Salons often have many appointments being scheduled every day and it can sometimes get overwhelming and hard to manage. Appointment scheduling, as well as sending out appointment reminders, can be an added pressure on estheticians’ existing workloads, taking time and resources away from other tasks. If customers end up missing their appointments, this means estheticians may miss out on potential salon time. Luckily, there is a solution that can help salons to run more smoothly!
Consider this example:
Salon ABC needs a more effective way to book appointments and remind clients of upcoming appointments. To help their workload, they are considering using an automated solution to book appointments and remind customers of their forthcoming patients.
Salon ABC has a few questions before beginning the automated process. For example, how will automation benefit the organization? How can they develop an automation strategy? What digital tools do they need to automate the process?
The challenge they are currently facing is that taking every call to book an appointment and managing the booking software manually can take up a lot of time. It's not unusual to walk into a hair salon and see hairdressers pulling double duty on the front desk.
With an automated solution, estheticians have the ability to notify front desk staff when an appointment has been booked, and gives the ability to front desk staff to automatically change important information such as the appointment time; keep track of client interaction data; and use this data to improve their outreach approach continually.
How does an automated salon appointment booking and reminder solution work? Let’s break it down into four easy steps.
Step 1: Appointment Booking Form
First, you'll want to build a form to begin the appointment booking process. This form will collect client data from clients and help you keep your data organized, while also notifying the desk staff that there has been a new appointment booking. ​Your form should collect client name, contact details, appointment time, and additional information such as allergies.
This form can be hosted on the salon’s website or posted to their social media pages, where potential clients can easily find it and book an appointment.
Step 2: Appointment Confirmation
Once customers submit the appointment booking form, they should receive a confirmation that their appointment was booked. Set up a confirmation email that automatically sends when the form is submitted, including any follow-up instructions that are necessary.
A drag-and-drop email editor allows you to customize the confirmation email to your business and business needs. ​The confirmation email should include information such as a thank you message with personalized contact information, the ​date and time of scheduled appointment​, any additional policy or operational information for the client (e.g., wear a mask, shoes off at the door, etc.)​, and the address of the salon.​
Step 3: Appointment Reminders
Life happens, and sometimes clients can forget their appointments. Unfortunately, appointment no-shows mean a loss of revenue and productivity for estheticians, and trainees miss out on valuable salon hours.
To combat no-shows, you can set up automated appointment reminders to ensure that clients remember their appointments. Set these reminders to be sent automatically a specific period of time before the client’s appointment.​ Automated reminders should include important information like a​ personalized greeting​, the date and time of appointment​, as well as the salon’s policy regarding cancellations or rescheduling.​
Step 4: Reporting
As soon as your appointment confirmation and reminder messages have been sent, your automated solution will begin to gather reporting data to tell you how they were received. This can be used to fine-tune your approach for future messages.​
The reporting will also show you important details in the confirmation and reminders campaigns such as​ how many of your messages were delivered; when they were delivered​; how many clients clicked through to the appointment booking form​; clients’ behavior on your website​; and whether clients are opening reminder messages.
Sound Interesting?
Automated appointment booking and reminders can take a lot of stress off salons! SimplyCast can help you complete all of the steps above and more, SimplyCast has developed an automated salon appointment reminders solution to help support salons to engage clients at a personal level and make sure they remember to attend their appointments. This solution can be used by any salon that wants to boost their efficiency.
Click the button below to request a one-on-one demo of SimplyCast’s automated donation reminder solution today!
