Customer Success, a concept initially designed for the business world, particularly in Software as a Service (SaaS), focuses on proactively ensuring that customers achieve their desired outcomes with a product or service. This business strategy relies on data driven practices, proactive engagement, and long-term relationship management. As the Indonesian education system grapples with long-standing challenges—such as access, quality, and equity—the idea of incorporating principles from business into education has gained traction. But the question isn't simply whether business models like customer success can improve public education in Indonesia, but rather how much of these models should be applied, and what limits should be respected to preserve the integrity of education as a public good.
Customer success is not simply about achieving short-term customer satisfaction—it’s about driving long-term success by ensuring customers derive sustained value from the service. This principle can be applied to education by ensuring that students, the primary stakeholders, achieve long-term educational success rather than short-term gratification. Success in education means equipping students with the skills, critical thinking, and problem-solving abilities that will enable them to thrive in the future.
In an educational context, applying customer success principles could mean that teachers and schools actively work with students to meet their long-term goals, such as college readiness, employability, and personal development. However, this doesn’t imply that students should be treated solely as customers in a transactional manner. Education serves a broader societal purpose, and simply delivering content that pleases students or their families could dilute the deeper value of learning.
Private Schools: The Business Version of Education
Private schools, in many ways, are the closest example of how education can operate similarly to a business. Private institutions are typically funded by tuition fees and rely on their reputation and results to attract students. Thus, maintaining educational rigour—high academic standards, challenging curricula, and fostering critical thinking—is central to their success.
Private schools compete on the quality of their offerings, much like businesses do with their products. Educational institutions differentiate themselves by their academic programmes, extracurricular offerings, and post-graduation success of their students. They thrive by delivering measurable outcomes, such as high test scores, top university placements, or successful career paths for their graduates.
Incorporating customer success strategies into private education—such as personalised learning, proactive engagement, and tracking student outcomes—only enhances their competitive edge. By using these strategies, private schools can provide tailored educational experiences, ensuring that each student reaches their full potential while also maintaining the institution’s prestige. In this way,
private schools showcase how customer success principles can enhance, rather than dilute, academic rigour.
Customer Success in the Indonesian Context: The Influence of SaaS Backgrounds
Interestingly, Indonesia's Minister of Education, Nadiem Makarim, brings a unique perspective from the business world, specifically from his experience co-founding Gojek, a highly successful SaaS company. His background in a tech-driven, service oriented company suggests that some business principles may have already found their way into Indonesia’s education reforms. The introduction of the Kurikulum Merdeka shows an emphasis on flexible, personalised learning, long-term outcomes, and proactive engagement—principles that align with customer success models.
The Kurikulum Merdeka gives teachers the autonomy to adapt their teaching to the needs of their students, focusing less on a rigid curriculum and more on fostering skills like critical thinking, creativity, and collaboration. Data is increasingly used to track student progress, and proactive interventions, such as additional support for struggling students, are encouraged. These efforts suggest a form of customer success adapted to an educational context, where teachers play a role similar to customer success managers, continuously monitoring and supporting student growth.
How Much is Too Much?
The real question isn’t whether customer success can be applied to public education, but how much of it should be applied. Education and business differ fundamentally in their goals. While businesses aim to maximise profit and customer satisfaction, education aims to cultivate well-rounded, knowledgeable individuals who can contribute to society in meaningful ways. Balancing these distinct missions is critical when considering the application of business concepts to education.
Beyond customer success, other business strategies have potential applications in education, but they too come with caveats:
• Lean Management: This principle focuses on eliminating inefficiencies and maximising value with minimal resources. Applied to education, lean management could streamline administrative processes, freeing up more resources for teaching. However, education is a deeply human process, and over-application of efficiency models might risk turning students into "products" moving through a system.
• Design Thinking: A problem-solving approach focused on understanding the needs of users. In education, design thinking could be used to create more responsive, student-centred curricula. However, excessive focus on innovation can sometimes overlook the importance of traditional academic rigor and knowledge-building.
