A concept of student relationship management in higher education

Abstract

Introduction The paper will present a novel marketing concept of relationship management in higher education and a justification of its application based on the specific character of educational services. The definitions of relationship and relationship management in higher education will be given. The paper will highlight key relationships that should be built by an educational institution with special emphasis placed on students as the most important clients of a school. The paper will proceed to elaborate on the concept of loyalty as the aim of building sustainable relationships with students and its specificity due to the special nature of an educational environment. A student relationship management model will be proposed and discussed as comprising three basic stages of the educational services provision: pre-sales, sales and after-sales stages. The presented model may serve as a basis for further theoretical research or may be applied in practice as it is.