Guaranteed Customers For Life

Spas and salons survive on customers for repeat business. They provide predictable revenue and help meet monthly revenue targets. As you cannot rely on finding new customers every month, you have to hold on to the customers you have. The cost of not retaining customers is enormous - when you lose customers, you not only lose revenue, but also increase profits for your competition!

In this whitepaper, you'll learn how to establish a core group of customers as regular customers for life. And, you'll see how easily you can consistently provide world-class experiences to each and every customer.

The 4 Things You Need To Do Today

Customer retention reflects your ability as a spa or salon to get customers to stay loyal over a period of months and even years. Spas and salons often address customer retention by providing:

• A variety of services
• A great ambiance
• Well-trained staff
• Excellent quality of services

While these are important, repeat business hinges on providing customer service that goes beyond. The following 4 methods, when done right, can provide exceptional customer service and keep customers coming back.

• Personalize customer experiences
• Anticipate customer needs
• Gather customer feedback it, measure it, and act on it
• Convert negative experiences into an opportunity

Accomplishing each of these methods is easier than you might think.

Personalize Customer Experiences

Customers always respond positively to personalized attention. Every smart business owner knows this. The challenge is to implement a method so that staff provide a personalized experience to every customer and every visit. Effective ways to personalize a customer's experience is to:

• Greet customers by name, always. This makes a customer feel remembered and valued. A quick look at the appointment book will help when a customer walks in the door. To greet customers by name when they call in requires caller ID on the phone, or a quickly accessible software system to look up customers when a phone number is entered
• Know your customer's service history. Track the services and therapist preferences. Any customer appreciates being asked if they would like to book their appointment with their preferred therapist. You've not only remembered them, but also show them you remember what's important to them!
• Know your customer's preferences. A specific room, a particular order of service, or any other special requests. If your customer prefers a particular room, remember to book that room. Or perhaps she likes to get her services done in a particular order - eyebrows before hair. Cater to her preferences and she'll reward you with her loyalty.
• Remember key dates like the customer's birthday or anniversary. Sending an sms (text message) or email shows them you remember! Not only is this cost effective and offers a personal touch, but you could also offer a complimentary service or discount to get them to come in for an unplanned visit.

In order to effectively personalize customer experiences, you must store customer profiles, track service histories and preferences. Make this data easily accessible, and you'll be able to make every customer feel special.

Anticipate Your Customer's Needs

By anticipating a customer's needs, you're assured to make a positive impression. Anticipating a customer's need can happen before they ever walk in and by addressing a need as soon as it becomes apparent. The more you know about your customer, the better you can anticipate their needs. For example:

• Assume a customer books a hair appointment in preparation for a party. What can you do to add to her look? Are her nails too long, do her eyebrows need shaping or cleaning? A free eyebrow clean-up shows the customer you care about her success. In this situation, the missed revenue from an eyebrow cleanup is insignificant compared to the loyalty you're sure to secure.
• If a customer just returned from an international trip and looks tired, but has only booked a haircut, suggest a relaxing massage. Often times, your customer just hasn't thought of the option. The revenue from the massage is an added advantage, but you gain more by showing the customer you noticed and cared to suggest a service they truly needed.
• Call customers to remind them about a pending service. For example, if they're in the middle of a skin treatment and need to visit every 2 weeks, get in touch with them. They may have lost track in their busy day and would appreciate a quick reminder.
• Whether its water, fresh squeezed juice or a snack, if your customer always orders it, ensure its ready for her.
• Is a customer in for a long hair appointment? Be prepared to respond to boredom, have magazines and beverages ready. Some salons even have ipads to really wow their customers!

Listen to Your Customers

Asking for feedback is the simplest way to know what works in your business and what needs improvement. It's also an effective way to show your customers that you care about their experience. To effectively gather feedback, provide opportunities to offer feedback immediately after the service. You could choose to use:

• A computer kiosk placed in an easily accessible location
• Feedback forms accompanied with the bill. You could even print the form directly on the bill!
• An SMS (text message) with a thank you message and a phone number to send feedback

Ask enough on the feedback form to get the information you need and not so much that the customer needs to put in too much effort. Are your customers hesitant to fill out a form? Why not ask them the most important question of all. "Would you refer us to friends and family?"

