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7 Ways to Enhance Your Salon Customer Experience

Posted: December 1, 2022 - By Health Dev

When running a salon, the two biggest challenges are acquiring and retaining customers. Even if you offer perfect haircuts and the best hair washes, your customers may still not return. Due to the rapidly growing competitive industry, it’s not just about providing up-to-the-mark services anymore. You must offer an excellent salon customer experience that keeps people coming back to you.

Today, acquiring customers has become easier than ever because of modern digital marketing techniques, particularly the rise of social media. Almost all businesses, including salons, utilize their online presence to attract and wow potential customers. However, returning and loyal customers are essential for every business and shouldn’t get overlooked in the overall pursuit of growth. If salon owners want to thrive in this highly-competitive world, they should opt for innovative ways to hook guests long-term.

In this guide, you will learn practical tips for offering a top-notch salon customer experience, from investing in automated client management software to using high-quality products.

How To Refine the Salon Customer Experience

Customers now want a personalized experience when dealing with a business. Once limited to target marketing, personalization now includes the entire customer experience, or in other words, all points of user interaction with a brand.

When provided satisfactorily, personalization helps both customers and brands, giving the former the experience they seek and the latter a competitive advantage over the competition. But how do you deliver personalized experiences through every customer touchpoint?

Although communication may first come to mind and indeed has a significant impact, there are other things you may want and even need to do to wow your customers. Here are seven tips to provide an excellent salon customer experience to your guests:

Invest in a Complete Client Engagement Software Platform

As mentioned, communication can help you take long steps forward in your journey to improve salon customer experience. Fortunately, salon owners can easily communicate and interact with customers to provide them with those much-needed personalized experiences.

For example, many salon visitors are often skeptical about the type of hair coloring or haircut they want. Some may also struggle with keeping up with the appointment dates. As a salon owner, you can identify and list customers’ preferences and concerns and address them with every appointment to ensure a better experience.

But talking to customers every time and keeping a manual journal can often get tedious. A better and faster solution is a completely-automated modern client engagement software.

Such software or platforms streamline all your customer-related data in one place to help you track and measure performance but also provide personalized experiences. When customers interact with you, the platform records essential information you can examine with ease and use to make accurate and relevant offers. After receiving one valuable recommendation after another, your customers will be more likely to revisit your salon.

If you opt for a quality customer management solution, you can also:

Schedule and reschedule appointments.
Send automated appointment confirmation alerts and reminders to minimize no-shows.
Track your customers’ appointment history and pricing.
Store essential details of your clients, such as their photos, phone numbers, email addresses, etc., through the appointment scheduling app.

The more information you have about your customers, the better the experience you can offer to them. Investing in modern customer experience management software allows you to gather this information and automate processes for increased operating convenience. Alongside data tracking and monitoring, the software provides many other benefits, some of which we’ll explore in more detail later.

Get To Know Your Clients for a Personalized Experience

If you want to improve salon customer service, make your clients feel invited and valued. Appreciated customers will remember you and return to you whenever they need hair salon services. The most effective way to make customers feel heard and valued is by understanding what they want and providing services accordingly.

You can’t offer the best-personalized experience without knowing your clients. Since personalization is the new standard these days, your entire focus must be to achieve it through open communication. You can do so through:

Listening to the client’s needs and concerns carefully
Showing interest in the customer’s concerns and needs by asking them questions
Finding the right time to talk to the client
Being honest about the solutions you can provide

Let’s say a client complains to you about their dry scalp and poor experience at different salons. You shouldn’t overlook this concern but sit with your client, try to understand the problem, and suggest the best solution at hand. Such an approach will show your dedication to providing exceptional customer service rather than solely pursuing financial benefits.

Another thing you should consider is giving customers a say in some decisions, such as a type of essential oil during the massage. This will make people feel more important and increase satisfaction with the services.

Involve Your Clients on Social Platforms

Whether an automotive or beauty business, no company can thrive in this digital environment without an online presence. If your salon business still lacks a website or social media accounts, change that as quickly as possible. You may want to start with Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. These are the most-effective social platforms to engage people and create awareness.

