Here’s the truth:
Whether you operate a spa, salon, barbershop, or wellness business— the competition for clients’ attention for your small business has never been more intense.
It’s one thing to have a good client engagement strategy— this remains vital— but over and above this, you have to offer exceptional and unforgettable customer experiences.
You probably know this and are nodding your head in approval. And while you may be in agreement, do you know that if you’re going to provide your clients with amazing experiences, you need to give careful consideration to the kinds of experiences your employees are having as well as it is tied together?
If staff satisfaction hasn’t been your focus, we are here to help. In this post, we’ll talk at length how happy employees equal happy clients.
We’ll also discuss what you can do to provide your employees with the challenges, stimulation, and rewards they’re looking for from their careers.
By mastering the art of staff satisfaction, you can ensure that you have a greater word of mouth and overflowing revenue.
Happy clients are the lifeblood of any business, which is why it’s essential to do everything you can with regard to creating exceptional client experiences.
But while the importance of client satisfaction is well documented, the benefits of happy employees are less talked about. Clients like to be in an environment where there are happy staff visibly enjoying what they do. It puts them much more at ease.
Your employees aren’t just the people who do the work from day to day— they’re also your brand ambassadors. They’re the ones directly speaking to clients and tending to their needs. It stands to reason that their experiences at work will reflect in their interactions with your clients.
A great customer experience is indispensable to ensuring long-term loyalty, but delivering it requires employees who are motivated, committed and generally on top of their game.
This is why, as well as thinking about customer experience, we also need to think about employee experience.
But that’s just the tip of the iceberg, albeit in a more positive way. Let’s look into ways in which satisfied employees can help your business grow!
Put yourself in your clients’ shoes: when you go to a salon, you want to have total faith in the hairdresser or beautician and be sure that they know exactly what you’re looking for.
This is why it’s so important to hang on to employees who your clients know and trust. If you don’t have an action plan to hang on to these skilled members of your team, it may impact the footfall at your spa, salon or barbershop.
But there’s more…
If you’re losing employees, you’ll then be faced with the costs of recruiting replacements and training them on your processes and online booking software, say for example. It’ll also take time for them to get fully up to speed, so there’ll be lost productivity to think about as well. Over time these costs can really mount up, so it’s in your interest to take staff satisfaction seriously.
If employees are fully dedicated to what they’re doing and feel that their efforts are appreciated, it’s likely to translate into amazing customer experiences. This is why employee recognition matters so much. If you’re running a business, you should stop and think about whether you’re really giving your employees the recognition they deserve for all their hard work and dedication.
Oftentimes, small businesses without a proper work structure seem to falter with client appointments. Either they have too many of them or none at all. Double-bookings aren’t uncommon as well.
This is extremely overwhelming for the staff, especially those who work on a commission basis or rent a chair. As small business entrepreneurs, your focus should be on ensuring that you provide your team with the right processes, requisite tools, and space to be productive. This can hugely improve their ability to do their job, their relationships with clients, and thus their individual experience as well.
This is something that’s true across the board, no matter the sector, but it’s especially crucial for salons, barbershops and spas.
An overworked, unappreciated and demoralised workforce is hardly likely to be alert to the needs of (potentially demanding, or particular) clients. This, in turn, will inevitably have an impact on your businesses client turnover. You’ll risk losing long-term clients, or failing to convert new customers into long-term prospects.
On the other hand, if your employees are satisfied, it will reflect in their work. So make sure that you have ways to make your employees feel appreciated.
It’s one thing to communicate a particular business philosophy to your clients during your startup funding stages, but what about your employees? If your treatment of them isn’t consistent with that philosophy, your staff is going to feel that it isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.
Your ethos is hugely important. If you can offer a clear philosophy and ensure that it informs everything your business does, it gives employees something to identify with. This has to be more than just rhetoric: don’t patronize your employees with cliches. Instead, it has to genuinely shape the decisions your business takes, and offer staff a set of values which they can incorporate into their own everyday work.
Another important cultural factor is that of forging a common purpose. Employees who feel that they’re truly working as part of a team, and with common goals in mind, are much more likely to buy into what you’re trying to create. Employee buy-in is indispensable; without it, you’ll struggle to maintain genuine interest and engagement. Business philosophies are vital to establishing common goals and a shared purpose, as well as maintaining employee satisfaction.
As an entrepreneur you must take active steps to let your staff know you are attentive to their concerns and that you respect their opinions.
One way to do this is to solicit, listen to and act on employee feedback. It’s up to you to ensure that you create a culture where employees feel free to air their concerns, in the knowledge that they won’t be held against them and that positive action will follow.
You need to maintain openness and ensure approachability. Employees must feel that their opinions and concerns are taken seriously. Employee engagement survey questions can help you gain important insights into what your staff is thinking, but they must be relevant. Likewise, you must be prepared to give employees the freedom to articulate their concerns and to approach you with them whenever they feel it necessary.
Above all, you have to ensure that your workplace is somewhere people genuinely want to be.
Make sure that your employees also have a workspace that’s well-designed, pleasant and practical for them. This is a key aspect of improving staff satisfaction.
Think about our previous point on creating an open and supportive workplace: ask your employees if they’ve got any happy workplace ideas, including suggestions on how to change the space itself.
It’s one thing having the right people to do the job, but quite another to have the right tools and technology. Your staff needs to have access to the tools they require – ones that are up-to-date and easy to use. They should be provided with the resources to do the job to the best of their ability. These can be automated booking systems to log client appointments or utilizing order management software if you’re selling other merchandise out of your salon.
Even with the best will in the world, it’s very difficult to provide clients and customers with amazing service when you’re working as part of an overstretched and under-resourced team. No matter how capable an employee is, they would struggle to do it.
There’s always a great deal to think about when you’re running a business— there’s no end of tasks to get through. Indeed, you might be so snowed under with responsibilities and day-to-day jobs that you simply lose sight of the needs of your team. But this could be seriously damaging to your business, for the reasons we’ve outlined.
The needs of clients are critically important; this is business 101. But they won’t keep coming back to take advantage of your services unless your staff is genuinely enthusiastic and engaged. This is why you need to remember that happy staff are just as valuable as happy clients and why staff satisfaction is of utmost importance.
Editor’s Note: This post is written by John Allen—Director, Global SEO at RingCentral, a global UCaaS, VoIP, and video conferencing software provider. He has over 14 years of experience and an extensive background in building and optimizing digital marketing programs.
