The global spa market is expected to grow 6% annually from 2021 to 2025. This is great news for spa owners, but it’s worth asking yourself: is your business ready for this revival?
Spa management software is a fantastic solution that handles the admin tasks and daily stressors of running a busy spa. It’s designed to automate your daily operations, including bookings, inventory records, employee performance tracking, customer database management, scheduling, and marketing.
Spa software will help you streamline your operations and grow your brand more easily than you ever thought possible.
However, it’s important to select your spa business software carefully. You want a tool that not only improves your guest experience, but also enables you and your employees to manage your business with ease. To help you make an informed decision, we’ve assembled a list of the top ten features to consider for your spa scheduling software.
10 Key Features of Spa Management Software
Most spa owners aren’t in this business to think about technology and software — you’re more interested in interacting with guests and helping them look and feel their best.
An intuitive spa management software will feature everything listed below and allow you to get back to serving your guests faster.
1. Guest Experience Features
The digital age has increased guests' service expectations. Whether they’re at a spa, a restaurant, or a supermarket, they’re constantly assessing their experiences and comparing them to their best brand interaction. The modern customer cares more about how they’re made to feel than the price of the product or service you sell.
80% of customers say the experience businesses provide is just as important as their products and services.
So how can you deliver these premier experiences? There are a few things to look out for:
- In-app appointment scheduling – guests want to act on their decisions instantly which has increased the demand for 24/7 booking. A modern spa scheduling software enables guests to choose their preferred date, time, and provider from any platform, at any time and book through an app that has all their details already logged. This allows your service providers to prepare for each appointment with important information on each guest’s preferences, past treatments, and more.
- Alternate availability recommendations - when guests can’t find a convenient appointment with their preferred service provider at one location, automatic recommendations for alternate brand locations avoid a lost appointment opportunity and increase your overall revenue.
- Device flexibility - whether they use a mobile phone or a tablet, your spa scheduling software should allow your guests to schedule appointments and interact with your business easily and consistently on any operating system.
- Self-check-in – if your guests have your app installed on their device, your spa software should offer online booking, and allow them to automatically check themselves in. With geofencing, your guest’s wait time at the front desk is eliminated, while your front desk staff get automated notifications that the guest has checked in.
Learn more about how you can use technology to elevate your guest experience.
2. Payment Automation
It’s no longer just about cards vs cash — there are so many payment options nowadays, from mobile money and e-wallets to payment apps. Is your spa keeping up with the changing times?
An integrated payment and point of sale system puts the power of choice in the hands of your guests while enabling you to record transactions. The best software integrates payment with check-out, allowing your guests to seamlessly pay as they walk out after a service. Online transactions keep your fees transparent and ensure your business isn’t charged for refunds, disputed transactions, or double entries.
Automatic payments have become increasingly important to attract younger generations as well. Both millennials and gen-Z have high expectations for different ways to pay, with 78% of survey respondents demanding auto-pay options. Finally, with financial transactions comes the concern over security. So, look out for a spa software that is fully compliant with PCI Data Security Standards to keep all your transactions secured.
3. Customer Retention Data
Would you know off the top of your head how many guests haven’t returned for a service in the last six months, and why? Intuition, experience, and your books are unlikely to give you full insight on how many guests you have ‘lost.’
A spa management system not only collects data but can be used to understand why guests are dissatisfied. Whether it’s because they couldn’t find convenient time slots, want better pricing, or seek a membership program with special benefits, your management platform will tell you.
An intelligent platform infuses the power of marketing into your business management system. This allows it to make sense of various customer segments by recording guest feedback and opinions, and other preferences like type of services and frequency of visits. This will help the software suggest retention strategies that can strengthen your customer relationships.
4. Marketing Campaigns
As your spa management software digitally captures customer journeys, it must also have the capability to use that information to design relevant and personalized marketing campaigns.
Intuitive marketing tools should predict customer flow, target the right guests for specific services, and fill your schedule. They can also send targeted messages to guests based on who’s likely to drop out, who needs access to loyalty programs, or whose membership will soon expire.
