Across the salon industry, one thing is on everyone’s mind these days: client experience. A great client experience can power a successful salon in countless ways, from driving revenue growth and boosting average ticket size to improving client retention and increasing word-of-mouth referrals. A poor client experience, on the other hand, can undermine all of your hard work, swiftly and absolutely. 

Of course, the challenge is that a truly great end-to-end client experience in this age of highly discerning consumers requires a level of intricacy and detail that’s not only hard to achieve but equally hard to maintain. The client experience can easily be disrupted, often on account of things you might not have considered risks. 

A Poor Experience Is Rarely About the Service Itself

Disruption to the client experience is often tied to more than the service itself. The quality of work done at salons and other self-care businesses has reached new heights. When a client declines to come back for a second visit or passes on referring your business to a friend, it may not be because they did not like the cut and color or are unhappy with their extensions. Often, it’s because the experience was less than seamless somewhere else along the way. 

Perhaps booking an appointment online wasn’t easy. Maybe you weren’t ready for them when they walked in the door and made them wait longer than they appreciated. Maybe it was too hard to park. Perhaps they’ve grown frustrated with communication (namely, the lack of it) before and after their appointments. 

Or maybe you just wouldn’t accept their preferred payment method. 

Wait, will clients really be mad at us, even after a service they were happy with, just because we don’t accept their preferred payment method?

Surprisingly, yes, they may. 

For modern consumers with high expectations and minimal patience, payments matter. Next to online booking, a seamless payment process is one of the more important contributors to a great client experience. Everything about your payment process has to be easy and effortless. 

Discover® Network Data Shows the Link Between Flexible Payments and Client Experience

According to new research commissioned by Discover® Network, failing to meet your clients where they are by not accepting their preferred payment method comes with consequences. Consider, for starters, that more than half (51%) of respondents have been in a situation where their preferred payment method was not accepted in the past year¹, and that nearly a third (30%) of consumers blame the business when their payment method is not accepted.²

Ok, sure, they may be annoyed, but are they really going to walk away from us because of this? 

Data from Discover Network shows that not only will clients be agitated if you don’t accept their preferred payment method, but they will also change their behavior because of it. And in this case, changing their behavior doesn’t mean they’ll pull out a different credit card. It means they may stop coming to your salon, or worse, may not come in the first place. As the Discover Network research shows: 

• Globally, 19% of consumers are ‘Very Likely’ to restrict their shopping to places where they know their preferred method of payment will be accepted.

• 58% of consumers in North America are at least ‘Somewhat Likely’ to restrict their shopping to places where they know their preferred method of payment will be accepted.

• 76% of consumers at least sometimes look for signage or posted notices about methods of payment accepted at different places before they proceed to shop, to make sure they are able to pay.

• Only 53% of consumers reported that 'I paid with another card' when their preferred credit card was not accepted.

• 27% of consumers reported that 'I did not make the purchase' when their credit card was not accepted.³

Look, that’s a lot of numbers, and it’s admittedly hard to say exactly what the net impact client-wise is on your business, but the exact number doesn’t matter. Not really, anyway. If one client walks away or doesn’t come back because you weren’t prepared to accept their preferred payment method, that’s already too many.

Modernizing Your Payments: A Checklist

If you’ve got some work to do to get to where you need to be with payments, you’re not alone. According to a study commissioned by Discover Network and conducted by S&P Global Market Intelligence 451 Research, while 76% of merchants say offering a consistent, streamlined payment experience across all sales channels is highly important to the success of their business, 86% of merchants agree their omni-channel payment experience remains a work in progress.⁴

If you haven’t already done so, now is the time to modernize your payments infrastructure and position your business to meet clients wherever they want to be with payments. That means:

• Ensuring that your payment processing software fully integrates with or, even better, is the same as your booking and broader client experience platform. 

• Offering a fast, painless, and completely digital process for collecting payments at checkout.

• Collecting a client’s payment information once and re-running it touch-free at subsequent appointments.

• Accepting credit and debit cards and making no assumptions about which route a client prefers. 

• Accepting all major credit cards; no exceptions.

• Having systems in place to ensure data security and guard against fraud.

• Embracing modern payment methods such as digital/mobile wallets. 

• Accepting contactless payments from nearly anywhere.

A Great Client Experience Is Within Reach

You and your staff are working too hard, and the competition is too fierce, to lose business because your payment process isn’t where it needs to be. The good news is that if you’re ready to prioritize payments as part of a great client experience, the resources you need are out there. Now it’s just a matter of finding the right partners and making the right investments. Wherever that takes you, this much is certain: your business is worth it, and your clients will thank you.

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About the Author: Shanalie Wijesinghe is the Content Strategy Director at Boulevard, where she lends her industry and platform expertise to both in-house staff and partner salons and spas. A salon industry veteran with more than 14 years of experience working for high-end luxury salons such as Sally Hershberger and BENJAMIN, Wijesinghe was previously a sales engineer for Boulevard and blends her knowledge of the beauty and technology industries to help put the company’s partners and employees on the path to success. A Bay Area native and first-generation immigrant, Wijesinghe is a graduate of the Paul Mitchell School specializing in cosmetology, styling, and nail instruction.

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1. ^{TSG (The Strawhecker Group) Holiday Shopping Survey, commissioned by Discover Network, May 2024}

2. ^{Datos Insights Merchant and Consumer Industry Trends 2024 Survey commissioned by Discover Network May 13, 2024}

3. ^{TSG (The Strawhecker Group) Consumer Travel & Entertainment Survey, commissioned by Discover Network, Q1 2025}

4. ^{S&P Global Market Intelligence 451 Research, Global Payments Survey commissioned by Discover Network, Q1 2024}