Increase Revenue Through the Client Experience: Tips From Boulevard's Skya Jones

How automation and delegation can help you create a luxury experience for your clients and drive growth at the same time

As a business owner, you’re always looking for ways to increase revenue. Maybe you consider increasing your prices, or you spend time trying to attract more clients. Those are valid avenues for exploration, but I’d urge you to start with something simpler: refining your existing systems to perfect your client experience.

Enhancing the client journey to create a more luxurious experience can yield great benefits for business growth and profitability. Many mistakenly believe the actual service you provide to be the main touchpoint that will make or break the client experience. That’s not necessarily true. 

The quality of the service experience matters, of course, but it’s just one touchpoint of many that we can use our tech stack to help elevate.

Automating and delegating menial tasks like scheduling and reporting can yield huge benefits for your business, improve your client experience, and allow you to grow your business exponentially.  

The client experience 

The client experience is an all-encompassing journey comprising every step of the interaction your client will have with your brand, from booking a service on your website to the send-off after their service. 

What is the client’s experience when they visit your website to book their service? Do they know what their pre-care instructions are? When they check in, are they being welcomed in a way that feels luxurious and high-end? Are they scheduled for the correct service that they wanted? Are they scheduled for the service provider that they wanted to see? 

Each step along this journey needs to deliver the kind of top-shelf experience that your clients will appreciate. This is especially important in the medspa industry, where we have a higher-than-average ticket price, approximately $540 per client per visit. We know clients aren’t shopping for discounts when looking at medspas. Rather, they are looking at factors like value, safety, and efficacy when deciding where to spend their money. This means we have to ensure that clients feel the value throughout their client journey.  

Are your tools increasing your revenue?

But what does any of that have to do with your tech stack? The systems you use can give you and your staff the time you need to give your clients personalized attention — or constantly create friction throughout the entire client journey. When you begin to audit your existing tech stack, ask yourself how well each component is serving your business. Is that tool just providing the basic service, or is it actually driving an increase in revenue? Let’s get into some specifics.    

Scheduling

Scheduling, for example, is easy to get wrong. There are more considerations that go into creating an efficient schedule than simply when a provider is available. You might have three providers who can perform laser services but only one laser. Appointments might take different amounts of time. Rooms and stations must be sanitized and re-prepped between treatments. A client might sign up for multiple services that require scheduling in a specific order. Botox, for example, always goes last. Not many clients know this, but your scheduling software should.

Creating a precision schedule can take hours of your time and require you to continuously monitor it to ensure it doesn’t go off the rails or that you don’t develop unbookable blocks of time because of miscommunication. Quality scheduling software can do all of this for you automatically. Delegating this task to your tech stack will not only save you time but help you create a more luxurious client experience by ensuring clients move smoothly from one stage of their visit to the next.

Your scheduling software is just as important from your client’s point of view — if not more so. Clients don’t want to call to make appointments anymore. They want to book online and do it seamlessly. Being able to offer something that is integrated into your website but that also is intelligent in its scheduling functionality is vital to ensuring healthy profit margins.

Marketing

Creating a memorable experience and wowing the client is not the end of the client journey. We want to be able to continue to nurture the client once they walk out the door. It is always less expensive to retain an existing client than to win a new one, so you want a system that automates as many of your processes as possible and keeps your retention efforts consistent. 

Ideally, using a platform that is integrated into your scheduling is going to give you the best ROI because it will be able to track things like your client’s purchasing habits. Are they about to run out of a product they bought? Are they due for a touch up from the last service they booked? Using your client data to personalize post-visit marketing not only increases its effectiveness, it also makes clients feel special. Using a system that automates that personalization for you is a win for everyone: Clients get the customized attention they desire and you get the results you need to increase revenue. 

Reporting

Reporting is a crucial facet of running a successful medspa business that nevertheless often goes neglected. Having a tech stack with customizable and easy-to-use reporting will give you a new level of business acumen without creating a lot of new headaches. 

Reporting will give you data to support all aspects of your business, from day-to-day operations to tracking staff performance. This is a great place to identify areas of opportunity for an increase in revenue or coaching opportunities with your team. Are sales for a specific product low? Maybe a team training refresh is needed. Identifying your numbers and margins allows for more effective business strategy and goal setting. 

I spent many years pulling many different reports and having to combine them in Excel and creating a lot of time-consuming processes. Realizing I could use systems that automated a lot of this was a lifesaver. What could you do with more hours in your week? A robust reporting system can give that time back to you.

Feedback

When assessing your tech stack and its efficacy, you need feedback from all areas of the team. It’s easy to get tunnel vision or only see things through the lens of your personal experience. Your tech may work great for your service providers but is it working for the front desk? Is it easy to schedule but a nightmare to track inventory? Is there anything they are seeing that can be improved? 

Keep the channel of communication open and allow your team to provide valuable feedback that will help develop and shape your processes and protocols in a more intentional manner. This will create a much more positive and effective working environment for your staff, which in turn will improve your client experience and drive revenue.    

Add-ons & Enhancements 

Something I have always told my staff when working at medspas is that medspas are a retail upsell business. We are here to provide a service, and part of that service is offering our expertise. Clients want our recommendations and educated upsells.  

Upsells

You have likely spent time putting together a thoughtful menu of services and treatments to serve your target market. A great way to increase the average amount a client spends is to offer add-ons or enhancements that will complement those base services. This can be something as simple as a red LED light add-on to micro-needling. Or it can be a recommendation of an additional service that will work well in tandem with the first service, like a dermaplane with a hydrafacial. These should be a quick click for the client to select in the online booking process. 

This is another area where delegating to your tech stack can save you time and help enhance the client journey. You don’t have to rely on just your service providers to make clients aware of upsell opportunities. Clients can be exposed to upsells — and select them — as part of the booking experience. They can explore the idea of different add-ons at their leisure, without feeling like they’re being “sold at.” Whether they select them at the time of booking, or come in armed with questions to ask their provider, they feel in control of the conversation. It’s another enhancement of the client experience that creates a path to increased revenue for your medspa. 

Memberships 

Another revenue driver is to offer memberships to clients directly through your tech platform. This is a great way to drive revenue and create deeper brand loyalty for your clients. Inviting clients to become a part of an exclusive membership can give them a VIP luxury feeling, especially if you offer a free enhancement or treatment every month. It offers them an opportunity to feel selected and validated and a part of something not everyone can afford. 

Memberships also represent regular business for just a little extra work on your part. The client wins because they get access to regular services plus rewards. Your business wins because of guaranteed revenue every month. Having a membership program at all is a good start, but consider how your technology can take it further. Does your membership program work with the rest of your tech stack? Can you send targeted marketing materials to members or customize the offers based on their usage of your program? 

Overall, finding a system that allows you to focus on serving your clients and not spending time on menial tasks like a slow checkout process, cumbersome reporting, or hard-to-use marketing will be key. Identifying areas where you can automate and streamline will allow your team to focus on what matters most: your clients.