Tune Up Salon: Zenoti for memberships, online booking & reviews

My name is Anthony Milton. I'm the cofounder and the CEO of Tuna Commandly Salon. We currently have fifty six locations across five states, and we have twenty plus locations currently under development.

We operate on a corporate and franchise model. The brand itself, we started in two thousand fifteen. We wanted to build a national brand with a real community feel, which is somewhat unheard of in the salon industry.

We want our clients to come in, have a drink at our bar, have conversations with the bar staff, get to know their hairstylist. The experience is everything. That's really what sets us apart from other brands.

We're building relationships, and that's honestly what matters. It's not a customer. We get to know them by name. And the more they come in, the more we learn about them, the more they become part of just the culture of the location and the team, and it makes a place that you want to come back to.

So let me speak on the membership piece for a second, because it's about thirty to forty percent of our overall business.

We didn't have the point of sale system that could actually take care of them and the nature we wanted them to be taken care of. VIPs couldn't create an account to be able to look at their historical services, update their billing, see when their favorite stylist or barber was working. They couldn't schedule their appointments accurately, so we had to do it all in an old fashioned way, which is over the phone. Now we can do that via the phone app.

We can do that via the web based services. We can do that via the customer logins. So it makes the VIP membership a lot easier. And what we've seen there is the ease of use is great for the customer, which means the retention of the VIP is better.

There's lack of fall off.

We've had other systems in the past where we have to deal with when a cell crashing or the system freezing or just having a lot of issues, especially with our membership program. Being able to do different types of memberships, very customizable, being able to freeze memberships makes the process very, very easy for the employee and for the customer.

One of the great ways that Zenoti has allowed us to remain authentic to our customers and, create a better customer experience, not just external, but internal, is the ease of the platform. It's intuitive. You're able to access the information that you need to see how your store's performing. And from a franchisee level, when you're when you're able to understand your numbers and there's always a story in your data, it allows you to look at your top performers, your top customers, and then those that maybe need a little bit more help, you know, with what Zenoti's been able to allow us to do at scale and as we continue to grow at every location. The whole platform itself is very easy to understand.

The franchisees that are technologically savvy, they love the system because they get it. They understand the flow of it. They understand the binary metrics of it. They understand everything that goes along with the different levels of the system. And the franchisees that aren't quite as technologically savvy love it because the technology is working for them as opposed to us having to work for the technology. So it's a great win win across the spectrum.

In the past, our old point of sales reporting, was very difficult just because very few reports were customizable and there were only so many that were actually accurate. With moving into Zenoti, everything's very customizable, so we're able to go in and pretty much pull anything we need to pull, and whether that's at a specific location, a specific market, or or company wide, we can pull pretty much any KPI that we need to and get whatever report we're looking for.

Historically speaking, with old technology, it was very, very tough to manage the brand on the go. But with the Synoti, I can literally manage the entirety of this brand from my phone. I can look at any location anytime, look at who's on, who's getting service, when the appointments are, and and really helps drive the business in the event or when there needs to be any quick changes. So I can save an hour a day or two hours a day if it's all at my literal fingertips.

Reviews are critical to any business, and sentiment matters most to consumers. So by using the SMS platform within Zenoti, we've been able to automate that, that as soon as our customer leaves in a couple of minutes, they get a text asking how their experience was, and if they wouldn't mind leaving the review, there's a link. So it makes it very easy. Now rather than our staff having to text every single person when they walk out, it's automatic, it's timely, and it's done in a way that is authentic. And the response from our customers has been exponential.

The mobile app has been fantastic for us. Before the app, we were just relying on phone calls. So moving into the mobile app and having the web page available for our clients to be able to book appointments and contact us, any way that we can increase communication between us and our clients can be very beneficial and free up a lot of our our staff's time, which is very helpful.

Moving over to the app definitely freed up a good two to three hours in total for for an average shift for our bartenders or receptionists.

Having a mobile app that is intuitive and native to a consumer is important to the longevity of a business. Rather than an app creating a pain point, we've created more of a simple process that creates it more fluid and easy, and that just at scale, that's why we continue to grow.

The ability to expand a business and that technology be ahead of the expansion is very, very important for us. We look at it as we should be catching up to the technology as this technology grows itself.

Without Zenoti, I I can't I can't imagine. Especially the membership piece being our our bread and butter of this company. If we went away from Zenoti and went back to an old point of sale, we would definitely see a lot of issues.