Can a Salon Thrive Without a Front Desk? (Yes! And Here’s How)

Ah yes, the front desk, that sacred altar where we burn thousands in wages every month, just for the privilege of someone saying, I'll be with you in a minute. In a world where every expense in your salon should be working hard, the front desk just doesn't pay its way anymore. So in this week's episode, I'm going to convince you why it's time to finally pull the plug. Hello, hello, hello, my salon friends. Phil Jackson here, your queen of salons, coming in your ears again with another dose of Wise Owl Wisdom. How on earth are you? Achingly well, I hope, as always. Here we are, middle of July, just about to start taking big chunks of time off all the way through the summer, and I hope you've got some balance too. So what are we talking about this week? Well, last week I worked with my guest, Owen, to try and convince you that cash is no longer king. And this week we're kind of continuing a bit of that theme, really, because I believe that in a small business, at least, every element is up for grabs. There should be nothing that's sacred, nothing that shouldn't be examined, nothing that we shouldn't pull apart and see whether we can put it back together in a better way. And this week I want to look at the front desk because I think we have inherited a certain way of doing business as far as our reception experience is concerned. But just because something's always been done that way does not mean it's the best way to do it. Sometimes we need to just throw things in the air and put things back together in a slightly different way. So I want you to look outside the industry, look at what's going on, because I think most of the excellent lessons that I've learnt about business have come from outside the salon industry, and I've got to where I am by applying those lessons in a slightly different way. And if you just look inside the industry for inspiration, it ends up with lots and lots of businesses all doing the same thing. And I think if we take a broader view of how business is moving, then I think you'll be not terribly surprised to see that the front desk is no longer serving us. It's a bit of a relic because the front desk is kind of it comes from a time when we were handling lots of cash and taking lots of phone bookings. And both of those things are no longer true. And I've been encouraging you. Well, last week we were talking about the fact that actually I don't think cash is necessary in a business anymore.

Phone bookings. I mean, how many times does the phone ring compared to how it was five years ago, 10 years ago, 20 years ago? And hanging on to the front desk is a bit like being blockbuster in a Netflix world. It's time for us to be ready to move forward, innovate and take our businesses in a slightly different direction. But I think that we've carried on with the front desk because we think that clients want it. And I don't think they do. Actually, I think that's quite an old fashioned view. And I think most clients these days want a frictionless digital experience. They don't want to wait in line for somebody to finally get around to them when they finish on their phone call. And I think if we take that view of outside the salon industry, I think this has become the norm. So if you think about my favorite shopping experience, which is the Apple store, as you know, if it hasn't got an Apple on it, I'm not interested. And they don't have a front desk. They just have people that are hosts. Customer service is something that's very fluid and very tangible. And everything's done from the iPad. And I think it could be the same in our business, too. And I look at my favorite, let's say, hotel experiences. I don't want to check in at a desk. I want to be able to check in from my phone before I get there, ideally. Or if not, just give me a booth. I don't want to have to wait in turn. You know, sometimes when you're checking into hotels, it always seems to be that I get there just after the coach load of tourists. And you can be stood there for ages and ages waiting to check in. There's really no need for it anymore. So I think if we look at those frictionless experiences from outside our industry and bring some of them into the salon, I think there are lots and lots of gains to be made. And the front desk is expensive, but more than that, I think it's costing you more than you think. So once we've got our front desk wage bill on top of that, what about the downtime? What about the training that we've got to invest? What about the errors that are being made? The front desk is likely bleeding cash and it's slowing down your business as well. And what I don't like is that the front desk is an inconsistent experience. And I've said for a long time that inconsistency will kill a business much more quickly than actually getting a few things wrong. And I think that, well, I know actually from my own salon experience that we had reception cover for a lot of years.

But we had by definition an inconsistent experience because if you've got a salon that's open seven days a week and a receptionist that works five days, you've got two days a week where that experience is different, be it for the better or worse. Add on to that the fact that your receptionist has paid annual leave. Add on to that the fact that they have the odd coffee break or a paid lunch hour. Well, yeah, OK, it means that we've got a very inconsistent experience. And then what are we going to do? Does that mean we take on a second receptionist? Then it gets really, really expensive. So for us, even though I recognized that actually I thought the experience was better when we had a receptionist, I thought it was better to slightly reduce the expectation for our customers and to get rid of reception so we could offer a consistent experience. These days, I think that technology has moved on, AI has moved on of the ability to check out our customers and make those appointments and retail from the chair or from our beauty rooms. I think all of those things have moved forward at such a pace now that I think we can actually get a better experience without a receptionist rather than a worse one. But even when the receptionist is there, we've got bottlenecks, we've got people waiting around, we've got mixed messages, we've got people dropping client communications. It's a single point of failure in an otherwise smooth client journey. The more links you put into a chain, the more vulnerability is built into that chain as well. So let's get rid of this link once and for all. But ultimately, I think from a customer care perspective, I think the receptionist is an excuse for your staff not to take ownership. Every time your team member relies on the front desk to handle something, they lose an opportunity to build trust. They lose an opportunity to build loyalty and they gain an opportunity to wash their hands of the client experience. So why not give your team members, your beauty therapists or your hairdressers, why not give them complete ownership of the client experience? And that means they take care of every element all the way through. So how do we go about it? How can we get rid of the front desk? You've convinced us, Uncle Phil, that we no longer need that front desk. How on earth do we go about it? Well, obviously, if we're getting rid of receptionists, well, there's going to be a redundancy process in there somewhere.

