Whether you operate a luxury resort, wellness center, or beauty salon, when a guest walks into your business, they expect to feel comfortable and pampered. But poor service can negatively impact their experience, leading them to feel frustrated and potentially avoid doing business with you again. That’s why it’s important to make sure you have the right technology in place to ensure guests receive the best service possible.
Here are four ways salons, spa businesses, and wellness centers are using technology to increase guest satisfaction and boost loyalty.
1. Seeing available services in real-time
Not only is it frustrating when a guest goes to book a service with you and realizes it’s not available, but it’s even worse if the service becomes available again and they aren’t notified of it. And, if your guests can’t book the services they want, chances are they might take their business somewhere else.
To ensure that your guests can stay informed about their preferred services, it’s important to make sure you have a reservation management system that lets you see all your availability in real-time across all your channels. This means your guests should be able to find available appointments online, or on mobile, and make bookings easily. And, if a guest wants to add-on to their appointment while at your physical location, your employees should also be able to see open slots in the system and book guests accordingly. Ideally, the system should also cancel appointments automatically, instantly freeing them up for another interested guest to grab and allowing you to resell appointments without much hassle.
2. Understanding what guests want
Your guests want to feel understood when they do business with you, and that means you need to be able to keep up with their expectations and offer the right services to them. But if you don't have clear visibility over what your guests purchase most from you, you can't personalize the experience according to their needs.
To keep up with your guests' purchasing habits, you need software that allows you to collect all your customer information in a single database. This allows you to keep track of your best-selling and least popular services, understand new patterns in guest behavior, and find ways to appeal to their preferences. Maybe you want to send a guest a promotion for their favorite hair treatment, or a new bundle deal for a mani-pedi. When you understand what they're looking for, you can create an offering that will keep them coming back.
3. Introducing self-service options
There’s nothing worse than having to wait at the check-in desk for an appointment while the receptionist struggles to find your booking. Modern consumers are impatient – they want things to be handed to them as quickly and conveniently as possible. If the service at your business is slow, your guests will not be very happy with you – even if everything else went great.
Introducing self-service technology into your business can significantly reduce wait times and help you serve guests faster. Whether that means introducing self-service kiosks to speed up the check-in process, or using contactless payment options, such as RFID bracelets, that can keep track of guest purchases and charge them at the end of their reservation. Maybe you’re managing a wellness center, and you want to make it easier for guests to make purchases while they’re at the pool or hot spring. RFID bracelets provide a convenient way to tie guest purchases directly to their reservation, allowing you to keep track of what they buy so you can charge them accurately. This also simplifies things for the guest because they don’t need to worry about getting out their wallet or phone, for example, every time they want to buy a drink at the poolside bar (or risk dropping it in the water!).
4. Managing everything on one platform
Traditionally, salon and spa businesses have relied on multiple different systems to manage various aspects of their operations, from making bookings to tracking inventory. But things can get complicated if you want to diversify your offering beyond just appointments. Maybe you want to sell the products you use on clients, like hair conditioners, facial masks, beauty tools, etc. Or maybe you manage a spa resort, and you want to be able to keep track of what food and beverages your guests buy at the café, smoothie bar, bakery, and full-service restaurant.
But managing all these different aspects of your business on separate systems that don't communicate often results in loads of repetitive manual work, leaving too much room for errors or inconsistent information that can prevent you from delivering the experiences your guests expect.
To help address this challenge, salon and spa businesses can benefit significantly from comprehensive business management software that can unify all the different parts of their business on a single platform. Take LS Central for hotels for example, which gives you all the tools you need to manage your retail, food service, PMS, appointments, and more in one place. With LS Central, you gain a single overview of your entire operation, making it easier to create a consistent guest experience across all your channels and locations, and access valuable insights that will help you improve your business strategy.
Are you struggling to find the right technology to manage your salon, spa, or wellness center? Get in touch with our experts to find out if LS Central can help.