Your work doesn’t stop when you open up accounts on social media, though. If you want to keep them visible, attract your target audience, and engage followers, you need to post content regularly. Here are some best practices to involve your clients on social networking sites:

Post videos and pictures. Take crisp videos and photos of your salon and post them on your social media accounts. You can display the relaxing environment of your salon or your employees’ friendliness with the clients.
Create contests. If you want to give your beauty service exposure and engage social media followers, consider running contests. Ask your social media followers to use a specific hashtag to participate and win prizes. You can also include a sharing rule in your competitions and ask participants to invite their friends.
Ask for reviews. You can also ask your customers to leave a review on your social media page. It will boost your credibility in front of your prospects.
Show your work. If you desire to go one step ahead, how about sharing the pictures of your work on social media? But for that, you need individual permission. Once you get consent, take clear and crisp images of your client’s new hair color or shampoo experience, tag the person, and post it on your salon’s social media page. The client will surely love and share the post, leading to more exposure for your salon.
Get a free social media boost. If your client uploads an appreciative post for your salon services on social media, re-share it on your profile. That’s one of the most powerful free tools to gain the trust of your prospects.

Provide Automated Appointment Reminders

No-shows are one of the biggest letdowns for every service provider. Sometimes, the client books an appointment and forgets to show up. This wastes the time you could have spent better had you received the cancellation earlier.

Fortunately, there’s an easy way to deal with and prevent these situations. Automated appointment reminders can be your best friend here. They help you reduce no-shows and manage appointments with all customers in your salon. This software sends:

Text reminders for upcoming appointments
Instant notifications when appointments get booked
Follow-up messages

Additionally, you can customize the templates for your reminders to ensure personalization and client engagement. The process is simple. You only need to input your client’s information, such as:

Name
Appointment date and time
Location info
Service costs

Within a few minutes, the software will generate fully-personalized templates for appointment reminders, thank you notes, and client feedback. However, remember that customers dislike too many texts, emails, and notifications. Set your client management software to send automated appointment reminders when required, but avoid overloading your clients.

Be Flexible With Cancellations and Rescheduling

Sometimes, your client won’t make it to the appointment for valid reasons, such as a family emergency or a health issue. In such cases, you must show empathy to your customers instead of forcing them to come to the salon. But how can you know the cause behind a no-show?

Effective communication is once again key to achieving good relationships with customers. When you send a reminder message, add a section where your clients can write notes and notify you about the reason for their no-show. This way, you can easily cancel and reschedule their appointments for another day.

Things may not go this smoothly every time, though. Sometimes the customers will ask you to cancel a few hours before the arrival or may completely miss to alert you. Never lose your patience in these cases. Instead, show support to your customers and be more flexible with appointment rescheduling and cancellations.

Appointment cancellations can also come from your side. From the business point of view, an appointment is like a promise, and breaking it can hurt your reputation in the market. So make sure the business is open before the client’s scheduled appointment.

If something dire arises, let your clients know and reschedule as early as possible. When you miss the meetup, remember to send an apology message. Customers will appreciate it.

Start an Email Campaign and Text Communication Services

Another way you can boost your communication with your customers is through email campaigns and text communication services. These services are highly beneficial because they allow reaching out to customers without overloading them with calls and in-person marketing.

An email campaign usually comes in handy post-appointment. You can personalize your emails according to the service a client used before. For example, if a client got a haircut, your email’s subject line can be “Are you loving your new haircut?” The primary purpose is to keep the client engaged and ask for their feedback. Text communication services can be a good addition here, helping you stay connected with your clients.

Here is how you can start an engaging email campaign:

Add multimedia content. Emails with multimedia content like videos and photos will likely get more clicks. You can also embed gifs and audio directly in your emails to make them attractive.
Practice story-telling. You can opt for story-telling emails to keep your customers engaged for weeks. These emails consist of a story told across numerous emails.
Experiment with call-to-action (CTA). You can use different CTAs in emails to see which works the best for your clients. These could be “visit our website,” “click now to learn more,” or “get a 10% discount voucher.”

Use Quality Products for a High-End Salon Experience

Salons use the best products available to offer high-quality and professional hairdressing services. As a salon owner, you are responsible for examining your customers’ skin type, inquiring about any skin condition they have, and then using suitable products. To provide the best possible service, always do a patch test before applying a product and be transparent about what you use. Go into detail about all the ingredients a product contains so customers can feel confident.

Also, before stocking up products, ensure that they are of high-end brands, authentic, and not expired. Ensure that your equipment has the latest safety features to offer a seamless experience to your customers.