Client experience is all about putting clientsʼ needs at the centre of everything you do, and ensuring that they have a flawless experience along all of the key touchpoints and interactions at your business.

If you truly understand your clientʼs needs, then youʼre already ahead of the pack! Not only will this knowledge help you improve the client experience at your salon or clinic, but it gives you the information needed to increase your client retention rate, improve client loyalty, and increase your revenue.

Tip 1: Offer a seamless booking experience

The perfect client experience starts when the client books an appointment with you. Whether a client is making an appointment in person, over the phone, or online through your salon booking system, itʼs important that booking an appointment at your salon, spa or clinic is as simple and convenient as possible.

Does your business have an online booking system?

If the answer is no, here are 5 reasons why you need an online booking system at your salon, spa or clinic.

Tip 2: Personalise your client’s experience

Personalised service is no longer a trend, itʼs an expectation from your clients. But it doesnʼt have to be complicated or expensive.

The more you know about your client, the more personalised service you can provide. Start by collecting your clientʼs personal information and notes from every appointment, e.g. their favourite drink or treat, treatment preferences or goals, lifestyle, appetite for change and how much advice they are looking for.

Salon booking software, like Kitomba, allows you to customise the client profile to add fields like favourite drink, allergies and more so you can ensure your team provides the highest level of customer service.

Tip 3: Create the perfect salon atmosphere

As we mentioned earlier, client experience is all about putting clientsʼ needs at the centre of everything you do, and ensuring they have a flawless experience.

Think about how you want your clients to feel when they visit. For example, do your clients want to relax after a long day of work and stress? If so, your salon, spa or clinic could be painted with light colours, decorations could be simple and calming and soft background music should be chosen.

Be sure to think about every aspect of your space—decorations, furniture, equipment, flowers, magazines, drinks—even the lighting! Donʼt forget about non-visual things too, like what your clients smell and what they hear.

Tip 4: Keep in touch with your clients

Your client experience doesnʼt stop when a client leaves your salon or spa. To continue building strong client relationships and fostering loyalty, set up personalised text messages and emails to add value to your service.

For example, you can share after-care instructions for services that require specific maintenance such as chemical peeling or microneedling. Itʼs convenient for clients and it shows them that you are invested in their well-being.

Tip 5: Build an amazing salon team

Team culture is an especially important aspect in any hair and beauty business, and can make or break your salon, spa or clinic. You and your team are the face of the business, and clients will in turn pick up on when thereʼs a positive and happy team culture, and when there isnʼt. Creating a positive work environment leads to more satisfied team members, who will turn pass this on to the client.

Motivating your team

The use of incentives or commission based targets are a great way to motivate your team into upselling. Setting a business target, or giving individual staff members their own targets, gives them something to strive for. Hitting these goals will not only benefit your business, the increased service your clients will receive will add to their overall client experience.

Learn about Kitombaʼs target and goal tracking features.

Tip 6: Create a loyalty program for client retention

A salon loyalty program is a marketing strategy used for client retention as well as for attracting new clients. Building your client loyalty will help to keep your clients coming back, increase client spending per visit, and promote your business through word of mouth.

Our statistics show that regular clients at a hair or beauty salon make up around 40% of the client base. It also shows that these regular clients generate 70% of all appointments which essentially means that the more loyal clients you have, the more business you get over time.

With Kitomba, you can create a customised loyalty program that suits your needs and bring value to your clients.

Tip 7: Take your client consultations to the next level

If youʼre looking for ways to improve your client consultations, start using digital consultation forms. With digital forms, itʼs easy for your clients and staff to complete the forms on any device, anywhere. You can even add images during your client consultation, and draw on them to mark areas of concern or treatment plans.

With Kitomba Digital Forms, all this information can be automatically saved to the client card, ensuring easy access to the information whenever you need it. With Kitombaʼs Give to Client feature, itʼs easy for your clients to securely update their details directly from any device.

Tip 8: Help clients maintain their results between appointments

Educate your clients about how they can maintain their hair or skin between appointments and provide recommendations on what products they should use, how much of it, and how to apply them. Educating your clients goes a long way and reinforces the fact you are a trusted expert when it comes to their hair and skin concerns or goals. It also helps to build trust and client loyalty.

Tip 9: Provide a sustainable salon experience

Sustainability is becoming increasingly common across different sectors, and hair and beauty businesses are no exception. Environmentally-aware clients will make choices based on how a salon or clinic meets their green expectations, on top of price and location.

Kitomba is proud to partner with Sustainable Salons, the first comprehensive resource recovery service in Australia and New Zealand designed for the salon environment that rewards salons and gives back to the community.

