Multiple studies indicate that over the years, increasing number of customer prefer to conduct their transactions such as booking appointments, shopping for goods and services, settling invoices, and leaving feedback online. In the beauty and wellness industry, that figure goes upto 70%, indicating that that technology has transformed the way how salons interact with their customers. It is without doubt that one can say that technology plays an increasing larger role in our day to day lives. Thus, as a salon owner or manager if you’re still hooked onto the old ways, then read along to know why you should adopt a hair salon online appointment booking system and make your business future ready. Listed below are the top 5 reasons to switch.
Enhanced Customer Experience
The first and foremost reason to switch to an online platform is because of it enables the business to provide an enhanced customer experience. A high quality online hair appointment booking system can make the process extremely easy for customers while ensuring that the process is swift, and giving them the flexibility to book anytime, anywhere. A well-designed solution will allow guests to exercise one tap login, check availability of preferred providers, look up last minute slots and deals, visit past purchase history and much more. In other words, it enables your business to respond to the unique needs of each customer with much ease and without your active involvement. Designed to a be plug and play tool, all that a hair salon online appointment booking system needs is internet and a device such as laptop, tablet or a phone. Zenoti’s cloud based salon booking system adapts intuitive login method and works by creating a master profile of every customer that allows them to login using either phone number or email. Equipped with rich features, such as search slots based on service, or providers it allows customers to complete booking in just 4 clicks. The system also auto populates the list of purchase history to allow guests to book services in one tap.
Reduce No Shows and Eliminate Empty Slots
How many times have you had to deal with situations wherein you were all set to provide service but the customer didn’t show up? With a hair salon online booking system, no shows will become thing of the past. Once the booking is confirmed, the system keeps a track of it to send automated reminders, usually 24 hours in advance, to both customer and the provider about the upcoming booking and requires customers to confirm their visit. As a result, your salon sees minimum no shows. Furthermore, some online booking platform also allow customers to put themselves on waitlist, for appointments on a certain dates, and in the eventuality of any booking being cancelled it automatically shares the availability of the slot with the waitlisted customers.
Higher Revenue
Believe it or not, but an online hair appointment booking system can help you increase your revenue by increasing the average user spend. In a study conducted over 100 salons in United States, varying in size and location, it was observed that salons which had switched to an online booking platform saw their average user revenue increase by 30%. The study revealed interesting facts that customers, who prefer online bookings tend to visit the salon more frequently. As the online platform makes the process of booking an appointment both quick and easy, along with making your salon accessible at all times results in customers increasing their spends thus resulting in higher revenues for your business.
Improved Employee Productivity
Another advantage of using an online hair appointment booking system is that it greatly enhances the productivity of each employee. With much of the tasks such as booking and scheduling appointments, processing payments, seeking feedback, running payrolls, computing income by tips and commissions etc. being automated the staff can focus on other important matters such as strategy, marketing and providing better customer experience. Further, the automation also ensures that the element of human error is avoided. Based on the level automation you can reduce the need for a full time front desk as the online booking platform becomes the one stop solution for all needs. Furthermore, some of the online booking platforms come with an employee management module that allows you to set up KRA’s to monitor the individual performance of your team.
Real Time Reporting
The online booking platform converts the concept of real time reporting into reality. Irrespective of the medium the guests choose to book an appointment, the software assimilates all data and transfers into the centralized database to provide you with real time information. Sales reports, customer trends, marketing effectiveness, payrolls, commission payouts – and many more. With an online hair appointment booking system, you can generate on-demand reports for every aspect of your business. Additionally, since every data is stored in remote server, it helps you have a dashboard of comprehensive and individual location wise information. Whether you’re in one location or at the beach, you can be in control of your business from anywhere and take data driven decisions.
Online hair appointment booking systems are now hugely popular. In the US alone, there are more than 30 such platforms available to choose from. Amongst the renowned names in the industry we like Zenoti as it provides end to end solution to meet all business needs, is scalable and comes with an easy learning curve.
