While I believe that the receptionist is the first person to make a client a great fan, the therapist seals the deal on how your client perceives the value of the service they receive at your spa. The therapist’s ability to read the client, communicate effectively, and perform the scheduled service will dictate a huge portion of your client retention.
The top two reasons spa clients complain are payment
mistakes during check out or, having a bad experience with their therapist. If
only bolder clients are willing to complain to management, how many clients are
talking to friends and family about a bad experience? We all know that a poor
grass-roots reputation can severely hurt your efforts at growing a reputable
business.
Below are a few unique challenges facing spa
directors when dealing with a therapist’s performance:
Spa
directors don’t always know about skin care or the spa industry.
Spa directors and spa owners come from many
different walks of life. I have spa directors with back grounds ranging from owning
car dealerships to having previously been stay-at-home-moms. This presents a
difficult situation. How can somebody with no experience in the spa world know
if their therapist is giving fantastic treatments to paying clients?
The easiest (and most fabulous) way to overcome this
obstacle is to go have a few facials at highly rated spas in your area. Write
off some relaxing homework and let other experts give you a ground base of what
a facial should be like. Then periodically get a facial from each of your
therapists. Make it a part of their employee reviews.
Another way to overcome this problem is to hire a
therapist manager with years of experience in the spa industry. This person’s
job is to make sure your therapists are up-to-snuff on technique, product
knowledge, and skin analysis.
Spa
directors can’t see what the therapist is doing during a service.
Respecting the privacy and relaxing atmosphere of
the treatment room during a service is important. This makes monitoring
therapist performance impossible during the most important part of their job!
Worry not, there is a very effective solution! Bring
in a secret shopper. Here’s a step by step guide to utilizing a secret shopper:
1) Recruit
a colleague or friend who has at least a basic understanding of the spa world and
has never been to your spa. Choose somebody who you know will be honest and
understands the importance of what you are trying to accomplish. Beware of
those who will take the free facial but not offer useful feedback.
2) Create
an objective checklist as a set of guidelines to help your secret shopper
evaluate the therapist in question.
3) Meet
with your secret shopper away from the spa and prior to her appointment. Be careful
to not create a bias or discuss past issues with a specific therapist. You can
always chat about this in the post treatment discussion. Instruct your secret
shopper to review the checklist right before the appointment, but leave the
actual list in the car. She can fill it out immediately after her experience.
4) Give
her a gift certificate or reimburse her for the facial so that you are the only
one who knows about your plan.
5) Meet
up with your secret shopper within a few hours after the appointment so as to
capture details while they are fresh in her mind. This meeting is crucial to
the entire process! If you have any doubt about the follow through, choose
another shopper!
6) Review
the checklist with your secret shopper with a grain of salt. Remember that if
you accidentally hinted any behavior to look out for, your shopper may report a
biased analysis. The idea here is to accurately evaluate a valuable member of
your staff for improvement, not to persecute the therapist.
7) If
the secret shopper ended up being a good asset, use her again in six months and
don’t tell anybody!
So now let’s talk about the therapist. Here are a
few warning signs that low retention is coming from your therapist’s
performance.
1) The therapist has low retail
product sales. There is a direct correlation between
high sales and high retention. Statistical analysis has proven that clients who
buy more are more likely to come back for more services. If your therapist is
afraid to recommend product, or if the clients aren’t buying what she is
recommending, you may be losing precious customers. Not only are you losing
customers, but you are losing important retail revenue.
2) Clients look tense or don’t give
interactive feedback after a service. No news is terrible news in
the service industry. Watch your client’s body language after a treatment. Do
they look relaxed? Are they glowing? Are they happily chatting with the
therapist as they are walked out of the room? Ask your clients how the service
was with specific, open-ended questions such as, “How did you like our
signature face lift massage?” Avoid asking how the treatment was. You need to
get a better answer than, “Fine.”
3) The therapist doesn’t engage the
customer in small talk or with familiarity. A quiet smile
doesn’t cut it in the spa industry. Your therapist must be able to speak
comfortably with a client. Remember that we are a people industry. Your
therapist should take an effort to get to know your guest and make her feel
welcome.
4) The therapist has low tips or
gratuities after each service. This is self-explanatory.
5) Clients tend to rush out after a
service. A very good sign that your clients are invested in
your business is that they tend to linger and browse the spa after a service.
