A CRM for a Language School: Easier Management and Scaling

By TalkEn.Cloud Author Team

Running your own business means working for yourself, earning money, scaling and winning the approval of those around you. But that is only the outside picture. Behind it hides a huge pile of difficulties: sleepless nights, emotional and physical burnout, failures, financial trouble, stolen ideas or no way to put them into practice. So if you want to create your own language school, or already have one and are trying to take it to a wider market, you need a universal helper. That helper can be a CRM for a language school: cloud software that complements and simplifies the work of methodologists and administrators, helps build relationships with clients and lets you monitor the work of each teacher. Read this article to learn more about what a CRM for an English school is and which business problems it helps solve.

Contents

1. What a CRM for an English school is
2. What features a CRM for a language school usually has
2.1. The admin panel
2.2. The teacher’s account
2.3. The student’s account
3. The most common language school problems a CRM solves
4. Who else, besides language schools, can use a CRM
5. Tips for finding and choosing a CRM for an English school

What a CRM for an English school is

CRM, or Customer Relationship Management, means managing a business’s relationships with its users or clients. In the broad sense, it is a marketing and tool-based approach to interacting with the target audience that covers building the brand and its image, choosing and setting up different channels of interaction, finding your own tone of voice, and tools for recording the results of all these strategies. In the narrower sense, a CRM for a language school is a program that helps automate teaching, sharing learning materials, monitoring students’ progress and teachers’ work. Since today we are talking specifically about English schools, we will focus on programs that make work easier for teachers and private schools.

So a CRM for language schools is a cloud-based platform that contains all the tools for organizing learning. Why a cloud program? To make it convenient to teach English online. The English school sets up the platform for itself and gives teachers access to it. Teachers set up their personal accounts, add students and can teach them online through video calls, which also run on the platform rather than through third-party software. Teachers and students only get a link to the platform, which they can open from any convenient device, a phone or a computer. Through the link to the school’s CRM, they can see all the learning materials and the schedule, and they can contact each other. So there is no longer any need to install extra software or apps on your laptop: you can go to the platform and start learning even from a friend’s device.

Another important feature of a CRM for any English school is the ability to upload your own learning materials to the platform, such as recordings of ready-made lessons or interactive textbooks. What is more, some CRMs already have ready-made textbooks for teaching English or another foreign language at different levels. This way, a language school business can get all the materials it needs to start working and does not have to order its own courses from methodologists: it only needs to find teachers and connect them to the system.

A CRM is a platform that fully automates your online business

What features a CRM for a language school usually has

Of course, every CRM for language schools has its own features, advantages and disadvantages. Most of them focus directly on organizing the learning process and running online lessons with students. That is the foundation without which no English school can function properly.

CRMs usually have several levels of management: an admin panel that the school’s managers can configure, plus personal accounts for each teacher and student. Let’s look in more detail at what you can do in each part of a CRM for an English school.

The admin panel

Every language school has these main tasks: develop a curriculum for teaching English, find or train qualified teachers, and attract clients who will attend lessons and pay. Using a CRM for a language school helps partly with these tasks, in particular with creating a course. As we mentioned above, the platform can contain ready-made learning materials, for example interactive textbooks, on which teachers can build their English teaching. But you can also upload your own materials to a language school CRM and add tests, for example to check students’ English level.

Once teachers and students are found, the school administrator adds them to the English school’s CRM. In the program you can create a profile for each teacher and student with not only their name but also extra details: phone number, email address and course payment information. Students can be put into groups, which is relevant for schools that teach English in groups. This way a teacher can see and add to lessons not just individual students but a whole group at once.

The teacher’s account

Inside a language school’s CRM, each teacher has their own account where they can set up their work processes, saving up to 20 hours of working time a week. In particular, the platform and the teacher’s account have these features:

• Setting up and following the schedule. The teacher does not need to keep a separate calendar to get to lessons on time and manage their time properly. Most importantly, they can notify their students about lessons through the built-in calendar.
• Grading students. An online grade book inside the language school’s CRM is another way to reduce paperwork in a teacher’s job (or forget about it completely) and save time. It is convenient to share such a grade book with parents, and the school management will also have access to it.
• Monitoring attendance. A CRM for an English school lets you see clearly who attends lessons regularly and who misses them. First, this can be a reason to talk to the client: perhaps the previously agreed schedule no longer suits them and should be reviewed. Second, the teacher can see which topics the student missed and know what to focus on in the next lesson, or whether to give them extra homework to cover the missed topics.
• Uploading extra learning materials. The teacher can add their own videos, audio recordings, textbooks, pictures and similar materials to the program. This helps students take in new information better, makes lessons more interesting and saves students from going to third-party resources, for example to listen to educational podcasts. You can also add your own tests with automatic checking to a CRM for an English school. This way both the student and the teacher see the test result immediately, and the teacher can check which topics the student has not learned well.
• Creating homework for students. A CRM for language schools lets you send both group tasks for all students and individual ones. If they want, teachers can leave feedback and recommendations for individual students.
• Preparing for lessons. Since the program contains interactive textbooks, the teacher can use them to prepare for each new lesson.
• Running online lessons. One of the main features of a CRM for language schools is an online video calling platform, which is used to run distance lessons within the CRM.

