关键词: 免费试用, 在线教育, 人员配置, 服务运营管理

Abstract: Online education has become an important form of extracurricular training due to COVID-19 pandemic impact and Internet technology development. In this environment, many companies that sell online courses have arisen in China. In the process of selling online courses, an industry-agreed business mode has emerged. Customers can experience the free course before deciding whether to buy it. In this business mode of free trial before you pay, operational costs are mostly workers’ salaries. Workers involved in selling the online education product are usually made up of two types. One is the sales-force that is responsible for attracting potential customers to the free trial. The other is the service-staff who teach courses to both the free-trial and the paid customers. As customers try the courses before they purchase, their purchase decision is affected by their assessments of the service staff’s teaching quality. The number of both types of workers determines operational income (i.e., the number of paid customers) and operational costs (i.e., workers’ salary). Free trial directly affects the number of sales-force and service-staff, hence, profitability of a company’s operations. We consider a problem of optimal staffing of workers for online education companies because online education industry has been greatly affected by the stricter regulation of K12 education institutions, thus online education companies have become more concerned with operating costs and profits.
The problem of optimal staffing is subject to two important constraints: one is the financial budget constraint; the other is capacity constraint, that is, an upper limit on the number of simultaneous online users that can be accommodated by live delivery platform. Our study investigates how the free trial duration affects the optimal staffing decisions of sales and service operations, the shadow prices of the capacity and budget constraints, and the choice of the optimal sales channel under such constraints. Specifically, we answer the following three research questions. First, how does the length of the free trial affect the optimal allocation scheme on the number of sales-force and service-staff? Second, when more capital is available, should the company invest the new capital in hiring more workers, or in buying more the live delivery platform’s service to accommodate more trainees at the same time? In addition, when faced with the problem of choosing multiple channels, how should online education companies select efficient promotion channels among the many channels?
This paper develops a dynamic system model and provides the optimal staffing solution by characterizing the system equilibrium and applying linear programming theory. We find that when the free trial duration increases, the optimal service staff number weakly will increase (non-decrease) but the optimal sales staff number weakly will decrease (non-increase), and moreover, the shadow prices of the capacity and budget constraints will decrease. We also study a case of multiple sales channels and find the effect of free trial duration consistent with the case of a single sales channel. The findings of this paper are not limited to the online education field. They also provide guidance for the operation and management of other service products with free trial features. In particular, the model of this paper can provide some insights when it comes to the staffing and marketing channel selection of other free trial services. Other companies offering free trial services can also gain some management insights to reasonably allocate staff and choose the optimal marketing channel. Future studies may consider the impact of factors such as the length of free trial on conversion rate, or introduce competitive scenarios. Customer choice and uncertainty of the online course’s value to customers could also be taken into account in further research.

Key words: free-trial, online education, staffing, service operation