How to conduct effective talks with customers? Communication and customer service in a beauty salon.

One opens an own beauty salon out of love for beauty. The goal of a professional beautician is to ensure that her customers have perfect skin, eyelashes, or nails. She is constantly striving for excellence. However, professional skills alone are not enough to guarantee a success on the beauty market. There are more factors that determine a business growth. Excellent customer service is as important, if not more. It is customer service which will make customers feel the most important from the doorstep, so they will gladly recommend the beauty salon to others. We will give you some tips how to achieve that!

Building relations with customers - learn this art and you will not regret it

Many factors may have an impact on the first impression of a customer in a beauty salon. Some of them, like a decor, home page or design of the website, may be planned in every detail in advance. Other are more intangible - they include many subtle elements of interaction, which will have an impact on the customer’s opinion about the salon.

Customer service in a beauty salon usually starts from arranging a visit. It is worth to refine this experience to make customers feel distinguished, which will increase their satisfaction level. During a phone talk customers should hear such messages that will prove that the employees of the salon intentionally engage in their matters.

Arranging visits online, though often automated, also gives a chance to show care by welcoming a customer properly, expressing thanks and greetings. If customers can leave an e-mail address, they will certainly be happy once they find in their mailbox a welcoming e-mail with a coupon for selected services.

Verbal communication - key channel for understanding a customer

Direct talks with customers are strategically important for building relations. Customers must feel that their goals and needs are in the first place, and the personnel of a beauty salon is doing everything to meet them.

Extremely useful are invaluable techniques of active listening and resulting types of expression like paraphrasing, empathy statements, mirroring or clarification. It is also extremely important to meet a customer in the conditions comfortable for her. A beauty salon should appear accessible. Using too complicated, professional terms or unclear presentation of treatment details will make customers feel alienated.

To create a friendly atmosphere, giving customers the possibility to relax, one should use a clear, understandable language, full of warmth, but focused on direct information flow. It is important, especially at the stage of talking about prices and costs where any misunderstanding may even lead to a loss of a customer.

Non-verbal communication - effective talking beyond words

Talking with customer it’s not just words. Albert Mehrabian, a researcher of body language proved that only 7% of communication take place through the words. Since than the facial expression, tone of voice or intonation have become especially important in customer service.

Customers should feel satisfied from the first moments spent in a salon. Therefore, they should be welcomed by a person with an open body posture, smiling and establishing eye contact. Body language showing empathy and readiness for problem-solving also matters at the stage of explaining procedures, establishing their details, talking about prices and in the case of complaints.

It should be emphasized that while talking with an unsatisfied customer it is worth to send the same positive verbal messages. We should strive to fully emphasize with her situation also at the level of facial expression, by appropriate intonation of voice, leaning a head towards her or hand gestures.

Problem-solving and coping with difficult situations

And what to do in the situations where we must deal first of all with a customer’s objections towards the salon or performed beauty treatments? The customer service in a beauty salon will not always run smoothly, but the tools used in customer care work well also in such circumstances. In case of problems the quality of support will be the basic value the customer will get.

Respond with empathy to irritation or anger. In case of objections propose concrete solutions and be flexible. Be mindful and attentive. Assume full responsibility for errors or mistakes - this will create positive associations in the customer minds. Moreover, by applying skilfully selected methods in difficult situations with customers will enable you to turn a potential problem into a chance for increasing their satisfaction.

Customer loyalty and its maintenance - the magic of permanent relations

A permanent customer base is a dream of a team of every beauty salon. Work with returning customers can be more intentional, and remarketing is an easier and less costly task than winning new customers.

An individual approach is the key to customer loyalty. By ensuring tailor-made services to our customers, we invest in their satisfaction and desire to return to the salon when their further needs arise. To treat a customer in a unique way tailored to her needs we must have the knowledge about her. That is why it is so important to collect and analyse information on the existing customers.

Such an approach will allow to monitor satisfaction of customers, dynamically respond to their new needs and better adjust the offer to their expectations. Undoubtedly, it is also worth to maintain permanent contacts with customers via e-mail, text messages or social media. Through these channels we can remind customers of the salon’s offers, inform about novelties and propose tailor-made solutions.

Summing-up: communication that attracts customers

What really counts in running a beauty salon are the hundreds of details. But we can see that effective, emphatic communication and customer service oriented to practical solutions count even more than a wide offer or attractive prices.

Customers of beauty salons come to such places to take care of themselves, to feel beautiful and exceptional. The task of a salon’s personnel is to cooperate with them in order to achieve this goal in a pleasant and relaxing atmosphere. Professional approach in contacts with customers will cause that the costs of advertising will quickly start to fall and the number of opinions of satisfied customers will constantly grow!