Effective time management, alongside excellent service quality, is the foundation for every successful hair and beauty salon and one of the greatest challenges for owners as well. Customer service, answering incoming calls, organizing the team, stocktaking and equipment checking, not to mention doing a quick marketing campaign here and there… A growing to-do list certainly doesn’t help with time management. There is, however, a modern approach to this - a very handy salon management system which will save you a ton of valuable time. This extra pair of hands will streamline your daily tasks, and completely automate some of your most tedious tasks, giving you the time you need to tend to your customers.
Your virtual receptionist
An online booking system is the perfect, personal receptionist! This receptionist knows the available time-slots in your appointment book, what services you provide, and best of all, works for you 24/7. No need to worry about missed calls, or ringing back customers to confirm their booked appointments either, the system does it all for you. Customers schedule appointments with you after hours, your virtual receptionist sends a confirmation message after they’ve booked and an automatic appointment reminder is sent a day before the appointment. Now imagine focusing on what’s most important, your customers. Your appointment book is being filled up with online bookings, without those messy, handwritten notes. No more chaotic scribbling, or missing information, everything is as it should be.
Collect customer reviews, hands-free
In the daily flood of tasks, we rarely remember to ask customers for feedback of their visit. Thank goodness for the automatic reviews and comments system. This state-of-the-art feature has been developed to send an automatic message to your customers, right after their visit. The message contains a very short questionnaire, allowing customers to get creative with their review on your business and services. And when you receive positive feedback, you can then decide to share it on Twitter or Facebook.
The numbers - know where you stand
Real-time reports and salon operations analysis not only help in daily work management, but also in creating genius plans for expanding your business in the long run. Thanks to the well-developed salon management system, managing your statistics is a piece of cake - even for the less numerate users. You choose what time range you’d like to see your reports from and...voila! You’ve got the document and all the information you need at your fingertips. Take a peek at your customer retention and service popularity, keep tabs on your finances, changes in your inventory and employee efficiency… And we’re just warming up! The system will allow you to customize your employee schedules - appointments won’t be booked for absent employees - and automatically calculate commissions for you, freeing you from annoying paperwork at the end of the day.
Communication tools of the future
Customers are every salon’s lifeforce. As a salon owner, you work hard to provide the best services for them, so that they become your loyal, returning clients. A vital part of this are the right communication tactics. There are many ways to reach out to customers and some methods can make the whole process unnecessarily time consuming. However, thanks to advanced salon software, the time spent reaching out to your customers is cut in half and most importantly - it's easy. Best of all, the most important tools for communicating with customers are under one roof, in your professional salon management system. Automatic appointment reminders, booking confirmations, bulk messaging, and birthday wishes are just a few options, but then there’s marketing automation - the quintessential form of communication with your customers. In it, you’ll find sets of predefined promotional templates, which - sent through the system automatically, at the right time - remind customers that you’ve got the best services in town, and that it’s time for them to book their next appointment. Customers return, and you can sleep peacefully, knowing that you can send all of your automatic reminders and newsletters via text and email, straight from one source!
Introducing your salon to the most brand-spanking new salon tech, such as the professional salon management program Versum, you take the load off your back and allow for your most tedious and time-consuming tasks to go on autopilot. With the time saved, you can focus on what’s most important - providing the best quality services, and taking a break once in a while.
Learn more and try Versum for free @ versum.com
[Image courtesy of Versum]