyer of distance education consumption, on the other hand, the experimental college' s service agency and social commonality service agency are only middle parts.From 2004, only few experimental colleges put the CRM' s ideals and methods on their distance education service. These colleges alwaysintegrate internet technologies with their service, including call center, answer-on-duty, BBS, SMS, E-mail and FAQ, etc. during the practice, we must pay attention to more key successful factors, for example, person, data, management, or hardware and software environment.