• Agile Methodology: Often used in software development, Agile involves continuous iteration, adaptation, and feedback. In education, this could translate into more flexible teaching methods, where teachers and students continuously adapt to each other’s needs. However, an overly flexible system might struggle with consistency, especially in larger public school systems where uniform standards are necessary to ensure equity.
The adoption of business principles in education is not without its critics. Scholars such as Michael Apple argue that the "businessification" of education can lead to the commodification of learning, where the focus shifts from developing well-rounded individuals to producing "human capital" for the workforce. Apple notes that education’s public mission—to develop critical, engaged citizens—risks being overshadowed when too many business principles are applied. Nonetheless, selectively integrating business practices such as proactive engagement, outcome oriented learning, and data-driven support can help strengthen educational institutions by making them more responsive and adaptable.
Multiple Interpretations and the Challenge of Measuring Success in Education
One of the limitations of applying business concepts to education is the challenge of defining "success." In business, success is often clearly measurable—through revenue, customer retention, or satisfaction scores. But in education, success is multifaceted and difficult to quantify. Students’ paths to success are diverse, and what success looks like for one may be different for another.
Success in education can be viewed in multiple ways:
Academic achievement: Test scores, grades, and university admissions are traditional markers of success. However, these are limited in measuring long term personal or societal impact.
Social-emotional development: Success can also be defined by students’ ability to collaborate, communicate, and demonstrate emotional intelligence. These are increasingly recognised as key skills for the modern workforce.
Critical thinking and problem-solving: These skills are difficult to measure but essential for students’ future success in a complex, changing world.
Civic engagement and societal contribution: Schools are tasked with preparing students to become engaged citizens, a form of success that transcends individual achievement and focuses on collective well-being.
Tracking long-term success is especially challenging. Schools can measure short-term outcomes like test scores or immediate job placement, but the true impact of education often unfolds over years or even decades. Moreover, success can shift depending on socio-economic background or personal goals—some students may define success as financial stability, while others may seek intellectual fulfilment or societal impact.
Incorporating business strategies like customer success can help track and improve short-term educational outcomes, but it may fall short in capturing the broader, long term goals of education.
Despite the push for data-driven decision-making, some aspects of education remain difficult to quantify. Critical thinking, creativity, and social responsibility are core goals of education, yet they defy easy measurement. Attempts to quantify these skills often rely on proxies—such as problem-solving tasks or social behaviour assessments—
which, while useful, may not capture the full scope of a student's development.
This raises questions about the applicability of business models like customer success, which rely heavily on metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs). In education, especially public education, the success of students often extends beyond immediate metrics and into the less tangible realms of personal and societal growth.
However, that doesn’t mean the idea of customer success should be dismissed. Rather, it calls for a nuanced approach. Schools can use data to track certain types of success—such as academic performance or student engagement—while recognising the limits of quantitative measurement. Combining quantitative data with qualitative insights—through teacher feedback, student reflections, and community engagement—can offer a fuller picture of what it means to succeed in education.
Now, what?
While business models like customer success offer valuable insights into how public education can be improved, it is important to recognise the unique goals of education as a public good. The integration of business principles like customer success into education offers opportunities for improving student outcomes, engagement, and personalisation. However, education is fundamentally different from business. Its success cannot be fully measured through short-term metrics but rather through long term societal and personal impacts. Education is not a product or service to be delivered; it is a transformative process that builds individuals who contribute meaningfully to society.
Striking the right balance is key. Business strategies should not overshadow education’s core mission of fostering critical thinking, personal growth, and civic responsibility. Instead, they should be used selectively, in ways that enhance these goals while respecting the complexity of teaching and learning. Ultimately, the question isn’t whether business concepts should be applied to education, but how much, and how they can be adapted to serve education’s broader social purpose.
References:
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2. Ministry of Education and Culture, Indonesia, "Kurikulum Merdeka: Fostering Independent Learning." Available at: Kurikulum Merdeka
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