Every head of a beauty salon, even at the stage of opening a salon, is faced with such a phenomenon as negative customer reviews.
Whether it is reviews about the work of the masters or a negative assessment of the interior, this absolutely cannot be ignored.
It should be understood that competitors can give you negative feedback. Such cases are most frequent when the salon is new and does not yet know its “closest environment”, and, accordingly, may not imagine that this is possible. From our practice, there are non-isolated examples of rather bright, sharp and persistent, but still groundless criticism.
One of the beauty salons, located (as it happened objectively) in an area densely populated by competitors, posted its advertisement on a well-known portal. And he did this, like many, solely out of the best intentions, so that they would learn about him as soon as possible. Already in the fifth month of operation, his enterprise began to be criticized from one IP address (computer address on the Internet) and one login (network username on the Internet) just on this portal. A certain woman began to write regularly that she was painted terribly, almost green (in fact, she claimed that she was turned from a blonde into a redhead), then the masseur "insulted her cellulite", saying that nothing would help here. ... The head then turned to the administrators of the portal with a request to remove such offensive slander, which, not only did not affect the activities of the beauty salon in any significant way, did not have any ground under them. The administration of the portal was lucky - it was removed free of charge and without talking, moreover, quite quickly. Then a refutation was published, and the person who "dirty" in the comments never wrote anything else.
Recently, more and more information about the portals of beauty salons has been found on the network, as if some of them deliberately write negative comments in customer reviews, in order to later demand a separate payment from the owners of the salons for removing these reviews. Here you can only recommend carefully choosing your partners among the portals, and, of course, it is good to read the contract they offer when placing your salon on their resource.
The situation with negative reviews from your real customers is much more interesting. As a rule, a dissatisfied client tries to express his dissatisfaction in all available sources - from a book of reviews and suggestions, which must be in your beauty salon (at the request of regulatory authorities), to portals, websites, pages with reviews about beauty salons.
In this case, you should immediately determine if there is a real reason for dissatisfaction on the part of the client. If he exists, and one of the employees really made a mistake, then it is worth working with the team, explaining that the client is their salary, and if they like to receive money for their work, then they will have to love each client and start treating him with all due care and respect. If the complaint is from the category “I was in a bad mood and decided to recoup at the salon,” then efforts should be directed to ensure that this precedent quickly becomes forgotten. Indeed, in this case, there is nothing more than a nagging, which has an objective explanation, that is, a bad (read "inadequate") mood of a person. However, the task of the administrator, master, head of the beauty salon is to ensure the client's transition from the "state of passion", at least to a calm and relaxed state. Therefore, such cases are interesting for management analysis. After all, who knows, maybe this is the lack of professional ethics of the work of the staff with the client. Then this is again a question for you, as a team leader.
The last of the most common types of complaints from clients of a beauty salon is dissatisfaction with the interior, cleanliness, taste of coffee / tea (cookies / sweets), and if it is customary to serve drinks in the salon for free, then there are complaints about this as well. There are cases of grievances of clients against the beauty salon and the loss of clients due to the "charge" for tea / coffee.
In this case, it is possible and necessary to influence dissatisfaction with the interior, unless you have to paint the walls in a different color and buy new furniture. If the complaint comes about stale flowers or a mess in the waiting area, or bold magazine covers, etc., then - work with the staff. If we put a vase of flowers - both the water and the flowers in it must be fresh - this is the law. If there is dust on the coffee table, a cup of coffee / tea drunk by another client has not been removed, if the magazines are open and scattered (left on the couch, as another client read them) - the administrator or cleaner should be motivated either by an explanation from the manager, or in more radical cases - by de-bonuses, or if this is repeated systematically and the instructions of the head are defiantly ignored - by dismissal, no matter how sad it is. There is no need to talk about fat magazine covers and torn newspapers - they should be written off to waste paper immediately and without further ado.
And always remember that the first rule of a beauty salon is tidiness - both of the premises and of the employees. Further complications appear as the level of the establishment rises. If the salon belongs to the business class, then this puts forward requirements such as uniforms for staff, the latter's responsiveness to customer requests (people who have their own business, as a rule, do not have a lot of free time), etc. If the salon is VIP, then this is a special case, and, in short, the staff should be “quieter than water, below the grass”, however, and not give the client complete freedom.
In conclusion, I would like to say that no matter what strict rules you put forward, no matter how diligently you explain them to the staff, it will still work only when, even in your absence from the workplace, each employee will know and remember that his actions in working hours are under your control. This is a great art, and one should not think that such a level of managerial skill is born. No, this is the result of hard work, above all on yourself.
I wish you success and may the reviews about the work of your beauty salon be mostly positive, but sometimes negative reviews inspire you to new interesting ideas in your work.
PS: As one of the interesting ideas: why don't you put an "unofficial" book for reviews right on the coffee table? .. Customers like this, they will gladly write by hand many wonderful reviews about the work of the masters, about the friendly smile of the administrator, about how what golden hands your beautician has. And this will become your powerful weapon against negativity and bad mood, because for one bad review you will have twenty good ones.
ISMIe