The beauty and wellness industry, whilst growing exponentially, comes with its own set of challenges. Amongst the host of challenges that salons face, one such is operating in a highly competitive space. As a result, world over, salon managers are constantly looking at ways and means to improve both process efficiency, and employee productivity. In other words, one of the core focus areas of a salon manager is to ensure that every working minute is well utilized. One of the ways how salon owners or managers are tackling the challenge is by rapidly adopting technology popularly known as hair salon online booking software.
The hair salon online booking system, colloquially known as salon management software transforms the business by automating the administrative processes. Read along to know how the software works to increase productivity of the salons.
Automate Appointments
A salon business works on appointment, and a hair salon online appointment booking system can help you take the leg work out of the process. A well designed system can not only simplify things for your guests but also work wonders for your business. From allowing guests to make booking at their convenience and get instant confirmation to enabling businesses to be able to respond 24×7, and do away with voluminous paper work, the online hair appointment booking software vastly improves the quality of interaction between the business and the guest. Some of the renowned software such as the one from Zenoti allows guests to complete bookings in just 4 clicks, and recurring appointments in just one click. Aside from confirming the booking, the system also sends automated reminders of the upcoming bookings to minimize the no show bookings.
Plan staff shifts and schedules
Often times, one of the common issues that salon owners and managers find themselves grappling with is with adequate staff deployment. They often find themselves in situation where they’re either having shortage or are paying overtime. A salon software can help you avoid both the situations. It does so by creating profiles of each staff, and matches their skills with the appointments calendar to ensure that there is both fair and equitable distribution of work, and that the salon is never understaffed. The system allocates the work based on the staff availability and syncs the confirmed appointment with individual staff calendar such that the staff is always kept aware of the upcoming work schedule. Some online hair appointment booking system also allow you to pre-set the duration of break between appointments based on the time of the day. For instance, you can easily incorporate a 10 minute break during peak hours and a 20 minutes break during off peak hours.
Minimal Downtime with smart scheduling
Did you know that scheduling can directly impact your profitability? On the other hand, a well thought scheduling plan can result in keeping yoay interesting and improve your bottom line. The hair salon online booking system can help create a schedule that works to improve your profitability. By analyzing the popularity of services and frequency at which they are availed the software can help you create the right mix of services for each day. For instance, it can strategically schedule the high value services during the peak hour slots and the low value services during the off-peak hours to help you better utilize every working minute and ensure that your staff doesn’t sit idle.
Integrated POS
The days of writing manual invoices and dealing with cash are long gone. Not only is the process time consuming but also prone to the element of human error. The hair salon online booking software comes with a robust POS (point of sale system), which automates and expedites the process of generating invoices and offers one touch payment options. Further, by democratizing the payment methods, it equips your business to accept payments through multiple methods such as cash, credit cards, wallets, NFC. Some software also have an integrated shopping portal where guests can also buy products and settle combined invoices. Further, as soon as the payment is settled the system automatically completes the check-out process instantly thus providing guests with superior experience.
Manage multiple locations
Last but not the least, the salon software can easily help you manage multiple locations through a common dashboard, which gives both macro and micro view of your business metrics. Since the online hair appointment booking system records each and every transaction, and maintains complete traceability it can analyze the data to generate on-demand consolidated sales reports, revenue, inventory, staff deployment etc. Since the system is cloud based, it can be accessed anytime and from anywhere thus eliminating the need of physical presence. The reporting and analytics feature comes very handy and helps you better understand the business performance and helps you take data driven decisions.
The hair salon online appointment booking system is an excellent tool to increase productivity and as a consequence the performance of your business. Some such salon software such as Zenoti, MioSalon, Phorest, Rosy, and Salonist are very user friendly and come with an easy learning curve. A US based men’s high end salon 18|8, which operates at 85 franchise locations, deployed Zenoti salon software to transform the way how their business interacts with the guests. From offering single touch booking and automated check-ins to Uber-esque style one touch payments and instant feedback collection, they automated all administrative tasks such that the team could focus solely on client experience, and strategy. Being able to monitor performance at all locations has helped them better manage inventory, deploy newer sales strategy and improved productivity by 30%. They are now looking to scale up operations to 500 stores.
