Open around the clock: why online booking is a must for hairdressers

In the salon, the debate about online booking is usually held as a question of convenience: pleasant for clients, a little more modern on the outside. The real effect lies elsewhere. It shows at three points of the salon day – on the phone during a colour, in the number of appointments nobody cancels, and in what is already in the calendar when you unlock the door.

This article describes those three points and two more that tend to get overlooked: which times should be released for booking at all, and what the switch demands in the first few weeks. Switch on the booking page and change nothing else, and you get an additional channel but not a calmer day.

Somebody sitting on the sofa in the evening, thinking that their roots are growing out, reaches for the device in their hand – not for the telephone. If the salon is closed, there are exactly three continuations: the thought is noted down and acted on the next day, it is forgotten, or it lands with a business where the appointment can be fixed straight away.

Only the first of those three leads reliably to you, and it demands an extra action from the client the next day. This is exactly where a booking page works: it turns an impulse into an entry while the impulse is still there. That is less a question of the hour than a question of friction.

The same applies during the day, when nobody can pick up because every hand is busy. For the person calling, an engaged line is no different from a closed salon. You do not have to guess how large that share is in your salon: note down for a week how many calls went unanswered and in how many of those cases somebody rang back.

In a salon the phone does not cost talking time, it costs interruption time. A call in the middle of a colour application pulls attention away, and getting back into the work takes longer than the call itself. For the client in the chair, that same minute is also a signal: the time they are paying for currently belongs to somebody else.

That is why the relief is regularly underestimated. The point is not to stop receiving calls – queries, rescheduling and consultations are in the right place on the phone. The point is that plain appointment booking, which demands nothing in terms of content, no longer has to take the route through the handset.

One side effect only becomes noticeable after a few weeks: misunderstandings get rarer. An appointment jotted down on the fly carries every source of error a verbal handover has – wrong weekday, wrong service, a similar-sounding surname. An appointment the client selected themselves and had confirmed in writing does not carry them.

An appointment agreed only verbally exists in two places: in the salon's calendar and in the client's memory. The second place is the unreliable one. An appointment booked online, by contrast, exists as an entry – and almost everything that works at all against lost appointments follows from that.

An entry can be confirmed in writing, taken into the client's own calendar and brought back to mind before the date. Above all, though, it can be released again by the client without anybody having to pick up the phone. That sounds counterintuitive at first, but it is the point with the greatest return: a cancellation made in good time is a slot you can give away again; a cancellation that never happens is a lost one.

How strongly this works in an individual business cannot be quantified in advance, but it can be observed well afterwards. Record over a quarter how many appointments were not kept and how many were cancelled so late that the slot stayed empty. Only those two figures turn a hunch about the benefit into a statement – and they usually also show which weekdays are the problem.

The most common mistake when introducing online booking is releasing the entire calendar. A salon that makes everything bookable loses the ability to shape the day: an elaborate blonding lands at half past five, half an hour sits between two dry cuts that nobody fills any more, and the only long block of the week has gone to a fringe trim.

A deliberate selection makes more sense. Which services are so unambiguous that they can be booked without a query? Which need a conversation beforehand, a strand test or an honest assessment of the starting condition? And which times stay reserved for the people who arrange their next appointment at the chair anyway?

That includes the uncomfortable work on durations. If every service sits in the calendar with the same time span although the actual duration varies considerably, an online booking does not even out that error, it multiplies it. Measuring your services honestly once takes the most time in the switch and makes the biggest difference.

A booking page is set up in an afternoon and settled in after about four weeks. The gap between those two periods consists of work that comes up in the salon, not of work at a screen.

The first week is about matching things up. Does the same opening time appear online as on the door? Are holidays, training days and the Monday off stored? An appointment that comes in through a forgotten blocked period does more damage than ten unanswered calls. In the second and third week it then becomes clear which services are wrongly measured, recognisable from where the day regularly falls out of rhythm.

Whether the switch holds is ultimately decided by the team. Keep writing appointments into a paper book on request while the calendar runs on online, and you produce exactly the double bookings the system is meant to prevent. So set a cut-off date from which there is only one calendar, and, during the transition, give one person the job of checking the two against each other every morning.