Your customers book while you are off

It is 10.40 in the evening on a Tuesday. The salon closed at six, and your phone is lying on the kitchen counter. Somewhere else, a customer is sitting on her sofa with her phone, booking a haircut for Friday at two. You do not find out until the next morning, when the appointment is already sitting in your calendar.

That is the whole point of online booking. The booking arrives while you are off, and it asks nothing of you.

People book when they have a free hand

Think about when a customer actually has a moment. It is rarely eleven in the morning, when she is at work herself. It is in the evening, once the children are in bed. It is Sunday morning over coffee. It is on the train home.

Those are exactly the hours when your salon is closed and nobody is there to answer the phone. So once customers can book on their own, part of your bookings move to evenings and weekends. How big that part is depends entirely on your salon and your customers. The best thing you can do is look at your own calendar after a couple of months and do the maths with your own numbers. The pattern is what matters, not a figure someone made up.

An answering machine versus a full day

Without online booking, evening enquiries turn into messages. Four calls on the answering machine. Two texts. A message on Facebook that you find three days later. In the morning you stand with coffee in one hand and the phone in the other, calling people back who are now at work themselves and do not pick up.

With online booking you wake up to a calendar where the appointments are already in place. No callbacks. No “I will try again at lunch”. The customer got an answer at 10.40 in the evening, and she got the time she wanted.

There is a quieter gain too. A customer who cannot book in the moment she thinks of it often forgets again. Or she finds a salon where the button is there.

This is where evening hours can cause trouble

Online booking without rules can produce unpleasant surprises. The classic one is the booking that arrives at eleven at night for eight the next morning, when you have neither seen it nor had time to prepare.

That is not the system’s fault. It is a setting that is missing. There are three questions to answer, and they take five minutes.

How far ahead must an appointment be bookable?

This is about how close to right now a customer is allowed to place a booking. Some salons set two hours. Others set a full day.

The rule of thumb: set the notice far enough ahead that you will actually notice the booking. If you only open the calendar when you arrive at work, two hours of notice is useless. Then a booking has to arrive the evening before at the latest.

Think about preparation too. A haircut you can take as it comes. A colour you have to mix, or a treatment where something has to be ready, needs more room. It is perfectly fine to use different notice periods for different services.

When should an appointment close?

The other direction is about how late a free slot should still show as free. If a nine o’clock slot can still be booked at 8.55, you can end up with a customer in the doorway you did not know was coming.

Close the slot well before it starts. It is the same kind of setting as above, but it helps to think of it as two things: when may the customer start booking, and when is it too late.

The eleven o’clock booking for eight the next morning

If you set a notice period that matches when you really check the calendar, that booking simply cannot be created. Instead the customer is offered the next realistic time, say eleven o’clock. She is not turned away. She just gets a different suggestion while she is sitting there with her phone.

If you do want to be able to take an early slot now and then, make it an active decision instead of an automatic one. You can always add the booking to the calendar yourself in the morning, if you see the message and feel like it.

And remember the reminders. An automatic SMS or email the day before means an appointment booked one evening four weeks ago does not get forgotten by the customer either.

Set the rules when things are calm

Spend an evening on it, when there is nobody in the chair. Go through the list:

• How far ahead must an ordinary appointment be bookable?
• Are there services that need a longer notice period?
• How late may a slot still be booked before it starts?
• When do you actually check the calendar in the morning?
• Should new customers or long treatments pay a deposit before the time is held?

A deposit is worth considering exactly for evening bookings, where you have not spoken to the customer. You set the rule yourself. The customer sees the amount and your own message about how to pay, and you mark it in the system yourself once the money has arrived.

Then run it for three or four weeks and look at the calendar again. Did something come in that you had no time to prepare for? Turn the notice period up. Were there empty slots a customer would have taken? Turn it down. That is how you find your setting: by adjusting a little, not by guessing right the first time.

One last thing

NordBooq is built for that kind of everyday. You set the notice period and the cut-off yourself, the calendar gives every staff member their own column, the rota keeps track of holidays and sick days, and the reminders send themselves. Then the bookings can happily arrive at eleven at night, without you having to be awake.