Learning how to use data can help lead to changes for the better at your salon. Data and information from your scheduling and point-of-sale systems will empower you to work smoothly with your staff to create more efficiencies, manage workflows, and help everyone earn more revenue. Learn more about how you can do this with Square Appointments.

Become staff-centric to become customer-centric

Data can help staff understand their roles and performance, assess the health of their client relationships, and set goals for future success. With data such as team performance metrics and time card reporting, you can:

• Inform decision-making
• Refine operations and create efficiencies
• Create new streams of revenue

Here’s a scenario to consider at your salon. A staff member learns through data that they are the top salesperson of a certain product line. Discovering this can motivate them to sell more of the product and learn about other items in the line. That staff member can go on to become an even more effective communicator about the product line to clients because they understand the value of it.

Understanding customer churn is another piece of data that can help you empower your staff. The lifetime value of a repeat loyal customer is much higher than a series of walk-ins. Helping your team understand the value of these repeat clients can help them retain more of the clients they want with higher satisfaction and earnings potential.

Finally, data can help you figure out new potential revenue streams. Does booking online result in fewer cancellations? Can you sell products through an eCommerce avenue as well as on location?

Use Data to Set Business Goals

Reporting metrics can help you better understand exactly what’s happening with your business, giving you information to help set attainable business goals. With a variety of reports available, you can find the information to dig deeper into every facet of your business.

The Team Performance report is available with the Square Appointments Plus subscription. This report will help you drill down into your staff’s client retention rate, which measures the percentage of clients that visited a staff member within a specific date range, and pre-booking rate, where a future appointment was booked within 24 hours of a visit. You can also view the percentage of total working hours (total available hours) for your staff that are booked by clients (booked hours). This reporting metric helps determine if you are over or understaffing your business, as well as gauge staff performance.

In addition to this report, you can view broader reports for an immediate snapshot of the health of your business through sales performance by team member measured by key metrics including:

• Gross sales by team member and top-five ranking
• Each team member’s sales attribution by commission, average sale value and gross/net sales
• Labour cost percentage of net sales
• Labour cost breakdown by regular, overtime, and double-time

Over time, you’ll establish a baseline for each of these metrics and be able to set goals for your salon as a whole or for your team members individually. By sharing this data with your team, you can help them work with you to set reasonable goals so that everyone can work toward a collective outcome.

Optimise decision-making: retain

Consult time card reporting to track when your staff members clock in and out. Then compare this data to the busy times in the salon and communicate those customer flows to the team so they can work during the busiest times. This will reduce staff idle time and help them average a higher hourly rate, making them more likely to want to work at your salon.

View and download your sales summaries and fees to identify your most successful salon staff, and do what it takes to retain them. Sometimes recognition as a top salesperson is enough to help create employee satisfaction in a role. You can break sales reports into multiple points of recognition to help highlight multiple members of the team for their accomplishments.

Streamline operations: motivate

The labour versus sales report can help you identify peak hours and when your salon is most profitable. It compares labour costs to sales to help you identify team wins. You can use this data to assign schedules to cover peak hours with enough staff, giving them more tasks to do, raising their desire to want to perform at their craft and do a good job.

Insights into client retention and pre-booking rates are a great motivator for your team by allowing them to track performance. Use client retention information to help incentivise and motivate staff who have repeat clients. Use the pre-booking rate report to motivate stylists to ask clients to set future appointments, which can help you manage schedules and help stylists predict their workflows. Well-informed team members can be intrinsically motivated to keep pushing their numbers higher and become even stronger performers for your salon.

Find new revenue streams: incentivise

Understanding data relative to your staff can increase salon profits. Sales report information can be used to help direct team goals, individual goals, and even create incentive structures for top performers.

Filter the sales report by team member to see how well specific members of your salon staff sell services or retail products. Using sales reports in conjunction with client retention and prebooking rates is a good way for stylists to see how their past sales have been and help predict repeat clients who are booking their next appointment.

It can also help from a staffing perspective. Project high performers, which can translate to commissions, or align with shifts and times to figure out how to boost bookings and earnings. You can even assign commission tiers to reward accordingly and incentivise even better performance.

Retail and inventory management tools allow salon employees to sell products and services in a single transaction, scan products, and track how many individual units of any item they have sold. Square provides a quick and easy checkout experience for customers that are backed by data for your team.

A Square Team Plus or Square Appointments Premium subscription, makes it easy to find this data and pay out commissions by employee. Salon employees can also log in to individual dashboards to track their appointments and sales to track progress toward goals or earned commissions.

How to use data in a salon environment can vary widely, but if you use data to set goals and work as a team, it can be a valuable sales tool. Data can empower your team to work more efficiently, effectively and serve customers better. Using data from your Square Dashboard as part of salon management can help you better understand how to retain, motivate, and incentivise staff in a way that helps boost revenues.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute professional advice. For specific advice applicable to your business, please contact a professional.