Don’t we all sometimes feel like we are in desperate need of a personal assistant? If only to manage our bookings, appointments and all boring but necessary everyday tasks.
Good organisation is the key to bringing order and balance to everyday life and understanding your customers’ needs is the key to business success.
Most of us tend to have one dentist, visit the same farmers market, buy clothes and shoes from our favourite brands continuously and trust the same hair and beauty salon repeatedly. Smart business owners will do their best to become customers’ healthy habits and cherish that.
Without positive (or negative) feedback from your clients, you might easily lose touch in your ability to provide a high-quality customer experience. Trends and client’ expectations are constantly changing, which is why the best way to keep your loyal customers from looking the other way, is to communicate with them.
Though customer satisfaction is crucial for your business wellbeing, as a professional in the hair and beauty industry, you are most probably facing a few challenges with managing appointments as well. Nothing is more frustrating than someone missing an appointment. Not only does it waste your time, but it upsets the clients who have had their appointment times rescheduled as a result.
You need a solution designed and optimised to help you communicate with guests quickly and easily, responding to queries and requests swiftly.
Let’s see just how easily SMS can help you improve all these stages of the customer journey.
Booking confirmation
Make sure your clients have all needed information about their appointment and your salon easily accessible to them on their phones by sending them an SMS as soon as the appointment time is set.
They will respect your schedule with a gentle SMS reminder
Even the most loyal guests will occasionally and not intentionally miss out on their appointment at your salon, which badly affects your internal organisation and time efficiency. We all sometimes have too many things on our plate, and a simple reminder will do the trick. The best practice is to set an automatic reminder to be sent one hour ahead, along with any additional info you’d consider to be important for them.
Send follow-ups to get feedback via 2-way SMS
Many factors influence the level of customer satisfaction. First and most important is the quality of service. Realistically, it is hardly possible to have a 100% success rate with this criterion. Having in mind that the internet brings us the ability to say out loud all the good and the bad things about products and services we’re trying out, most likely a negative comment will arise on some social network. This happens because we all need to be heard, and have our needs acknowledged. If you enable an SMS channel for customers to share their feedback internally, you’re more likely to prevent negative comments from going public.
Manage your staff
Send SMS notifications to your staff members 15 mins before each appointment to consistently and easily stay on the top of their daily tasks.
Put a spotlight on your salon
Even with a method in place to remind customers of upcoming appointments, effective marketing in a field as competitive as the hair and beauty industry can still be a real struggle.
If you’re wondering why SMS is the most popular marketing solution across most industries, the answer lies in the fun fact that it has a 98% open-rate. This even puts it in front of emails, which often end up in a spam-box.
Text messaging is the ideal way to drive more business to a salon, targeting new and existing clients with news, updates and special deals straight to their mobile phone.
Campaign manager helps you track not only the open rate but also the conversion rate. Conversion rate tells you if they have proceeded with the needed action, for example, to get the New Year voucher.
Having the booking processes automated in your salon operating software enables you to put special attention to those guests who are visiting most frequently and attract them with ongoing deals.
Need any help with making all the above best practices new tactics you’ll be proud of? Feel free to reach out to Mitto!
Stay fresh.
