Post crisis, personal appearance businesses like hair, nail salons, and wellness spas have high demand from the population seeking to support their self care regime.
However, there is a lot of pressure being experienced by salon and spa owners.
Many of them are not able to operate at normal capacity due to local restrictions.
Those that are operating are doing it with less staff.
They feel their energy must be divided between operational task like incoming phone calls, emails and serving an in-person customer.
These time pressures lead to financial pressures because their staff must either be available to service existing customers or be on standby for inquiries by new people.
San Bodi, manager at Grow Well Today, says, “Energy, time, and focus are the intangible resources that these small businesses are seeking to allocate and invest most efficiently.” These business challenges can be overcome.
My sister shared with me the challenge of booking appointments efficiently these days.
She was traveling away from her home town so she could not get the repeat customer privileges from her favorite salon.
She identified a local salon thinking she would beat the crowd by booking 5 days ahead. She picked up the phone and dialed the number and it goes to voice mail. Of course, she left a voicemail. Then she put in a call to the second option for hair coloring. Same result- no one to speak with, only voice mail boxes.
She thought to herself, I don’t mind leaving a voicemail”, but I’ll send an email request also. All together, she had invested 30-60 minutes of her time seeking to identify and book a hair coloring in this city.
The stark reality is that most small businesses must dedicate resources of energy, focus and time among retaining new customers via excellent customer service. At the same, time they are tussling in the market to gain the attention of new customers and handling new inquiries.
It’s not easy. Quite frankly, these functions of the business either require more staff, or hiring an outside company. Both tactics hit the bottom line regardless of whether it’s line itemed as operations or marketing or sales. The bottom line is indeed the bottom line of what resources can be distributed across customer service, administrative task, prospecting and follow ups for existing and new customers.