Of course, there are instances when they are in a hurry due to outside obligations,
but more often than not, your clients should be interested in lingering for a
short time and even chatting it up with your staff. If most of your clients
bee-line it out the front door, they did not have a fantastic experience with
your therapist. They may be embarrassed or feel awkward to remain in the spa,
or worse, they may be burning to get away to tell somebody about their
horror-story experience.
6) Your client’s don’t know their
therapists name. In my small spa, my clients ask for
Adriana over the phone. I love this!!! It means that she made it a point to
create a professional relationship and a memorable experience. There are always
people that are forgetful of names, but if most of your clients don’t remember
who spent an hour working on their face, your therapist is not engaging them
appropriately.
If you think that the therapist is the problem, or
you would like a few tips to increase your retention as a therapist, here are
some places to start!
Take
a sales class and make an effort to get more product in the clients’ hands.
Regardless of personal feelings about sales, it is
the therapist’s job to make sure clients know how to take care of their skin
after a treatment. The more they use your products, the more they come to
respect the opinion and expertise of the therapist. Results come from good home
care, no matter how good a therapist is in the treatment room. Clients like to
be educated and empowered, but if they don’t have the right tools to get results,
they aren’t coming back for another treatment.
Remember
that the client is paying for 100% of the therapist’s time and attention.
Respect the time the client shares with the
therapist. Don’t allow therapists to
leave the room during a treatment unless absolutely necessary. If a masque
needs time to set, have the esthetician perform a hand, scalp, or foot massage.
Cells phones must be left outside the treatment room. No matter how stealthy
the therapist thinks she is, clients can sense when the attention they are
paying for has been diverted to a phone. Imagine how insulting it may be for a
client paying over $100 for a treatment to realize the esthetician is texting
the service! Nothing on a phone is more important than the human being who is
lying on the treatment table.
Have
an esthetician friend honestly evaluate the therapist’s technique.
Invite another esthetician to a free facial with the
condition that she/he has to gives perfectly honest feedback on the therapists’
facial techniques. Ask for honest evaluations about pressure, extraction
techniques, personal odor/breath, and overall skills. Get down and dirty about
how things could be better and remember that this kind of criticism can save
your business.
Remind
the therapist to shake off the ego.
Remember that the therapist is not the center of the
spa, the clients are. Be appreciative of their time and money. Make sure the
esthetician acknowledges that the client is choosing your spa out of hundreds
of other spas. Encourage therapists to show gratitude and humility. High-brow
attitudes only work in very specific environments and cultures. Snooty, know-it-all therapists turn off a lot
of clients. Require that your therapist verbally thanks each and every client
for trusting them with their skin.
Require
that therapists get to know clients through exploratory questions.
Teach your service staff to ask questions about skin
concerns and acknowledge what the client may feel and/or fear. Have the
esthetician educate and recommend only after having a full understanding of the
client’s perspective. Also, make sure your therapists are asking about personal
interests. Encourage your staff to take notes of intimate details about
clients, such as if they have children, where they are from, and other pleasant
tidbits of information. Remember these
simple facts make clients feel more welcome and special in your business.
Make
sure the treatment room is tailored to the clients’ comfort.
With the exceptions of ergonomic needs, the treatment
room should be designed for a client-centered experience. If the client is
freezing during a service, your therapist is going to have to adapt to a warmer
room. If the bed squeaks every time the therapist touches the client, get a new
bed. Avoid allowing the esthetician to get used to an annoying distraction in
the room. Clients are only there a short time, and they don’t have the
opportunity to get used to a dripping faucet, nor should they have to.
As I wrap up this blog, I’d like to offer a point
that may be hard to swallow for some of you. Unless you are an experienced
esthetician or expert in teaching esthetics, you cannot employ an individual
who is not independently competent as an esthetician. Do not continue to employ
somebody who doesn’t even know how to do his or her job description with
success. Entry level employees should only be hired to catch the run off
clients of more established estheticians, or must be entered into a comprehensive
training program offered by an expert. We all start somewhere and unless you
have the extra resources to back it up, it is not a spa director’s job to give
new estheticians an opportunity when they lack the qualifications. It’s management’s
job to run a strong business and offer clients quality service, with qualified
professionals!
Feel free to contact me with any questions or
feedback!
The Skin Lady D