Collate Customer Feedback

After you've captured and collated customer feedback, it is important to analyze feedback accurately to make the right improvements. You will need to organize all the data in the stacks of feedback forms. Avoid the common pitfalls that spas and salons often make. Be sure to:

• Gather accurate data. Often, receptionists and therapists submit feedback forms that contain positive feedback about them. In certain cases, the customer may not ever see a feedback form! It's important to implement a process that ensures you, the owner or manager, get accurate and reliable access to all feedback - good and bad! Implement an audit mechanism so you know that you're getting an accurate view of feedback and ratings.
• Look at individual customer feedback , averages and overall trends. Looking at individual level feedback calls out any warning signs that may be missed in averaged out data. Averages for the feedback provides a high level trendInformation. You'll get the most leverage from your feedback by organizing the data into meaningful categories. For example, collate the data so that you know how ratings rank against particular services. Perhaps your hair team does an excellent job, while pedicures have a long way to go. By organizing feedback ratings by services, therapists and gender, you'll know exactly what to address in your business. While it may seem a tedious task to collate all the customer feedback, putting a system in place, with reports to graphically display results will make analyzing your data and quick and simple.

Convert A Negative Experience Into an Opportunity

Any business can expect to receive negative feedback. By taking immediate action, you can turn a customer's negative experience into an opportunity. A daily report to the manager is an effective method to capture negative feedback. The manager may choose to call this customer and address the problem immediately. Often times, a call can simply acknowledge that the complaint was valid and will be addressed. Most customers are delighted to know someone actually listened and acted on feedback, and will look past their poor experience.

In many cases, feedback may reflect action items that cannot be addressed immediately. And unfortunately, without a system to track requests, much of what customers are communicating can be lost. By putting in a system that tracks action items, assigning an owner and a delivery date, you can vastly improve future experiences. The manager may call the customer to understand their grievance, ensure the problem gets resolved by a particular date and inform the customer after the problem is resolved. This system should ensure that tasks do not slip through the cracks, allows the manager to quickly identify "to-do's", and communicate with the customer as appropriate.

A Complete Solution for Retaining Customers

While spa and salon owners may agree that customer retention is a critical factor for success, the question still remains how you go about implementing the processes without overwhelming staff and incurring cost in time and money.

Software tools, like Zenoti, incorporate best practices, like those of retaining customers directly into the software so that even novice staff will perform like seasoned professionals.

While Zenoti offers a complete set of features from booking appointments, to running marketing programs and inventory, the software has a number of features to support customer retention.

Personalize Customer Experiences and Anticipate Requests with Zenoti

Zenoti integrates customer profiles, service history and preferences with the appointment book. That means receptionist and therapists have access to important information about customers through a single click. Things like detailed customer history, alerts and a smart booking system help personalize experiences, and help you anticipate customer needs.

Automating Customer Feedback with Zenoti

With Zenoti, you can choose to enforce the printing of a feedback form on every customer's bill, and ensure the receptionist enters the feedback into the system. This gives you full visibility to what customers are saying. Its easy to conduct audits, and the system does all the heavy calculating for you. As the owner or manager, you'll see exactly which services and therapists garner the best ratings, a daily report will highlight any negative experiences, and you'll be able to see trends within feedback as well.

You'll only need a few minutes a week and still gain full transparency into exactly how your customers feel about your business.

Turning Negative Experiences into Opportunities

The system also sends you a daily report by email to highlight any negative experiences reported for the day. This enables the manager to take immediate action and contact these customers right away.

For issues that can not be rectified right away, Zenoti provides an issue tracking system to store, track and follow-up on issues. Issues might include things like the sound system needing fixing, or to tighten a rod in the shower cubicle. The issue tracker is a sophisticated "to-do" list that tracks the person who reported the problem, the owner responsible for fixing the issue and even a due date. By communicating with customers about these longer term items, you show them that you truly value their feedback, and in effect turn a negative experience into an impressed customer.

Customer Retention Reports

Zenoti offers you something that no other software can - accurate customer retention reports. These reports are automatically generated from bookings made in the appointment book. Use these to determine your actual retention rate, find which therapists are best at customer retention and even which services attract the most customers back.

Why don't we talk about special ways to retain a first-time visitor vs a regular guest? We should tie into our reports that show first time, employees, which service folks come in for and come back for, or even gender (which might help address anticipation).

Conclusion

To retain your customers, it is important to provide a world class experience. Simple gestures like greeting customers by name, or remembering preferences form the foundation for a strong, long-term relationship. Gathering and acting on customer feedback provides you with an accurate picture of your business, and gives you an opportunity to connect with your customers. It's easier than ever to implement processes to personalize experiences, anticipate needs, gain insight from customer feedback and retain customers by using software like Zenoti. You can easily turn every receptionist and therapist into a seasoned professional and increase your customer retention significantly.