People love the convenience of the Internet and while many language students understand that true value in traveling to a location and book the perfect language travel holiday experience others are not quite ready to jump into that offer just for now.
Skype-based consulting services are nothing new. For many years consultants and service providers including language teachers have utilized those services.
The challenge of perceiving Skype as a threat to your language school business lies only in how to put language training offers into context.
Sure: if you look at pricing strategies of desperate language coaches that try to lure in people with extremely cheap pricing per hour – it might indeed look like the trend of people looking for the “cheapest possible offer” will indeed hurt your business.
But that is a very narrow-minded perception of what Skype-based language training could mean for offering language courses with your language business.
Using Skype as a remote solution where potential language students do not have to travel to your language school could be a great entry point for meeting with some of your language teachers and get to know them before making a decision to book a fully-paid on-location training at your school.
For example: while every language school online offers some sort of online-tests to evaluate the language skills of a student very little schools take this as an opportunity to offer – a paid, but moderately priced – Skype-based language evaluation test instead.
Your school does not need to offer free Skype training or consulting. You can, however, use personalized Skype-experiences to qualify potential language students instead.
And interaction with your future potential language students in real person will create a strong link that will make people trust you.
Anything online, even the best website that looks impressive, always has this one ongoing challenge: “How do I make potential customers trust me?”
With offers and possibilities of potential students to “try out your language school” online in a safe and trustworthy environment, you can take some important steps that will ensure you have students that value your services and are ready to go for premium offers of your language business.
Skype itself is never a problem and a threat to your language business. It is like with authors that are able to publish their own titles on Amazon Kindle without the need to work with a publishing house. Publishing houses do not go out of business because their true value lies in their network they have.
Successful authors know that successful publishing houses also use Amazon Kindle as a platform to distribute their books and titles in addition to their already existing channels.
The same is true for your language school and Skype. You can use Skype as a great platform to reach out to potential customers to showcase your services.
Skype is also even a much better tool if you think of what happens after language students leave your language school training on-site. You can offer additional language training via Skype to existing students that already have created a connection to language teachers while studying locally with you.
One downside of using Skype and your language teachers is that you need to carefully calculate and think on how many hours language teachers are available for such services. A clear advice to calculate Skype-based services NOT too low – language teachers need to feel that their true value stays the same whether they teach in person offline as much remotely via a webcam and Skype.
Some larger language schools even consider creating their own online team of teachers that people still can meet and greet while being on the language school premises but are solely dedicated for online remote language services your school might offer.
If you think of Skype as a great opportunity to leverage what your language school already has to offer – in combination with credentials and value that a single “cheap” Skype language coach doesn’t have, then you have discovered a true winning additional channel to reach out to languages students that you are able to inspire and influence for years to come.