As the leader of the education industry, only by following the digital trend can the New Oriental keep the leading position. The appearance of online education platform and the application of AI make the New Oriental well developed in China.
Online education
The New Oriental was established in 1993 and at first its business model was an offline teaching and became the leader in the education industry. However, with the development of technology and the market impacted by Internet+, the online education appeared and has gradually evolved into a boom in China whose market size is expanding rapidly. Traditional education model can not make the New Oriental continue to develop. Besides, most competitors appear, such as the Universal IELTS, the Netease, the Tencent, etc. In 2008, 282 overseas educational institutions entered China and online education financing reached $197 million in 2013 (iReaserch, 2014). So how does the New Oriental transform to stand out from so many competitors to become 1st education stock in China?
Source: Imedia data center (2020)
Minhong Yu, the CEO of New Oriental said that in order to keep the position as leader in the education industry after business model transformation, the New Oriental should develop the business online learning, meanwhile, it should use the internet thinking to upgrade traditional offline education. Eventually achieve the O2O business model in education field (Zhang, 2018).
The New Oriental pays more attention on its online education platform which develops better compared to other platforms . The online education platform was settled in 2005 which was one of the first online education website in China (About us, 2020). In 2011, the construction of K-LMS learning management system means that the New Oriental fully transformed into online education field. LMS system improves resource allocation capacity, which could update appropriate teaching resources in time. This brings a good experience to customers. The resources also could be security stocked in the cloud. In 2013, it built a new education cloud platform which gathers various high-quality teaching resources of different courses to offer a variety of teaching plans. In 2015, the platform has been expanded to the TV and mobile side, which broke the traditional online learning. Students could learn online wherever they want and the geographical limitations are addressed.This platform takes advantage to improve teaching efficiency and online real-time monitoring also ensures that students are focused on their studies.
Until today, more than 10 million customers used it, which takes the largest market share in online education area (iiMedia Reaserch, 2020). Also, the excellent reputation of the New Oriental’s offline education development has attracted a large number of customers for its online education. Interactive online teaching also attracts students across the country. Therefore, the joint development of online and offline has improved the profits of the New Oriental. The following diagram is the New Oriental online education market size compared to other big companies in China, which develops very well.
Source: Soochow securities research institute
Recurrent AI ＆ CRM
So, how does the New Oriental maintain good relationships with so many customers? The New Oriental makes a co operations with recurrent AI, which could check the service quality of employees when they make a phone call with customers. Compared to manual inspections in the past, this reduces the labor costs and almost all calls could be detected. The efficiency could be improved, which most problems could be found by recurrent AI system and do not cost much time. This could better standardize employees behavior to maintain customers loyalty and attract customers. The good corporate image could be built. “We are very willing to deploy AI technology into business processes to improve productivity,” said Wu Mingzhu, director of online customer service at New Oriental (CHINADAILY, 2019).
Source: Recurrent AI (about us)
Sharing Economy
In China, high quality education resources cannot be well distributed. However, with the development of technology, the sharing economy could apply in online education field and solve this problem. In 2018, the New Oriental published a new goal which was to build an open platform to lead strategic transformation and share the high quality educational resources to the public. The leader of the New Oriental said that “ In the era of sharing economy, we hope that more people could gain good educational resources in a more efficient and cheaper way to make shared future, concerted action and common development in education field(Wangyi, 2019).” However, it was still not achieved today, and maybe in the future it could achieve.Most learning resources are not free now, but the New Oriental begin to launch of online lessons to attract students, which cost only 1 yuan.
It is a bit difficult for applying shared economy to online education since core teaching resources represent business success. Maybe for the New Oriental which only share some common resources in the future. However, this also could help some poor students to support their study and no matter where they are they could study online.
The following video could make you to have a well understand of the New Oriental:
References
Adi Binnun. (2019). Focus on China: Interview with NewOriental. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/MlxeNMSHuA4
CHINADAILY. (2019). New Oriental Online × Cyclic Intelligence. Retrieved from https://tech.chinadaily.com.cn/a/201910/21/WS5dad4a57a31099ab995e6c68.html
iiMedia Reaserch. (2020). Research Report on China Online Education Industry from 2019 to 2020. Retrieved from https://www.iimedia.cn/c400/68955.html
iReaserch. (2014). Research Report on China Online Education Industry. Retrieved from https://www.iresearch.com.cn/Detail/report?id=2174&isfree=0
Recurrent AI. (2020).About us. Retrieved from https://www.rcrai.com/
The New Oriental. (2020). About us. Retrieved from https://www.koolearn.com/about/
Wangyi fiancial. (2019). Sharing economy promotes balanced development of education. Retrieved from https://money.163.com/19/0329/16/EBEV4REK002580S6.html
Zhang, R. (2018). Yu Minhong: from ordinary people to become the elite. Zhong Guan Cun
Manping Jiang 
Hi Manping, it’s really an interesting blog that brings back many memories of my own experience. I am a Chinese, I attended English training courses twice in New Oriental. the first one was in 2011 when I was in high school. I participated face to face course, the teacher is very excellent who stimulated my interest and built my confidence in English. But the biggest disadvantage is the distance is too far for me, there is some inconvenience. The second was 8 years later in 2019, I prepared my IELTS test before I went to Britain. This time is completely different from the first time. I can study at home through an online course. And when we finished our study, we can give feedback by joining New Oriental’s online comment system, even faster than the phone interview which you mentioned. It’s obviously contributed by the improvement of digital technology! However, I’m skeptical that New Oriental can improve the uneven distribution of education in China, because we all know that it is a business organization and all their training courses are expensive. Even if they release some free courses, the main purpose is to attract students to buy more courses. What do you think?
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