“Reception is Dead Money”

We often speak to salon owners who believe that reception is simply an extra cost that never brings revenue, so what is the point of them?

As far as I am concerned, a good receptionist is worth their weight in gold and can transform your salon or clinic from average to the place to be. Read more on this in my blog with Professional Beauty here

One of the biggest challenges we have as salon owners is our budget. How can we justify an extra cost when it comes to reception that is just going to add to overall staff costs and most of all, how can a receptionist be that important in the business when all of my team are dealing with the customer from the beginning to the end of their visit?

We have visited salons where that works and the customer is very much looked after this way but I want to challenge that belief since I don’t believe that everyone is as efficient as they should be at reception and are missing opportunities such as upselling, cross-selling and strong, efficient diary management.

Something else that is also quite popular is blocking time for the service providers to cover reception. Now, I don’t mind that if you have 1 receptionist and the lunch or holidays need to be covered but ultimately, you are losing money by having their time blocked out so is this really cost-efficient? Again, the person covering reception should be trained and understand what it takes, otherwise you are very much missing the crucial part of that customer journey which could deter people from wanting to come back to you.

If you are finding it difficult to justify the cost of a receptionist, I am convinced that we can find the budget through analysing your costs and revisiting and focusing on your operations and structure, that’s what we do best here at The Delforge Group® as we are so passionate about the reception being looked after!

In the meantime, I invite you to do a few things:

• Contact a few salons or even visit them and analyse how you feel as a customer, was that efficient and do you believe they impacted you as a customer to come back to them? What did you like, what didn’t work?

• Analyse your customer journey from the reception point of view, you can do that with the team which is always a great eye opener.

• Employ a receptionist on key days to see how that works and grow their role

Ultimately, if you speak to any salon owners that have a reception team, they will tell you how crucial they are to their business and how they cannot do without them. Without my reception team, I know that I would never have been able to step out of my business like I did and was able to work on creating further growth to it.

The key is the training, that’s why we created the 1-1 coaching approach to the reception team, we love to see them grow and understand how pivotal their role is and where we can increase the average sale significantly with a clear and precise structure.