We're going to have to find somewhere else for those team members to contribute to the business. If you're going to keep your receptionist, shift the role. So instead of having somebody who's glued to a desk, my God, aren't those reception desks sticky? Not only if you're receptionists, but they can keep team members there. I can remember certainly my apprentices loved being stuck to the desk for hours and hours at a time. But instead of having someone stuck to the desk, let's ditch the desk altogether. If you're going to have receptionists, change their role to more of a maitre d' role where there are hosts in the business. And they're much more keyed into that hospitality and client delight rather than an admin role. So someone whose job it is to see somebody through the business, to build those personal relationships, to host the experience, to make sure everyone's having a great time, to move around the salon space. So if you can't get rid of the receptionist, let's at least get rid of that traditional reception role. If you're going to get rid of the receptionists altogether, I admit you may need to look at the timings of your services. You may need to build in an extra five minutes buffer time for your team members to do their own greeting and their own checkout. It may be that we need to look at that, but I'll bet that you can actually still save money even if each service is taking five minutes longer. Of course, take it as read that you're going to have to empower your team. They're going to need to do more of the job. So they need to understand much more around rebooking and upsells. Make sure they understand how to take payments at the section or in the beauty room. Make sure that they can offer that faster, more personal, more effective service and make sure they understand the parameters that we would normally only have to explain to one person. So if, for example, they're empowered to offer a deal on a package or a bundle or an upsell, we're going to have to tell the whole team that, not just your receptionist this time. So there's some education that needs to be in place. There's some empowerment that needs to happen too. And of course, you're going to have to invest in a killer booking and payment system. So if you've been scraping by with some shitty free software that does not do the job properly anyway, but we're expecting all team members to get involved, we're expecting online booking to be completely seamless 24 seven. We're expecting clients to be able to book and pay and reschedule for themselves. Well, this is your new receptionist. So you're going to have to make sure that your booking system is absolutely superb and ticking all the boxes. So this may be time to shop around and I would try and get this in place before you get rid of your receptionist.

While you're looking around, have a look at that digital experience. So a lot of the reception systems now allow people to check themselves in or they have some kind of kiosk where a client can let you know that they've arrived. And sometimes it will also allow them to either scan a QR code or it will send their check in and health forms straight through to their phones. Without that gatekeeper, without that receptionist, these things have got to be taken care of. So either it happens ahead of the visit. So we use AI or automation to send those forms out and make sure that arrival experience is really, really slick. Or it needs to happen in the salon and we're going to need a little bit of tech. We're going to geek out ever so slightly. But I promise once we've got to grips with it, it's going to save you so much time. And at the end of the day, if bloody weather spoons can get to the stage where we're scanning QR codes and ordering drinks to our table, I'm pretty sure with the level of sophistication that we've got in our business that we can get our clients behaving in the same way. So we're going to maybe need to redesign our space a little bit too. If we're getting rid of the front desk, this is prime real estate in the salon business. So what are we going to do with that space? Is it going to be more productive space? Can we get extra beauty room or hairdressing chairs in there? Are we going to reimagine that space so it's more of a relaxation zone? Is it going to become a space where we interact with our clients and carry out our consultations? Is it going to be an enhanced retail experience? Can we get more shelves in there and get that real estate actually working and earning on our behalf? What's going to happen rather than just having that big empty hole where your receptionist desks used to once be? So there we have it. I hope I've made the case for getting rid of the front desk. And I hope I've given you a few ideas on getting rid of reception and how we can navigate that. We did this in my own salon, as I've already alluded. So we got rid of receptionists so that we could offer a more consistent experience. And we went through the hoops with it, to be honest. We went through a stage where we had outsourced reception. So it became an off-site experience. So we had a call center that took care of our phone calls for us. And they could also make bookings, move things around and answer some simple customer service questions.

All of that's perfectly doable. But ultimately, I think it's about managing client expectations. It's about managing that experience, but managing the expectation. So even if you're going to go down to just having an answering service or an answer phone in the salon, to manage those phone calls. As long as your customers understand that you only check those messages twice a day and that you'll be returning calls at 11 o'clock or three in the afternoon, it's fine. It's when they have an expectation that isn't met that we have a problem. So a big part of this is around understanding what clients expect, but managing that expectation in a realistic way. So what have I missed? Or do you fancy an argument about this? Please reach out and let me know. Phil at buildyoursalon.com. I would love to hear about how you're reinventing the client experience, how you're changing the way that we carry out business in your salon. Maybe I could interview you for a future episode of the Build Your Salon podcast. I'd love to be sharing your journey, your story of success with my gorgeous Build Your Salon listeners. Just seven short days until I'm coming in your ears again with another dose of my wise hour wisdom. And until then, take care. Sit down and see what's going on with the queen of salons. Hair and more successful tips for business owners. All on Build Your Salon.