How Barbers Can Reduce Cancellations in the Digital World

For this #kTip, we discuss the strategies and tools that barbers can leverage to keep appointments from canceling.

If you would rather learn about my #kTips by video, you are welcome to scroll to the bottom and watch the video.

Hello everyone! Another kTip for you…from me…Kak Varley.

I want to talk about an experience I had today. Well, I had it a while ago, but I just remembered it today because I just got a haircut. As you noticed in the last video about restaurants, I still had my long hair from the COVID experience of lockdown. So now I have a haircut. If you want to see what my hair used to look like, head on over to that kTip.

Anyway, I was over at the barber today, and I was reminded of some difficulties she’s having as a business. Her number one complaint is that people either cancel or forget that they have an appointment. As you can imagine, she only gets paid when people show up and get their hair cut. So I started thinking about it. I was like, ‘Wow. Why is this happening? And then she showed me her book…

Organizing the Old Way

She pulled out a book which is apparently her manual calendar. I guess what happens is that people call her, she pulls out the book, and she goes, “Okay, I have these openings. Which one would you like?” And they say, “Okay, I’ll take that time,” she writes it in the book, and she goes, “Okay, we’re great.” Well, we have a problem, which is that she’s resting on the customer to be organized enough to remember that they have an appointment. You’re hoping that they have written it down, it’s available to them somewhere with easy access, or they put it in their calendar.

Organizing a New Digital Way

This is what I do when I talk to her: When I call her and she says, “I got this opening,” I’ll usually plug it into my calendar. But then I asked her, “Why don’t you use a scheduler? There are these online schedulers. There are a ton of tools for which you can do this all digitally. You can tie them right into your calendar that you have today (if you have a calendar, whether it be Outlook or Google Calendar, or even an iOS calendar). It’ll plug into these, you’ll be able to see when you have openings, and then you can send an invite if you have their email. And by the way, you probably want their email so that you can continue to communicate with them on a marketing level. So, if you have their email, you can then send them an invite. They get the invite, they accept it, and it goes into their electronic calendar.” I’ll bet if she did that, she would reduce these problems by at least 50%, if not 75%.

That’s my kTip today for the barbers of the world. By the way, if you’d like some suggestions on what tools to use, please reach out to me.

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