Book Salon, a payment and booking service provider specializing in hair, beauty, and wellness companies, recently announced data based on its client portfolio of more than 1,000 salons, shows that 52% of appointment bookings happen between 5 PM to 9 AM. This means that salons not using online booking or booking apps are most likely to lose potentially tens of thousands of dollars for appointments that are left empty.

“According to some estimates, 65% of European beauty and hair salons don’t use any kinds of digital tools for appointment management or point-of-sale processes. This is a massive group of micro-entrepreneurs who are losing money every week due to not being able to handle bookings outside their normal working hours,” comments Harri Myllylä, CEO of Book Salon.

“It’s mentally very demanding if you need to be picking up the phone all the time. Every missed call might be a loss of income – in today’s world, it’s really important to be able to switch off completely,” Myllylä continues.  

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, statistics by Phorest Salon Software in 2019 showed that 46% of bookings happened outside opening hours. It seems that, although the overall number of bookings has normalized, more and more are happening outside the opening hours. The pandemic changed people’s consuming behavior significantly, making the use of online tools more everyday activity for older generations, as well.

The situation has changed for many salons who previously might have trusted customers to walk in without an appointment. Without a digital system, it’s especially difficult to fill in the no-show appointments or last-minute cancellations. 

Hiusviisikko hair salon was one of the companies that previously relied on paper and pen in customer bookings. They took the digital booking system into use in 2019, and now, they wouldn’t do things in any other way. Before, their work was constantly stopped by the phone ringing.

“We were especially worried that our clients wouldn’t be able to use digital tools, as they were used to booking us through the phone. This is a redundant concern – today, we get 70% fewer calls in a day, and now the time spent on the phone is less than 10 minutes a day,” explains the team from Hiusviisikko.

“The best thing is that we can actually have Sundays off because our customers are booking their appointments outside the opening hours. We feel at ease and are a lot less stressed out,” the team concludes.