The past week has been stressful and confusing – especially for small businesses like salons and spas. As we’ve worked through the evolving situation together we’ve had a wide variety of questions from our customers. I wanted to put some information together to help our customers find the best way forward and make sure that there’s nothing they’re missing in the process.
Whether you’ve decided to close in the interest of employee and customer safety or you’re located in a state that required the closure of all salons, your employees may need to file for unemployment. USA.gov has a good resource on unemployment rules in general which includes a link to CareerOneStop.org and their state-by-state unemployment page.
Our customers that have switched to the Cloud version of the program will continue to have access to their salon information from off-site. If you haven’t switched to the Cloud version yet this could be the ideal time to do so – call us at 800-682-2998 if you have any questions.
For our salons that send confirmation emails, text messages, and booking reminder emails, you should turn those off until you’re ready to reopen. You can access those settings under Maintenance -> Internet Marketing. The text message option is right on that screen and the confirmation emails and reminder emails can be turned off under their associated buttons on that screen Confirmation Email Settings and Reminder Email Settings. If you need help with these steps give us a call at 800-682-2998.
For our salons that currently use Online Booking, planning should be made to decide how to handle the service right now. Options include turning off the booking temporarily, blocking off the book through a certain date in the future but leaving the booking up and running so that future appointments still get booked, and just turning off booking availability for all your employees under Maintenance -> Employee -> Modify Employee. There are advantages and disadvantages to each option but make sure that whatever you decide to do you communicate those changes with your customers and as always, call us at 800-682-2998 with questions.
Many salons that did close or experience a large downturn in business due to cancellations have been looking for alternate methods of bringing in business. We’ve set up several salons this week to have Printable Gift Certificates. Having your gift certificate sales available directly from your web site will allow your customers to support your salon during this difficult time without having to leave their homes. In addition, while there’s quite a bit more involved to setting it up than the gift certificates, we do have the option available to sell your products online. They can either be set up to ship them to the customers or to have the customer come to the salon to pick them up.
Finally, I wanted to close this by saying we’re here for you. Working together we can get through this and get back to business.
Be kind to each other, be careful, and be well.