Everything You Need to Know About In Salon Service & Retail Analytics – India
EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT IN-SALON SERVICE & RETAIL ANALYTICS
Life can be tough for a beauty and hair business. There are a hundred of things to do and never enough time to do them all.
Sometimes it can be hard to know where to focus your time and energy. That’s where in-salon analytics solutions come in. This advanced technology is designed to give salon and spas business like you the data that you need to understand the inner workings of your business, so you can put your effort into the projects and tasks that improve the client experience, keep them coming back for more, and help you run your salon and spa more efficiently.
What Are In-Salon Service and Retail Analytics?
Let’s first start with a basic explanation of Analytics. It is defined as, “the discovery, interpretation, and communication of meaningful patterns in data.” In-salon service analytics simply takes this collection of processes and applies them to salon operations. In doing so, salon owners can get more insight into the performance of their business on both micro and macro scales.
It sounds complicated, but in practical terms, it isn’t. Vendors who sell small business software products that include an analytics component know that most salon owners aren’t technology experts or mathematicians and analysts by trade. You need data-driven insights that are easy to understand and quickly applicable.
To achieve this goal, their salon or spa business analytics solutions usually includes pre-built reports that spit out the key metrics you need, when you need them. For a typical salon or a spa owner, this might mean campaign performance reports from your targeted marketing campaigns or an employee performance chart from your business software solution. With either report, you can make some pretty significant decisions about your overall business strategy that are rooted in cold hard facts, not guesswork.
Why Use In-Salon Service and Retail Analytics?
As we just touched on, one of the biggest reasons to use analytics to guide decision making is that your decisions then become based on the truth vs. your perception of reality.
No matter how objective we try to be in a situation, humans are riddled with cognitive biases. We also tend to see and act on patterns and correlations that are fundamentally flawed. What follows is an example of how that might play out in an overall salon operation setting.
You hire a new employee. Shortly after that, you notice that products go missing from shelves and it isn’t reflected in your sales numbers. You have a loss prevention problem. You immediately suspect the new hire, because the problem began shortly after they started. However, you bring up the issue to your team, and a senior hairdresser confesses to the over usage.
In the above scenario, you almost made a horrible mistake because you were about to act on what is best called a spurious relationship. With analytics in place, you might have noticed that the over usage began long before you hired your new employee, thus eliminating them as a suspect. Insights like this demonstrate the power of analytics. They help you get to the truth and reduce errors through the elimination of guesswork or gut instinct.
Analytics also help you understand what’s going on with your business in much greater detail than you could otherwise. Here are a few examples of other insights that analytics can uncover:
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Understand the value and number of services or products sold in an average order
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Figure out which service or product sells the most, the least, and everything in-between
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Track sales by the day, week or month to understand your in-salon conversion rates
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Customer analytics can help you identify your most valuable clients
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Find your top and least selling employees
Armed with these insights, you can better understand the metrics of your salon and spa business and implement strategies that help you get to where you want to go faster than you could otherwise.
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Staff your best salespeople during your peak hours to drive more revenue.
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Implement a new up-sell display at checkout to increase your average bill value.
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Improve cash flow by stocking more of the products that sell the best and fewer of the ones that sell the least.
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Institute your best salon and spa customer loyalty program to enhance your client retention and customer satisfaction efforts.
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Better target your SMS and Email campaigns to market the right service or products to the right customers at the right time.
How Do You Get Access to In-Salon Service and Retail Analytics?
The best (and easiest) way to get access to your salon and spa services and retail analytics is with a point of sale (POS) system for your salon and spa. Because a best salon and spa point of sales billing system serve as the hub of your salon and spa business as almost all of your salon and spa business processes flow through them. This allows these systems to collect tons of valuable data. with added robust reporting as a core feature of a best salon and spa software systems.
Enhanced salon and spa inventory management, salon employee management, client engagement, access to salon and spa analytics are some the main reason to choose a salon POS over a traditional cash register. So, when you’re looking at salon and spa billing POS systems, make sure you evaluate the analytics capabilities of each to ensure they will meet the needs of your business.
