Enterprise businesses in the self-care industry can build stronger client relationships through analytics and automation

Enterprise businesses in the self-care space have to pull off a difficult balancing act. Every one of their storefronts needs to feel just as warm, inviting, and personal as a mom-and-pop location. Behind the scenes, they need to run things efficiently enough to employ thousands of people and maintain healthy profit margins year over year. Like any self-care business, building strong relationships with clients is key to thriving — even at scale. For large companies with numerous clients to manage, the most effective way to do so is through technology.

Once your business reaches a certain size, you need to organize and automate as much as possible. That means detailed client databases, scalable reporting tools, and streamlined scheduling systems. You’ll also want powerful self-care management software to tie all of these features together. With a solid technology strategy, you can find out exactly why your clients love your business and keep them coming back for more.

How can technology help enterprise self-care businesses?

Self-care businesses at the enterprise level have two big challenges:

• Provide personalized client experiences

• Maintain brand consistency across locations

These two goals are often at odds. You want every location to feel like an integral part of a neighborhood, not a generic corporate outpost. At the same time, the major appeal of chains and franchises is that they offer a predictable and familiar experience at every storefront.

There’s no perfect midpoint between these two ideas, but technology can help you strike the right balance for your business. The best tech tools for self-care businesses enable you to manage the entire client experience while also providing the data and reporting you need to optimize your business on the fly. With the right information, you can:

Build stronger relationships

Client loyalty is one of the most important metrics for any self-care business. The more your clients enjoy your services and trust your staff, the more often they’ll come back. They may also spend more money per visit, write positive reviews online, and spread the word among friends and family. The right software solution can help you keep track of your clients’ names, addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses, which helps you keep in touch with them effectively. As you learn about their preferences over time, you can track that information and build personalized service plans and targeted marketing campaigns.

Make data-driven decisions

When you manage multiple locations, you have to make business decisions at scale. That means you need to measure relevant metrics for both individual locations and your enterprise as a whole. Good software can generate detailed reports that tell you about:

• Your revenue and expenses

• Seasonal sales spikes and dips

• How many clients each location gets

• What the average client spends

• Whether clients return after their first appointment

Knowing this information can help you make smarter decisions about everything from staffing to retail inventory. This data can also be useful for making small tweaks to individual locations — stocking high-end retail products at locations that tend to sell more products, for example, or adding extra staff at locations with higher-than-average client bookings. 

Map out client journeys

In the business world, a client journey is a well-defined process with five steps:

• Awareness: “I know that your business exists.”

• Consideration: “I am learning about your business through reviews, social media, and word of mouth.”

• Purchase: “I’ve decided to book a session at your business.”

• Retention: “I had a good experience the first time, so I’m scheduling another appointment.”

• Advocacy: “I’ll tell my friends and family to patronize your business, too.”

The nurture stage is everything that happens between purchase and advocacy. You’ve earned a client’s business; now you want them to come back again and spread the word. The right client experience software can give you all sorts of useful metrics about the client journey, including how many clients become repeat visitors and how many friends and family members wind up booking appointments. With hard data on hand, you can see where your business excels in the client journey and where it could be more effective.

Technology tools for enterprise self-care businesses

Advanced CRM platforms

For large enterprises, a good customer relationship management (CRM) system is one of the most important tools at your disposal. While the staff at a small, local business might simply know everyone who walks in the door, that’s not possible when you’re dealing with hundreds or thousands of different clients. Instead, look for software that keeps track of each client’s:

• Clerical information (name, address, phone number, etc.)

• Purchase history (appointments and retail)

• Membership and loyalty program status

• Communications preferences

This information is useful for dealing with individual clients, but it’s also great to have in aggregate. You can learn which products and services your clients buy the most, how effective your membership programs have been, and whether your marketing techniques are working.

AI-powered analytics

Enterprise-level businesses serve tons of clients. That means they have tons of data to sift through. Detailed financial reports can put this data at your fingertips, but analyzing it is difficult, tedious, and time-consuming work — at least for humans. Some modern self-care software suites streamline the process with artificial intelligence (AI). AI tools can pick out patterns much more quickly and consistently than humans can, which means your staff can spend less time sorting through raw data and more time finding valuable insights. You can discover which of your storefronts have the highest rates of client retention, spending, and conversions among friends and family, then apply those lessons to other locations.

Automated marketing workflows

Writing custom emails and texts from scratch for every client isn’t practical for even small self-care businesses; it’s almost impossible at the enterprise level. With the right platform, though, you can automate most of your client communications. Self-care business management software can send your clients appointment confirmations, reminders, and rebooking instructions. It can also follow up after each session with satisfaction surveys. A good platform can address each client by name and send them either emails or text messages, depending on their preferences. Good communication can increase client retention and cut down on no-shows, both of which are important when you’re operating at scale.

Omnichannel touchpoints

The fewer programs you have to use to manage your enterprise business, the better off you’ll be. Look for omnichannel platforms that combine the various features your self-care enterprise needs: client profiles, membership information, report generation, marketing tools, support databases, point of sale systems, and payment processing information, for starters. Investing in one platform for all of these features is often much cheaper than investing in a bunch of different ones, and you’ll appreciate having a single customer service team to work with. You’ll also have all of your information in a single system, which makes it easier to see how all the different parts of your business fit together.

While enterprise businesses face different challenges than smaller self-care operations, the fundamentals are still the same. Create a welcoming space, staff it with capable people, and build a sense of loyalty in your clients. Having the right technological tools helps you make smarter business decisions, and those decisions can keep your clients happy for a long time to come.