Do salon clients expect access to your business 24/7?
Recent research by Phorest Salon Software suggests that’s a whopping 46% of bookings take place outside of business hours.
Of course this is an average figure and does vary from business to business.
So we conducted a little research of our own.
We asked a variety of hair and beauty professionals just how many customers expected “out of business hours” contact option,
This included
booking appointments
changing appointments
price enquiries
feedback, praise and complaints
service specific enquiries such as: what will I need to do to achieve XYZ
The results were astounding!
Some responses telling us that they are contacted outside of working hours by as much as 85% of their customer, whilst other reported a much lower figure of around 30%.
Of course there seem to be a few varying factors such as client base: behaviours, demographics, age etc
Phorest also differentiated their findings based on the customer demographic starting:
Gen Z (those aged 18 to 24) was the group most likely to want out-of-hours booking options, followed by millennials (25 to 34) at 36%.
But what is most apparent here is that every single salon owner and freelance hairdresser involved in the studies reported that there was a need for being accessible to our customer 24/7.
Whilst having online booking options does provide an advantage for salon owners and freelance hairdressers who want to reduce their accessibility to clients in their free time, this doesn’t seem to be the silver bullet.
From where we are sitting, we are finding that even those who have online booking services still find that clients make their way into DMs, messenger, whats app etc.
So how is a salon owner or freelance hairdresser supposed to create the work life balance they desire? How can we truly have time off, uninterrupted time?
At HEIR we felt that we needed to make a big change, so we started to map out our salon customer journey.
Initially the aim was to remove in salon issues such as clients booking appointments without having a consultation or skin test, which was causing unnecessary white space and stress for our team.
But what we achieved was so much more!
In mapping out the customer journey and creating a full end to end experience, we were able to make small changes in the digital experience which resulted in
spending less time responding to customer DMs and messages
working less
having more uninterrupted free time
seeing more of our ideal clients
higher average bill
higher rebooking
a better work life balance for us (the Salon Owners) but also our team
Once we mapped out the journey we were able to identify potential pain points and barriers which were causing our customers to either
A) contact us out of hours
OR
B) not book a service at the salon
once identified, we easily created a bespoke system to remove these pain points and barriers as well as add delight moments.
Since then we have worked on a one to one basis with other freelance hairdressers and salon owners to show them how to mappings out their customer journey,
and they saw the same results!
Thom told us that he implemented just one change and had 11 new clients within 17 minutes!
We have been delivering specialist hairdressing education to show more and more people how to Work Less and Earn more, by implementing by a simple customer journey map to remove the pain points, barriers and hurdles for your ideal customers and prevent them from ending up in your DMs. This education now forms part of our brand new Marketing Membership Marketing Mastery made easy for salon owners.
We have also been sharing our knowledge and strategies to our community within a free Facebook group, if you are a Salon Owner who wants to grow their business using marketing strategies that work then become part of our community in the Facebook group!
We would love to hear your thoughts on this? How much of your free time do you spend working? what percentage of your customers expect a 24/7 contact option? Comment below