Sustainable Salons rescues up to 95% of salon resources from landfill and finds repurposing solutions that benefit the planet, all while supporting the community.

Enable clients to book with ease

A negative booking experience can affect a clientʼs overall experience with your business. Here are the common issues that clients encounter when theyʼd like to book an appointment:

• Looking for the salonʼs contact details is hard or impossible
• Not being able to get through to you when they call
• Having to call to make a booking if they prefer booking online
• Not being responded to quickly enough
• Not having an easy and seamless booking experience
• Not being reminded about the upcoming appointment

Itʼs also good to be aware that clients are increasingly choosing to book online at their own convenience, outside standard business hours. If you already offer online booking at your hair and beauty business, have a look at these tips to make sure it provides your clients with a seamless experience:

Tip 1: Check your pricing and deposits

Firstly, make sure that your service pricing on your online booking platform is accurate. That way if you charge a deposit or a full payment for your services, there are no surprises for your clients and they are charged correctly.

Tip 2: Keep your appointment book up-to-date

If you have any planned business closures over holidays or for renovations, if you have a team member going on vacation or not available for certain days, make sure to update that time in your appointment book with Business leave. This way when clients are booking their appointments online, thereʼs no risk youʼll need to reschedule their selected time.

Tip 3: Make your online booking accessible

Once you have your online booking platform ready to go, think about where it would be best to add the link to the platform so itʼs convenient and accessible for your clients.

Here are a five places where you should have your online booking platform advertised:

1. Your website
2. Google Business Profile
3. Add Book Now buttons to your social media accounts with Facebook and Instagram integrations
4. Newsletters, client emails and SMS text messages
5. Advertise it in your salon e.g. at the front desk, stations or in treatment rooms.

Rebooking

If you want to grow your hair and beauty business, you’ll know all about the importance of marketing strategy and attracting new clients. But once you have these clients through the door, how do you encourage them to rebook?

Rebooking is an important part of your overall client experience at your salon, spa or clinic. Rebooking your existing clients also helps you maintain strong cash flow and secure future income.

Here are some tips on how to improve the rebooking experience for your clients:

Tip 1: Discuss rebooking during the appointment

During the service, suggest a timeframe for when a client should return for their next appointment to ensure that their hair or skin keeps looking its best.

Tip 2: Build strong client relationships

Use every appointment as an opportunity to develop better relationships with your clients. Share your expertise and educate your clients on how they can maintain their hair and beauty between visits with you.

Tip 3: Follow up with clients who havenʼt rebooked

Encourage clients to return by reminding them when itʼs time to rebook their next appointment. For example, set up an automatic email or SMS text reminder to be sent five weeks after a non-rebooked appointment. Make it easy for your clients to rebook with you by including a link to your online booking system.

Tip 4: Create a loyalty programme

Create a loyalty program that encourages clients to come back and earn points or rewards. For example, after earning a certain number of points, your client could receive a free treatment or retail product.

Tip 5: Focus your team’s effort on rebooking

Encourage your staff to rebook their clients by setting up rebooking targets and providing incentives. You could also run a competition among staff where a team member who rebooks the most clients in a week wins a prize.

Reducing no-shows

As a salon owner, one of your goals is to keep your appointment book full and reduce no-shows. Think about ways you remind clients about their upcoming appointments, whilst at the same time protecting your business from client no-shows. A strong client experience can help achieve both of these.

Tip 1: Send your clients appointment reminders

Itʼs easy for clients to forget about an upcoming visit even if they are looking forward to it. Help your clients to stay organised and on top of their hair and beauty appointments by sending SMS text or email reminders a day or two before. Itʼs helpful and convenient for your clients and shows that you care about their experience.

Tip 2: Add appointments to your clientʼs calendar

When a client books with you in-salon, use the send appointment details feature to send a digital reminder card so they can easily save these details directly in their calendar and plan their time more efficiently.

Tip 3: Follow up with clients who missed their appointment

If a client did not show up for the appointment, it might be because they forgot about it or simply double-booked themselves. Send an email or text to let them know that they missed their appointment and encourage them to contact you as soon as possible to reschedule.

What are bottlenecks?

Think about a bottleneck as an obstacle or a point of congestion that slows down your processes and negatively affects your client experience. For example, if a client calls your salon or clinic to book an appointment, but youʼre too busy to pick up and a client has to call back later, thatʼs a bottleneck.

How to recognise bottlenecks

To identify your bottlenecks, have a deeper look at overall processes at your salon, spa or clinic.
Ask yourself the following questions:

• What are the areas or processes that take too much time from your clients or your staff?
• What can you gain from improving this process or your timing? For example, it can result in.
  increased client satisfaction or improved service capacity.
• How can you solve this problem? For example, by hiring or assigning more staff or using salon.
  management software. If you feel that processes at your hair and beauty business are in need of a major overhaul, consider speaking to a salon business coach.

