Customer Relations

Note: The Facebook account is to add a personal touch to the school. Teachers must regularly post blogs and pictures referring to the school’s students and activities.

5.2.3.9. Legal and Business Services

One of the advantages of going big and joining a franchise is the legal and business services support. The majority of the paperwork and documentation (such as land, property, or leasing, contracts; and process, applications, notice forms; or any other type of standardized forms for mutual agreement or consent) needed by a franchise should be able to be found at head-office.

If not, head-office will have professionals on speed dial who are familiar with the business Providers) are only a part of the total package of services that we intend on supplying. Access to an enterprise resource planning system (ERP) like SAP is important to our company’s growth, facilitating our network and in keeping us connected, while providing the end school with some all-important tools. Accounting software, customer management software and more will be made available to our franchisees to use. These offerings represent another perk gained by joining Abraham Academic Academy, which a smaller independent school would not be able to afford nor have access to. Because Abraham Academic Academy is located in Taiwan and the majority of businesses will be confined to Taiwan and Asia (with only a few at most located in North America) we will subscribe to DingXing (鼎新) services for enterprise support and maintenance.

5.3. Customer Relations

Customer relations are of outmost importance in our industry for three reasons: First a single customer potentially represents a 16 year shared revenue stream within our business model.

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Second is the value of a customer’s word of mouth in the education industry, which represents a wealth of potential new customers. Third is the extremely demanding nature of parents who send their children to language and cram schools. These parents are paying a high premium for the services rendered and tend to be highly sensitive of their investment and over protective of their children.

These three factors can put a demanding strain on the resources of a school and when this strain is met with an entrepreneurial business sensibility, the result can be damaging to the school. The most common and highly destructive results seen in the industry are the unnecessary pandering to a parent’s needs, the lying and hiding of important information and the discrepancies between what a school says and does.

Therefore Abraham Academic Academy will always be part of a school’s customer relation process. While a school will be conducting their own customer relations, we will be in the background monitoring and working together with schools in generating customer relation programs, packages and supplementing information to ensure better results.

This will be done primarily 2 ways: monitoring and dissemination of tools and information.

First, Abraham Academic Academy will establish a customer relations center at a flagship school in a country/region. All customer relations and services information will be made clear to school branches and their customers. Customers will be able to contact head-office via phone, email or on-line. This information will be displayed on our website and business cards;

schools must display this information on the walls in their main office and in plastic insert stands that sits on the reception desk where customers can plainly see; and schools must send this information home in a student’s communication book 3 times a year, at the beginning, middle and end of every semester. This way, head-office will be in the loop and have a chance to respond to situations through our customers’ awareness. Head-office can then decide to pass on the information to a school to resolve, or work with the school in coming to a resolution. Head-office can then decide to follow up with a customer to ensure that everything has been worked out to their satisfaction. In this way, head-office can act as a third party and intervene on a customer’s behalf to ensure that a school is conducting business as intended.

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Second, customer relations and services will be aided by head-office through the use of our network and resources available. This will be done by head-office routinely compiling and distributing the various successful customer relation measures used at various branches, learned from our competition, and developed by their efforts. Customer relations and services will also be aided through the use of our resources like our customer relations management (CRM) system. A franchisee will have access to everything we have and can employ them at will. Abraham Academic Academy believes that the proper use of these assets will lead to higher rates of success for a school and will produce more successful schools in the long run.

We understand that this service provided by head-office represents a large cost center, but it provides an important aspect or our quality control. It ensures that Abraham Academic Academy will never be out of the loop in terms of our customers’ care, nor unaware of any inappropriate behavior conducted by delinquent schools. Abraham Academic Academy wants to make sure that its schools stay on the right track by doing the right thing and providing the right information to its consumers. Service and information that is conducive to a positive and healthy relationship. Quite often in the industry proper relations and follow up is often omitted by smaller companies due to its drain on resources, which becomes more complicated without the right tools and support. Abraham Academic Academy believes this is the easiest way to keep parties aligned and to promote our long term success and growth.

Note: Actions will be taken against any school that does not properly participate in these customer relation issues. Schools will be punished financially and through mandatory training at their cost. Enforcement will be conducted in part by customers who notify head-office of any violations and by company supervision.

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The value proposition of Abraham Academic Academy lies in the packaging of its offerings.

A school, like us, lies in between the producers and the consumers and has to accommodate both our end-user and franchisees needs. We need to provide products and services that are useful and desirable to both parties and recognized by industry specialists. The construction of our value proposition takes into account the following three things.

At our core is our curriculum and our value is extracted through its assembly from a sea of information, taking into consideration our customers long-term interests so as to be able to support the schools in our business model, presenting it in an acceptable format for our schools to use and consumers to view, and having the courses recognized by the professional and academic accreditation societies that exist for validation purposes.

Another value factor is the nature and degree of practicality and applicability of what is being taught. A consumer’s willingness to invest depends on where the product lies between novel and novelty and whether the product is for recreational, career orientated or higher learning purposes. Most textbooks are abstract, theory based, full of technical jargon and crammed with information, whereas people want to know what can exactly be done with this information. It is the extraction of a practical application of a book’s content to a person’s real life that creates its value. For our school’s it will be the ease of conveying this information that is important, whereas as for our customers it will be the ability to comprehend quickly and track progress.

Everything else that we supply is secondary and serves the purpose of supplementing our curriculum, making the dissemination or comprehension of our curriculum easier or fueling a person’s higher order self-actualizing needs.

Thus, we have used these notions in searching for a formula to our curriculum, format and delivery systems that increases our value relative to our competition in terms of consumer preferences and in searching for ways to enhance the overall performance of our schools and students. Ways that will allow our schools to focus on the teaching and our students to focus