How you can automate your salon booking process
Ever heard of the term “work smarter, not harder”? This is something I’ve always tried to follow as much as possible. It doesn’t mean you should work any less than you already are, but automating certain tasks could free up your time to focus on other tasks that are far more important to your business.
I’ve always found the salon industry to be very interesting. From working with many beauty & hair salons over the years, I always discovered one thing in common… they always seem stressed out about managing their customer bookings over Social Media and the phone. I’ve recently thought, what if this could be automated? What if a salon could just click a button to approve or reject appointment bookings?
Fast forward a couple of months later, and I decided to launch Alfra.io
Alfra helps automate customer service, lead generation, appointment bookings and much more! We’re essentially a Chatbot on-demand service. I developed Alfra with my team, powered by AI and natural language processing.
We’ve built ready to be deployed Chatbots, which run across your Social Media channels managing all of your customer service. A customer could ask something like ‘How much are your services?’, but think about how many different ways you could ask the same question.. including the typos. This is where our natural language processing solution comes in. We’ve integrated our bots with tools like Dialog Flow, which make it easily recognisable for the bot to workout the customers intent.
Automating your booking process
If you’re a salon or even a business that accepts customer bookings, you most likely need to monitor your Social Media channels and emails, replying to customers who want to request their next booking.
With a Chatbot, you can automate this whole process. Our bot starts off by asking the customer which service they’d like to book, followed by their contact details, and preferred time and date, which is chosen with our calendar system:
Your customer has then generated a booking request, and as a business you’ll instantly be notified through SMS, Social Media and even email. You then only need to either accept or reject the appointment. Our bot will then take care of the rest, adding the appointment into your salon calendar, and sending out reminders to your customers through Messenger, before and after appointments.
All of our customers so far claim to save both time and money, from implementing an automated bot. It really does allow you to focus on what’s most important!
How you can automate customer service, and commonly asked questions
Fed up of responding to the same questions? I actually discovered that the majority of leads/enquiries will move onto another competitor if they don’t get a response from you right away. With a Chatbot, you can add in your services, prices, team members and any other details that a customer may request. Our bot is always listening to your customers, quickly identifying the best route to direct them in.
But what happens when a human needs to speak with a customer?
We’re always asked what happens when the bot becomes stuck, or how you can pause the automation so that a human can talk with the customer. It’s really quite simple, I usually break this down into two options:
Option one:
You automate as much as possible, but setup specific rules when a human should be notified to talk to the customer. For example, when you have an unhappy customer who wants to raise a compliant. Another perfect use case could be when the bot is stuck, or unable to answer the customers question.
Option two:
You limit how much of the customer service is automated. In some cases, our customers only want to automate the booking process, which is triggered by a menu inside of Messenger. It’s then up to their team to answer any other questions themselves.
Once a customer triggers a live chat, the automation will pause until the business has finished their conversation with the customer.
Want to automate your customer service and booking process?
If you see any benefit from implementing a solution similar to what I discussed above, then feel free to contact me at [email protected] or visit our landing page
I love to discover new businesses who are looking for a solution!
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