How to solve common causes of bottlenecks

Improve your booking experience

Over the past few years, consumer preferences on how to shop or book services have shifted dramatically towards online booking across different industries like hospitality, tourism, retail, groceries, health and wellness. If you still rely on bookings by phone, it can be a major bottleneck in your hair and beauty business that causes gaps in your appointment book, lost clients or bookings, and ultimately lost revenue.

Online booking is becoming an expectation for clients as it offers the convenience to book an appointment from any device, anywhere and at any time. Think about all the channels your clients use to communicate with you or find out more information about your business. It can be:

• Your website
• Social platforms
• Google Business Profile
• Newsletters
• SMS text messages
• Emails

If you set up your online booking once, you can use the link and promote it through all these different platforms. Having online booking provides your clients with a choice of when, where and how to book with you. It also helps you avoid one of the major service bottlenecks and improve overall client satisfaction.

Improve your consultation experience

A consultation with a client can make or break their experience with your salon, spa or clinic. It sets the tone for the clientʼs hair or beauty journey and helps to determine the trust level your client will have with you. So how can you make sure that you run a consultation in an efficient way and provide additional value to your client?

Gather client information

The most important part of executing the perfect consultation is gathering information about your clientsʼ needs and goals that they want to achieve. How do you record and store this information? Remember, itʼs important to keep this data in a safe and confidential manner but also make sure that your staff can access it to help them better prepare for the next appointment.

When your staff are getting ready for an appointment, can they access this information only from your computer at the front desk? If yes, this is a potential bottleneck as we know that the front desk area can easily get busy and overcrowded. Can your staff access it from tablets or smartphones anywhere in the salon?

With Kitomba Digital Forms, you can create a range of fully customisable forms which can be sent to clients prior to their appointment, and will automatically add to their client card. Client cards can be accessed on any device through Kitomba 1, and can be used to easily see all your clients information in one place.

Use photos

A great way to elevate your client consultation is to use photos. For instance, it can be photo examples of what your client wants and likes. It can also be a photo before and after the treatment to document your clientʼs progress and journey.

Use tablets

Think about how you can use technology to improve your consultations and make them more efficient both for clients and your staff. For example, use tablets to access client cards with client information, treatment history, any allergies and preferences.

Set up new client forms

If a new client signs up for an appointment, send them an online form before their arrival so that they can fill out some information in advance and save time during their appointment. A formalised new client form will also help you to get to know your clients better, learn more about their needs and provide a personalised experience from the very first appointment.

Improve your administrative processes

If you already have a system and process around collecting and storing your clients’ information, thatʼs a good start! It will help you provide a great client experience and build client relationships. The next step is to find efficiencies by reducing the administrative burden. For example, if you are copying information from paper forms into client cards, scanning and saving a copy and then filing the paper away, it can be time-consuming and can lead to errors, such as forms being attached to the wrong client or information being incorrectly entered.

Improve your client communications

When we look for ways to improve client experience, we often focus on the experience once a client arrives at our salon, spa or clinic, and our client communications can often get overlooked.

When it comes to communicating with your clients, think about the following questions:

Appointments

• Do you send your client a handy reminder a day or two before the appointment?
• If a client missed their appointment, do you follow up with them to reschedule?
• If a client hasnʼt rebooked after their last visit, do you send them a reminder?
• If a new client books with you, do you send them a welcome email or text to make them feel cared about?

Added value

• If a client requires after-service care, how do you send them instructions or tips?
• If your client is running low on their favourite shampoo or skincare product, do you send them an email or text with a reminder to repurchase?
• Do you celebrate clientʼs birthdays or special occasions by sending them a message?

Feedback

• To make your client experience even better, are you asking for feedback from your clients during their appointment or by sending them a follow-up message?
• If youʼre working towards increasing the number of reviews on your website or social platforms, do you send an email or text message with a link to your clients?
• If a new client was referred to your business by a current client, do you send a thank-you note to them?

Keeping on top of all these communications can be a nightmare but it doesnʼt have to be! To avoid this common bottleneck, the key is to reduce creating and sending these messages manually and instead, start using the power of automated marketing.

Automated messages can be set up in advance and are triggered by a setting within your salon software that sends an email or text to your clients automatically. For instance, if a client hasnʼt made a new booking within eight weeks after their last visit, sending them a message encouraging them to book their next appointment. Take a look at your salon management software to check what triggers and automation are available to you. Learn more about Kitombaʼs marketing tools.