Head of the Pride provides Boutique Salon Services and Modern Men’s Barbering in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Founded in 2014 on the idea that both men and women deserve a high quality salon experience in an environment where asking questions and getting expert style and product suggestions is comfortable. Head of the Pride strives to be a place where one can come and comfortably explore their personal style and get professional recommendations to get them from where they are to where they desire to be.

Can you share examples of how Zenoti has helped improve your business?

Delivering a great customer experience is definitely our top priority. We want to make sure everything from the client's first phone call, to their appointment, to the final moment before they walk out the door is fully thought through – and works toward the goal of bringing them back. Zenoti helps achieve that goal in multiple areas. The salon appointment book is really fast, which makes it possible for us to quickly look up things like the customer’s visit history, preferences, and custom personalized notes – we can even use our phone's caller ID information to pull up client information as we answer the call so we start off our interactions in a very personalized manner.

Additionally, clients appreciate the system generated confirmation messages to ensure they have their appointments scheduled properly; as well as the appointment reminders that are emailed the afternoon before the appointment. This has helped us as well, we no longer have to make a barrage of reminder phone calls to ensure our clients appointments still work for their schedule. The Zenoti system offers other automated emails as well – the "thank you" note sent after a visit and the emailed receipts are particularly great!

Studies have shown, once a male client has visited a stylist for 3 consecutive service appointments, they're a loyal customer, usually for life.

Building loyalty is an area where Zenoti has partnered so well with Head of the Pride. One of the customer service representatives at Zenoti walked us through the process of setting up Packages in the system. Head of the Pride now offers several “Buy 2 Services, Get 1 Free” packages – primarily we focus on our “Stache & Scruff Club” for men. This package offering allows us to both up-sell facial grooming services as well as lock clients in for a three visit package – which means they're likely to keep coming back for years.

And the best part is: the system tracks the whole thing and reports the Package's status both to us and to the client. It’s been working really well and the clients have been incredibly receptive. When it comes right down to it, the client is already expecting to pay for one service when they visit, so pre-paying for a second service – to get the third FREE – doesn't really seem like that much extra money; especially for men, because their services cost a little less and they can be more bargain driven consumers, so the free service feels like the best deal for them.

And for us, once a male client has come in those first 3 times, statistics show we've got them locked in for years of repeat visits. Generally, we keep our Package offers limited to first-time clients as an incentive to get them coming back, but around the holidays and promotional events we open it up to existing clients, too. Of course, in order to run any promotion, you need to be able to track it accurately – which is exactly what Zenoti does for us.

The client pre-pays for the first 2 visits and then gets the third one for free. They system tracks the upfront payment as well as the usage on the Package. And, at the time of check out for services performed, the system takes care of the redemption against the Package and puts the Package status right on the client's receipt.

Keeping utilization for the day up is important for the business.

Every salon experiences a slow week or unexpected cancellations. We have a few ways that we try to fill up open spots on our stylists' schedules. We encourage our stylists to use social media channels to let their friends and followers know they have a service schedule opening available. Then we support them using our salon’s Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

In addition, especially for our stylists that are still building their relationship with their client list, we’ll use the system to identify customers that are due for a visit, but haven’t booked their next appointment yet. Often, we’ll start by looking at who came in on that same day and time 6-8 weeks ago, and reach out to them. Frequently, we have the stylists send a personal email in order to help to continue to build their relationship with their clients.

The Zenoti system works really well at identifying these customers and helping the stylist connect with their clientele. Next up, we’re planning to customize the salon spa software to send out these lapse in service reminders automatically – so if a customer hasn’t been in for 8 weeks, they’ll get a personalized message encouraging them to come back soon, automatically. We’ve been coached that this is an offering and we’re excited to implement it in the coming weeks!

Inventory can be one of the biggest investments for a salon. Can you share what inventory controls you have in place?

We have over 250 SKUs for our retail products and nearly a hundred additional individual styling and hair care products for our back bar. Our retail products are carefully curated and each one is a product we can get really excited about. Providing a great retail experience for our clients is a team effort, we encourage both the stylists and the front desk associates to participate in informing the client about products we love.

That means it is critical for us to have those products in stock. We've been really happy with how Zenoti helps us put inventory controls at our fingertips. The POS tracks the retail items we sell, and accurately reflects our stock levels in real time. Then, every 90 days, we use an iPad to walk through our retail floor and our stock room to perform a complete inventory audit.

This system of checks and balances keeps our inventory accurate and makes it easy for us to order what we need, when we need it. Then, when we receive an order from a vendor, it’s easy to check-in the products and commit them to inventory. When needed, we just use the Zenoti check-out feature to check product out from the stock room to pull it for placement on the floor.

In our opinion, Zenoti is definitely better than the other products we've used and the number of software options we've looked into. The number one feature of Zenoti is the customer service and the high level of responsiveness from the Zenoti team.

While our current location has only been open for a year, our management team has over 15 years in the salon industry and has worked, hands-on, with multiple salon management software solutions, but Zenoti rose above all the other options and was our first choice to help launch our new brand. Part of the reason we decided on Zenoti was the flexibility of the system and the robust features, but ultimately what tipped the scales for us was their team’s responsiveness. That responsiveness is something we really appreciate.

We found that with the other software systems we’ve used in the past the salon was, pretty much, considered an account number rather than a customer. We would contact them about a feature that was not working or wasn't there, and there was no response – maybe an automated email saying 'thanks,' but no follow-through.

In the same way we value our relationships with our clients, we really appreciate that Zenoti is always willing to listen to our ideas, assist us in correcting a problem, or walk us through features to ensure we're getting the most out of the product. We’ve even seen some of our suggestions get implemented into the software, so that’s been really great & gives us a little extra PRIDE in the system! To learn more about what Zenoti can do for your business, request a demo.

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