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Achieve customer intimacy, get customer loyalty, get market share
The currently vibrant personal care sector makes for really fascinating watching. The past five years have seen a lot of entrepreneurial activity and franchising action in day spas, skin care clinics, and beauty salons. Led by innovators like David’s Salon, Jesi Mendez Salon, Luz Facial Care, the Dr. E.T. Nisce chain of skin clinics (Balmori customers all), and other prominent players, it seems the industry leaders and their sincerest flatterers launch a new personal care establishment every week.
If you think there are too many spas and beauty salons already, you’re probably right. This is a sector heading for a shakeout, much like the hot pan de sal or shawarma fads of a few years ago.
WHEN THE amateurs and weaklings are driven out, who’ll be left standing? As in the hot pan de sal and shawarma mini-bubbles of years past, the survivors will be the ones that succeed in maintaining product quality while at the same time keeping costs down. In the retail world, where by definition you’re dealing with numerous customers, keeping service quality up and costs down is impossible without information technology.
COMPETITION forces prices down, as we have already seen in day spas and hair salons (consumers say hooray for competition). And as prices go down, inefficient players get squeezed out. It’s the law of the marketplace: economists applaud it; enlightened governments base policies on it. The players who will succeed in controlling their service quality and their costs are most likely the ones who have been savvy with their information technology investments.
Alert entrepreneurs have learned the hard way that computerizing their accounting is not enough. That’s just the ante to stay in the game; it does nothing to help you attain service excellence on the retail floor. It’s like putting wheels on a car: that’s a rock-bottom requirement, no way a performance-boosting tweak. To attain excellence, you don’t empower just your accounting department; you must also empower the very people who render services directly to your customers – your stylists, technicians, cashiers, etc. You empower them by giving them real-time access to information that lets them do their jobs brilliantly.
Real-time information lets you attain customer intimacy. When a customer comes in to have her hair done or get a massage, your technician or customer service rep could do a better job if she knew exactly what treatment or services this customer got on her last visit. Or better yet, her last six visits. Your service rep would be better able to suggest relevant new services or products if she knew the customer’s recent service history. She might be able deepen your company’s relationship with the customer if she knew the customer’s birthday and then gave that customer a free product or service on her birthday.
Your store manager could decide more confidently to do a free repeat job if she could verify right now that today’s servicing was made necessary by a bad piece of work last week.
YOUR BRANCH manager might be able to plan her inventory better if she could identify the best- to worst-selling products or services at her branch. She could identify which technician needs additional training if she could view the jobs – and the back-jobs - done by each technician at her branch.
If your front-line people had these capabilities, they would be able to do their jobs in a way that impressed and delighted all your customers. But none of the above information can be obtained from your conventional accounting software.
Balmori Software’s SURE! Salon Premier Customer Care System (SPCCS), a customer service and branch management solution, is an IT tool to empower beauty salons, spas, skin care clinics, and similar lifestyle services businesses to attain service excellence at the retail floor level.
Speed and accuracy are the key to outstanding customer service. Modern urban living makes people very jealous of their time. It’s possible that a manual monitoring system could provide all the information cited in the scenarios just described, but it certainly couldn’t do it instantaneously, on demand, fifty times a day.
To a customer making a warranty claim, five minutes waiting for the facts to be verified by the back office is five more minutes of uncertainty and stress. Customer stress is not going to give you a reputation for service excellence.
Outstanding customer service is the key to market share. SURE! SPCCS addresses one increasingly common lament of business owners: “I want to get beyond basic financial accounting; knowing my balance sheet and income statement are far from enough. I want software to help me improve my service quality and thus my ability to win market share.” SURE! SPCCS captures the details of your sales transactions as you do the transactions. (Hence, no tedious data encoding at the end of the day.) It transforms all this raw data into accessible information that users can get their hands on in real time right on the sales floor, anytime they need to, as often as they need to. This empowers everyone in the business to render outstanding customer service by having relevant information – about customer preferences, about products, about past transactions - at their fingertips at all times.
SURE! SPCCS empowers your people at the point of service – stylists, technicians, cashiers – to render outstanding service, service that noticeably outshines that of the competition.
A credible, working solution, not vaporware. SURE! SPCCS is available, working, and ready to install right now. Right now, not next week, not next year. This is not "vaporware" that is promised for some vague future time, and hoping to use your operation as a guinea pig when it does come out. SURE! SPCCS is a robust, time-tested, and stable software solution that will have an impact on your service reputation and profitability from Day 1.
SURE! SPCCS is a software package; it requires no fancy hardware component other than an ordinary PC. (It will also run on your existing POS hardware, as long as it is PC architecture, Pentium 1 series or better).
SURE! SPCCS is part of a complete retail solution: If your business
requires it, SURE! SPCCS connects and communicates with our SURE! DMS
enterprise software solution to give you a complete, integrated inventory
control, A/R, A/P and accounting
solution.
Questions? Reactions? Write to balmori@balmorisoftware.com.