The student’s account

A student who signs up for a course at a language school gets a link to their own account inside the CRM. Through this account, the student can use these platform features:

• a schedule that the English school’s CRM automatically updates after every change made by teachers;
• tests and quizzes: by taking them, the student can see how well they have mastered different topics and learn new words or grammar rules;
• homework that can be done directly on the online platform in the interactive textbook.

Most importantly, students do not need to install extra programs on their phone or laptop, download or print a textbook, or remember lots of websites for watching videos or hearing the correct pronunciation of a word. They get all of this inside one single CRM of the English school. Among the extra links students of language schools usually use are good, convenient online dictionaries.

To reduce English teachers’ workload, a business should connect a CRM

The most common language school problems a CRM solves

As we mentioned in the introduction, running your own business, including an English school, always comes with lots of difficulties. Fortunately, software solves a significant part of them:

• Theft of learning materials. All the textbooks, videos and audio that a school adds to a CRM for language schools cannot be downloaded to a device. So you can confidently develop new unique courses without fearing that someone will steal them and open their own business. These materials also will not end up publicly available for anyone to use.
• Errors in analytics. It is very important for a school to monitor exactly how many lessons each teacher teaches and how many students attend them. The business’s income depends directly on this. To avoid errors, use a CRM: the program creates automatic analytics that no users other than the main administrator can influence.
• Having to pay for online resources. Previously, to organize online learning, English schools had to pay at the same time for video calling programs, various cloud storage for learning materials, investing in YouTube channels to create useful learning videos and websites for creating tests. Today a business only needs to connect one CRM for language schools, which replaces dozens of extra programs and significantly cuts extra costs. That, in turn, means higher company profits.

Of course, a CRM also lets you automate the business as much as possible, which is no less important than preventing course theft. To see all the advantages of a CRM for language schools for yourself, connect such a platform for at least a week: most developers will gladly give you a free trial period. This time will help you understand which of your business’s problems the CRM solves and what new horizons it opens up.

Who else, besides language schools, can use a CRM

A CRM for a language school is a universal platform that will be useful to many specialists and institutions. So such systems are in demand among:

• Tutors. Yes, a CRM is perfect for an individual specialist who works for themselves and wants to save time. And since a CRM usually also contains extra learning materials, it is especially popular with beginners who have no experience in designing English courses.
• Public educational institutions. Schools, lyceums and universities have to move to online learning, where it is hard to do without a high-quality, universal CRM. Even if a CRM was originally developed for a language school, it easily adapts to the needs of any educational institution. Such platforms are especially relevant because they help save the already limited funding of public schools and institutes.
• Online schools in other fields. Other online schools that teach SMM, marketing, programming and so on follow the same principle as a CRM for an English school. Whatever field the school is in, a CRM will be useful to the business.

Tips for finding and choosing a CRM for an English school

Before connecting a CRM for a language school, it is important to decide what your specific business needs. So first write down on a sheet of paper which tasks the English school’s administration and teachers handle and what difficulties come up in their work. This will help you understand which CRM platform to look for and, once you find it, how well it suits you and meets your needs.

We also recommend relying on these criteria when choosing a CRM for an English school:

• price: it is extremely important that using extra software in the form of a CRM does not “eat up” most of your business’s budget, so compare different offers and look for the best value;
• ready-made interactive textbooks: this platform feature covers many expense items, in particular finding a methodologist and developing an English course;
• the ability to upload your own materials: we are sure that over time you have created or will create unique videos or tests you will want to share with students, so it is important that you can easily add them to the ready-made materials in the language school’s CRM;
• automatic features, such as checking tests or recording students’ attendance, which make it easier to keep business analytics;
• a convenient interface: the program should be easy for both teachers and students to figure out, regardless of their age and computer skills;
• technical support: it is very important that you can get advice or contact the developers of the language school CRM if difficulties arise; otherwise you risk disrupting the learning process.

We hope our article has answered all your questions about CRMs for language schools. So do not wait: connect a platform to your business, test it and count the advantages of using it, and then the money it helps you save and earn.

Read also

• Building a Full Marketing Track in a CRM: How a Business Turns Chaos into a System
• 51 Services for Automating an Education Business
• An LMS for Tutors and Language Schools: How to Save Time