As your business grows, you have to expand the list of services and increase the number of salons to meet the ever-increasing demands of your consumers. To keep both your clients and employees satisfied, you can rely on automated online booking software that can take care of the lion’s share of routine operations.
Custom booking software development for salons is an opportunity to receive a top-notch web solution built in full accordance with the features of your business. The future appointment booking solution can help to avoid problematic situations or at least significantly minimize the likelihood of their occurrence. In this article, we’ll consider some essential things to remember before you decide to adopt an online booking system for your salon and review some benefits that you can get.
Things to Remember Before Adopting Custom Online Booking Software
If you decide to use online booking software for your salon, it doesn’t mean that you can abandon phone call appointments. The best option for both you and your clients is to provide a new online appointment system that will complement the existing solution instead of completely replacing it. On your website, you can offer all your potential clients of your salon to use one of the available appointment options. Old habits are hard to change, so it’ll be a better choice not to force your clients to use new online booking software.
The use of online booking software for salons has two sides. Such systems make the appointment booking process more convenient, but at the same time, they remove a bit of good old human relationships. With online software, customers won’t feel that your salon cares for them as much as in case of a conversation by phone. But it’s in your power to change it. With booking software, you can send your customers personalized notifications, happy birthday greetings, special offers, and more.
One of the main disadvantages of tailor-made online booking software for salons is that it requires time and money to build them. Unlike off-the-shelf solutions, custom-made booking software is built from scratch, so you better be patient if you choose this option. Before the first line of code is written, you’ll have to communicate with a business analyst to help them formulate the primary requirements for the future online booking software. Therefore, you’ll have to do a small research and ask the employees of your salon what issues they face during the work. This info will help a custom development company to find a better possible software solution. As you can imagine, further development will take months before you’ll get the possibility to try your brand new online booking system in practice.
How Custom Online Booking Systems Help to Improve Your Business
Any useful online booking system for salons should provide the following set of features:
- convenient online appointment booking services
- easy-to-use filtration by service type
- the ability to choose and manage appointment times
- review and synchronization of the calendar of appointments
- notifications and reminders
To see how these features allow companies to improve their performance and increase user satisfaction, let’s consider them in more detail.
First of all, salon booking software is available 24/7, so all your clients can book online at any time. It significantly simplifies the appointment booking process for those who don’t have enough time for phone calls during office hours. With online booking software for salons, a client can get access to a calendar of your salon to review available specialists and time for appointments. If there’s the need for scheduling multiple salon services, online booking systems allow doing it with ease. Online booking software for your salon can be accessed from anywhere with the use of any device. It will enable all your potential clients to use smartphones, tablets, or desktops to access your services.
Online booking software for salons can be automatically synchronized with your calendar. The system shows your availability to potential clients which allows preventing double bookings and helps to be aware of all your current and future appointments.
All staff members of a salon can receive notifications on all new appointments. After all new bookings, each specialist can be notified via mobile device or email. Staff members can accept or reject new appointments. It can be useful if there’s always an appointment set to a particular date that hasn’t been entered into the database yet. For example, such a situation may arise when a salon specialist received an appointment request by phone but didn’t have much time to add it to the calendar.
With online booking software for your salon, you can review your schedule any time you want. If you wish to plan the week schedule while enjoying your weekend or riding into work on a tram, you can use your mobile device to review the list of all salon appointments and prevent any possible issues. Knowing the type of all appointments booked for the upcoming week, you can develop a strategy that will help you to deal with all these tasks.
Online booking software for your salon can become a part of your strategy of reducing no-show appointments. Online scheduling software allows requesting credit card info from all potential clients during the booking. This action won’t charge anyone immediately, but you can use this info to apply a fee for those clients who missed an appointment and haven’t cancel it during the period stipulated by the terms of service.
Also, online booking software for salons with built-in reporting and analysis modules allow monitoring core KPIs to be aware of the current status of your business. You can get access to such indicators as revenue per employee, new bookings by an employee, average monthly rate by a specialist, and others.
To make sure that all your clients are aware of their appointment details, you can rely on automated client reminder methods built-in in an online booking system for your salon. A friendly reminder of upcoming visits to the salon won’t entirely replace human communication but will allow build relationships with the client and help to avoid missed appointments.
An online booking system for salon appointments scheduling will enable you to keep all your clients’ information up to date. Once your booking system asked a client to share personal info, it’ll be saved to the database so you can easily access and update it at any time. A properly made online CRM system for salons built according to the features of your company and your requirements allows creating and editing clients’ profiles containing their info and notes of your employees. Advanced CRM apps allow storing additional customer data which can help to provide personalized services. For example, you can get access to client’s preferences, comments, opinions on your work, the frequency of visits, personal bonuses and discounts, and other data. With all this information at hand, you can quickly contact clients if there’s the need to reschedule the appointment or receive some additional information.
If you’re interested in adopting an online booking system for your salon, but not sure if the whole process will pass painlessly for you and your business, you can learn how the development of a booking system for the chain of salons looks like in general.
Conclusions
Custom-made online booking software for salons can be built in full accordance with the features of your business. Therefore, you don’t have to change your business processes to adapt to the new software system. Also, software development companies can add new modules to your online booking system as your business growth, and the need for new features appears.
Read also How We Developed a Custom Booking System that Tripled the Income of a Healthcare Company
The list of benefits provided by automated software systems for online booking outweighs the possible disadvantages and makes such investment profitable in the long run. Judge for yourself. With an online booking system your company will be able to:
- allow clients to book online 24/7
- synchronize available appointments with the calendars of all your employees
- send automated notifications to clients and staff members
- provide easy online access to the schedule from all types of devices
- reduce the number of no-show appointments
- make all clients’ information easy accessible
- review core KPIs
Unfortunately, like any other thing, online booking software has its price, and we talk not only about money. Here’s what you should remember:
- online booking systems don’t replace appointments by phone completely and usually complement each other. Therefore, things can be a little tricky at first
- you can lose a bit of human relationships
- you have to make a small research on your current issues to help developer provide a proper solution
- the development of an online custom-made booking system requires time
Watch the demo that shows how to schedule client services to the business, and allows clients to reserve services on the example of a salon business.