Productivity in service-based businesses has been elusive for a while now. In the beauty scene, many businesses struggle to optimize performance so much so that they fail to survive the first 5 years of their existence. One contributing factor of declining productivity and performance is, surprisingly, technology.
Unproductive teams are characterized by excessive, uncontrolled use of tech devices (notably smartphones) in the workplace. It is not uncommon to find salon employees wasting valuable time on Instagram, online dating sites, or YouTube, for example. Some salon owners try to counter this problem by banning technology in their premises. But while this strategy can significantly increase focus and probably productivity, banning technology isn’t the best solution there is.
When utilized in the right way, technology can make most tasks in the salon simpler and faster and, consequently, boost employees’ performance and productivity. To help you with that, this article explores some of the tips for using technology in your beauty salon to improve performance.
Utilize time tracking tools
Time wastage in the salon can be a huge bump on your road to achieving your business goals. But the biggest challenge that many salon owners and managers face when trying to curb time wastage is their inability to constantly measure and track time. Managers either overestimate or underestimate the time each employee has or needs to complete a service, and that allows a substantial amount of productive time to slip through the cracks.
With time tracking tools, such as Time Doctor, salon managers can analyze and follow in real-time how each employee spends their productive hours. They give managers an x-ray vision over each employee’s workday, so they are able to see the most amount of time each employee wastes and where the wastage happens. It will help you answer, among other questions:
- Does a given employee spend more time than necessary to complete an appointment?
- Is a given employee highly productive in service A and extremely slow in completing service B?
- Which two employees perform optimally when paired together, or which pairings lead to increased time wastage?
More importantly, the tools tell managers each employee’s most productive hours, which then helps them optimize employees’ schedule management.
Automate and systemize
Successful salon managers use salon software to automate– to streamline complex workflows, time-consuming processes, as well as recurring and monotonous tasks. Salon software have features and capabilities that facilitate inventory management, appointment booking and scheduling, commission calculation and payroll management, marketing, HR management, and client data management, among others. This tool is designed to make things in a salon run more efficiently and effectively without inflating your overhead costs.
Automation enhances performance in many ways. First of all, your employees don’t spend time doing the same repetitive task over and over again. Automation frees them up to focus on more engaging, more meaningful work. Secondly, automated client database management allows salons to create unique, personalized experiences for each customer. Stylists are able to prepare for appointments faster and more effectively when they have a well-organized, easily accessible, and well-analyzed database to refer to compared to when they have to comb through piles of disorganized excel spreadsheets. Thirdly, with its HR management feature, your software helps you manage employees’ schedules, payroll, and benefits a lot more effectively using a single platform. Employees are motivated to work harder when their interests are effectively taken care of. Fourthly and lastly, for now, automation reduces the chance of human error. Team performance takes the biggest hit when errors occur in, for example, scheduling or appointment slots’ allocation.
Leverage remote and flexible working
Technology can help you inject flexibility into your team in so many ways. You can, for example:
- Use cloud-based software to make your client databases accessible to employees from anywhere and at any time. This is a great way to keep everyone together even when some of your team members are off-site.
- Outsource IT services to remote providers for two reasons. One, to ensure that you don’t burden stylists and cosmetologists with complex IT-related tasks. Two, to ensure that your salon’s IT infrastructure has a 100% uptime guarantee even when you don’t have an in-house IT team.
- Use networked voice and data tools that give employees centralized access to voicemails, SMSes, and emails all from the same platform.
- Invest in video conferencing software to inject efficiency into your customer engagements. You can, for example, use such software to hold virtual client consultations, eliminating the need for clients to drive all the way to your salon just to talk to a stylist.
- Use Virtual Private Networks (VPN) to ensure that your client databases are safe from data spies and thieves even when accessed remotely.
Blend traditional payment methods with modern, more effective payment gateways
The modern client has many options to pay for salon services. Traditional methods such as cash payments are still alive and well in this industry. This is because, as much as we try to discourage cash payments, there’s still a sizeable amount of old-fashioned walk-in clients who still love the warmth of paper bills. But cash payments take a lot of work to process- from counting the money to banking it. To improve performance at your front desk, create a QR code that allows walk-in clients to make payments by scanning the code with their smartphones. That will eliminate a big chunk of the cash your receptionists handle in a day. While at it, encourage the use of peer-to-peer (P2P) payment apps such as Venmo, online payments such as PayPal, contactless cards, and mobile wallets such as Apple Pay and Google Pay. All these are faster, more secure, and more convenient payment methods that you can blend with cash payments to improve performance.
Leverage appointment confirmations and reminders
Your team won’t perform optimally if customers keep missing appointments and checking in late. You need clients who report in time so that your employees’ schedules can run smoothly and with minimal overlaps. Everyone is busy these days, so a simple appointment reminder can go a long way in minimizing late coming and missed appointments. You can call clients to remind them of their appointments, but then that would be quite a time-consuming task. Your salon software can customize, personalize, and send these reminders in bulk.
Conclusion
Technology is a beautiful thing to have in your salon. It will help you improve your team performance in quite a few ways. You, therefore, would rather have it and worry about preventing your staff from misusing it as opposed to not having it at all.