The software should also be able to upsell guests by analyzing the best new services for their specific needs and guide your front desk staff to encourage add-ons and upgrades - increasing guest spend per visit.
5. Inventory Management
Inventory management can be tricky — too much or too little inventory can cause serious setbacks to your bottom line. A spa management platform will track stock levels to anticipate and prevent over or undersupply, and alert you when stocks run low. Top tier management systems will also automate your ordering process, and even track professional and retail products separately.
If your business has multiple locations, a smart inventory tracking tool will run centralized operations, enabling control over all locations so you can procure and distribute in accordance with need. Plus, the built-in transparency will make auditing easy for your accountant and procurement managers. The result: complete inventory control and zero pilferage or wastage.
Skin Renewal saves 6,300 hours annually with Zenoti Inventory! Get in touch to find out how we can do the same for you.
6. Employee Management
Employee management can take up a lot of time, especially if you have multiple locations or a large network of employees. There is so much to keep on top of, including employee payroll, commissions, bonuses, performance, and attendance. A cutting-edge staff management software will provide all the necessary information on your employees, including their work schedule, guest profiles and preferences, payroll, commissions and tips, performance metrics, number of hours worked, days off taken, punctuality, and more.
Your employee management tool should also provide your staff with key customer data, which can be used to improve their performance and elevate guest experiences. Customized employee dashboards, unbiased performance tracking, and smart scheduling can all contribute to a positive work culture that not only identifies and rewards the best performers but also finds opportunities for improvement.
Discover how our solutions can help manage and empower employees post-COVID.
7. Reporting and Analytics
The best business decisions are based on data, and your spa management tool should absolutely support that. The software must be able to pull data from sales, operations, marketing, staff performance, and customer behavior, and then analyze them to prepare actionable insights and reports. These insights should be delivered through clear reports and dashboards that can be further filtered, isolated, and analyzed.
The best software includes predictive analysis, where the algorithm examines and combines historical data with recent, seasonal, and expected trends to provide forecasts that will help you optimize your staff schedule. This will allow you to bring in more staff on predicted busy days or cut hours on lean ones.
8. Manage Multiple Locations
If you own a spa brand that has multiple locations, you know that no outlet is the same. Each will differ in size and number of employees and will typically have a varying number of guests that require distinct services. How do you manage all these locations seamlessly, ensuring that sales, marketing, billing, inventory, and employee management are customized to each location?
The answer lies in an advanced spa management software that pulls in data from multiple locations, analyses individual outlet needs, and assists you in making data-driven decisions to improve operational efficiency and overall profitability.
9. Scalability
The ultimate goal of any business is growth, and your technology must have the capability to support that progression, and scale alongside your business without growing pains.
Spa management software powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning ensures that your business can grow with ease across all locations. Your management software should make it simpler for your team to offer the same quality services and features your guests are accustomed to, even during a rapid growth stage.
Whether it’s fully supported data migration from legacy products or scaling to handle large volumes of guests daily, your spa management software must offer a single entry point to run the entire operation, and keep it 100% uncomplicated, accessible, and secure.
10. Cloud-Based Accessibility
Clunky desktop applications neither have the accessibility nor the sophistication required to handle the demands of a growing spa business. When you’re shopping for spa management software, the most important feature to look for is whether it’s cloud based.
79% of small businesses agree that cloud-based services helped their businesses communicate and manage their guests more effectively during the Covid-19 pandemic.
This is because cloud-based spa software allows you access to your business operations 24/7, wherever you are. Plus, there is no risk of outages or clunky integrations slowing your business down. So, you can save your attention for the most important aspect of your business: providing excellent service to your guests.
The latest and the best cloud-based spa management applications deliver important business insights at your fingertips, and keep confidential data secure, so you never have to worry about losing a database full of important information.
Be sure to look for a cloud-based platform that is customizable, with an intelligent algorithm that will develop an innate understanding of your business.
A reliable, state-of-the-art spa management software elevates guest experience and makes daily operations a breeze. To get all the features listed in this article — and more — try our cutting-edge spa management software. Our extensive experience in the beauty and wellness industry has informed every aspect of our solution. We’ve thought of it all, so you won’t have to worry about a thing!
