Growing your Beauty Business with Jana Elston

You have worked on your marketing and promotions and you have new customers coming in daily. But it's a never ending exercise and it can get exhausting. It's very expensive and a constant battle having to come up with innovative ways to bring in more new customers. While you focus so much on bringing in new customers in the hope to bring in more profits, have you ever wondered what would happen if all your new customers re-booked and came back? Do you have a 100% re-booking rate? If you do, congratulations! You will soon be unable to accept new customers unless you expand.  If however you find your customers retention rate is poor, have you ever wondered why your customers don't come back? I'm not saying that getting new customers is not important, businesses need to grow, but the only way the business will grow is to retain customers and build loyalty. Beauty businesses who have a strong loyal client base are far more resilient that businesses that rely on walk...

We all have to deal with difficult customers from time to time. Something I learned a long time ago, is that if we could successfully resolve issues for an angry or complaining customer, they would most often become our most loyal customer. Customers make judgements on the service and judgements about the business based on how the staff and management respond to a difficult situation. When dealin g with a difficult customer, it is important to acknowledge their feelings, don't ignore, or worse, dismiss their feeling. Typically a complaining customer would have been psyching themselves up for the confrontation, often taking you by surprise.  Imagine the customer blown up like a balloon full of hot air. If you confront your customer, question their judgement, deny or justify your actions, you’ll just be adding more hot air to that balloon. If you keep adding hot air to that balloon, it will eventually explode. The best thing to do is to let the hot air out of t...