Your busy days are full of answering the phone, booking appointments, and greeting customers. As busy as you may be, clients can only judge you based on what they see. While you’re keeping up with your packed to-do list, it can be all too easy to forget the important fine details: your customer’s experience!

It’s a no-brainer that excellent customer service is a necessity for your salon. 93% of customers say they will make repeat purchases with companies that provide great service. As a business owner, it’s essential to create a comprehensive customer service strategy with all your employees. Follow these tips to improve your salon’s customer experience!

1. Invest in Good Appointment Software for Bookings

Tracking all those appointments by hand is tiresome and dated. Plus, it makes it all too easy to make a scheduling mistake. In recent years, salon appointment tools have dominated the industry. If you don’t have one already, a good client relationship management system is a must for salons.

An all-in-one software can take your customer experience to the next level. Consider software like Vagaro or Fresha for example. Customers can book services using the calendar feature, pay with a credit card through the software, and receive reminders about their upcoming appointment. This takes out copious amounts of administrative work for your team!

On your end, you can use appointment software to track your customer’s preferences and purchases. Use their reporting data to customize their experience for their next appointment at your salon! Achieve both an accessible and customized experience for your customers through quality appointment software.

2. Ensure Employee Consistency

The minute a customer enters your salon, their experience begins. This means that even one unfriendly employee can sour their experience. Train all your employees from the receptionist to the stylists to greet customers and smile. Personalization will also go a long way. Whenever possible, employees should address customers by name.

On the same note, employees should all learn the fundamentals of good customer service. Ensure that all employees know the salon’s policies by heart. In turn, they should also enforce policies about cancellations or bookings equally. By ensuring consistency, no customer will receive an inconsistent answer if they encounter an issue.

To take your customer service training a step further, walk staff through a few scenarios of unhappy customers in a group training. Ask them how they would rectify a situation where a customer had a billing issue. Active participation will get people talking and share what’s worked best for them.

Encourage employees to work on their problem-solving scenarios together. Talking through customer service scenarios together can help your salon create a consistent and customer-focused response to any issues that may arise.

3. Encourage Employees to Match Customer’s Energy

Stylists should always be in tune with their customers. Good customer service means meeting people where they are. Not every customer wants to chit-chat. Other customers want to share pictures of their grandchildren. Whatever your stylist’s communication preference might be, they should match their energy and stay in the moment.

Your customer’s personalities can also evolve over time. Your stylist may usually have a bubbly conversation with their regular customer, Sally. But Sally might be struggling with a recent job loss or illness. She may be sullen and crave human interaction now more than ever.

Encourage your employees to tune into these changes. Some customers may consider their long-term stylist a friend or confidant after many years of service. Stylists should consider themselves as relationship managers. They should always work to maintain the working relationship through genuine connection. Simultaneously, they should always remain professional and polite.

4. Showcase Customers on Social Media

Social media can be a great tool to drastically improve your customer service game. If your employee did an awesome job on someone’s brow, ask the customer if they can snap a picture to feature it on your social media profiles. Not only will this highlight the stylist’s work, but it will make your customer feel celebrated.

If your customer is especially complimentary of your services, it’s an optimal time to ask for a review. You never want to force a customer to give out complimentary results. But if they’re already pleased with services, they are likely to naturally leave a positive review if asked. Considering 93% of people take Google reviews into consideration before making a purchase, reviews are fuel for continued positive customer service.

Scour social media for any mentions of your business. User-generated content is a win-win for your business and your customer. If a happy customer takes their own selfie after services and tags you, ask them if you can reshare it on Instagram. Customers love feeling listened to. You can also take a 5-star written review and repost it with permission as well.

5. Create a Loyalty Program

An excellent way to reward customer loyalty is through a loyalty program. Consider your goals before creating one. Do you want customers to book more appointments? Or do you want them to leave more positive reviews? Use punch cards, points, or tiers to create the program based on your goals.

Figuring out what rewards your clients truly want may lie in your salon booking software. Consider what services your clients typically use. You can create highly customizable offers for them based on their past data. Take personalization a step further with discounted birthday awards.

Once you create your loyalty program relative to your salon’s goals, it’s time to promote it. Post about it on your social media pages and add it to your website. Create print materials about the loyalty program in your salon. Finally, train your salon employees to actively promote the loyalty program to your loyal customers!

6. Remain Transparent and Communicative Online

While you will chat with your future customer in person at some point, their first point of contact with you might be online. Potential customers research. They want to know what kind of salon experience they’re going to have before booking an initial consultation. As a business, you should remain transparent with their expectations with your digital presence and in person.

Update your website with basic information like business hours and your contact information. List your services and feature photos of real customers. Have print materials at the salon with your hours and contact information as well. If you experience hiccups like an early closure, update your social media pages, website, and voicemail.

No matter how wonderful your customer service is, bad reviews happen. How you deal with them matters most. If you receive a poor review, be sure to respond to it promptly and publicly. Empathetically address the situation and focus on a remedy that you can control. Even if this particular customer isn’t swayed by your response, it shows your commitment to an excellent customer experience. Be sure to thank positive reviewers as well!

7. Roll Out the Red Carpet for New Customers

New customers will easily become returning customers with the right first impression. Get creative with first-time customers to really wow them with your salon experience. Try a few customer-focused strategies that work best for your salon’s culture.

In their initial booking, provide your new clients with a detailed questionnaire. Have them tell you more about their hair concern or eyebrow shaping preference. Take it a step further by asking about their favorite and least favorite scents for product recommendations. Give them a few options for a preferred beverage and provide it for them at the time of service! Keep a record of their preferences in your client management system.

When the client arrives, have their stylist give them an orientation to the salon. Show them around and make them aware of all your services. Have their stylist sit them down and ask more in-depth about their beauty concerns and preferences. Your new customer will feel appreciated and valued through their awesome first experience!

8. Offer Personalized Suggestions

As previously mentioned, customers love a personalized experience. The data stored in your software management system is a goldmine for creating that experience for your customer. Beyond providing their preferred services, take it a step further through personalized suggestions.

Stylists should consider the lifestyles of their clients. Maybe they’ll suggest a manageable brow style and product for a busy mom or offer the highlighter pencil for customers looking for a more dramatic look.

In addition to the service, employees should be product experts based on their client’s needs. Train employees to know your private label retail products well. When applicable, they can recommend products that can enhance a customer’s look and daily routine. They may suggest a tinted brow gel for a busy professional who wants to fill in her eyebrows quickly every morning.

Take your customer experience to the next level with high-quality and customizable private label retail products. Contact us to get your salon started today!

UPDATED CONTENT

9. For better customer service look elsewhere

Have you racked your brain thinking about how you can provide better customer service but haven’t found how to improve it more? Time to take a look outside our industry to figure out how other businesses are providing amazing customer service. 

The beauty industry and hospitality industry have a lot in common, take a look at a local high end hotel and figure out what they are doing that you can implement in your salon. Think about the experience, how did you find the hotel, how was check-in, what add-ons are they selling that you could match?

Take a night and pull apart the experience. What has made you feel amazing about the experience and figure out how to match it.

10. What Would _____ Do?

Let’s exploit how our brains work. You’ve been thinking about how you would improve your salon but lets get more creative. Ask yourself how your favorite business owner or salon owner would improve your salons customer experience.