The design of your digital tools matters to your business’s bottom line because beautiful tech leads to impactful beauty experiences.

At the franchise level, salons and spas lean heavily on technology to scale their services and brands. From booking software to POS systems, tech tools power all the digital touchpoints that existing or potential clients might use to interface with your business. But not all tools are on the same footing when it comes to what’s most important: design.

User experience design — or UX design, in the tech world — defines the interactive experience every stakeholder has with your digital environment, from clients to employees and managers to vendors. With the right design elements in place, you can offer digital experiences that enhance your clients’ perceptions of your company. 

Well-designed tech tools can help beauty brands increase revenue, boost operational efficiency, and improve customer satisfaction, but good design doesn’t happen by accident. Brands that don’t pay careful attention to the appearance of their tech tools have a lot to lose.

This article explores the key reasons design is essential for growing beauty enterprises.

Business benefits of beautiful tech

Studies have shown that business leaders that adopt proven UX strategies more reliably outperform industry benchmarks in revenue, growth, and conversion, among other measures. As much as beautifully designed digital interactions and tech tools can increase a company’s chances of success, poor UX design can be incredibly costly and hold companies back. 

• Revenue growth: Every $1 spent on UX design correlates to $100 in revenue.

• Increased conversion: Beautiful UX raises conversion rates by 200-400%.

• Competitive pricing: 80% of customers would pay more for better experiences.

• Improved service: Poor customer service leads to $62 billion in losses annually.

• Customer retention: 67% of customers blame churn on disappointing experiences. 

• Performance: Slow-loading websites lead to $2 billion+ in sales losses per year.

Beautiful tech in the beauty industry

In the beauty industry, in particular, the design of your tech tools determines the limits of the experience you can offer. Consumers expect powerful digital interactions that are pleasant and easy to use, and your staff deserves the same high-tech support behind the scenes.

Reflect your brand

When beauty franchises use tech tools to power customer experiences, it’s important for those tools to be a further reflection of the brand. In the same way that you invest in your physical salon or spa space as a manifestation of your company, the digital interactions you offer also influence the customer experience. The client-facing tech you use to provide customers with convenient self-service bookings, easy payment processing, and even communications with your salon should be a consistent reflection of your brand.

On the other hand, using lackluster client-facing technology can tarnish your reputation. Today’s consumers expect modern brands to build seamless digital experiences, even if those experiences play a supporting role to in-person appointments. If the tech you use to power digital interactions is clunky, buggy, or just plain unattractive, consumers will learn to associate your brand with frustration and distastefulness.

Streamline operations

It’s true that the tech tools you use to manage your back-of-house operations need to be functional, but even the most advanced functionality is useless without an intuitive interface. Beautiful and user-friendly tech streamlines operations by supporting a more efficient and productive work environment. 

When salon management platform features like automated scheduling, personalized client profiles, and point of sale systems are beautifully designed, it doesn’t just provide your customers with a better experience. It also eliminates manual busy-work so your staff can get back to the tasks that really matter.

Empower your staff

Without a beautiful tech experience for your back-of-house staff, average employee training time goes through the roof. In addition to job-specific training, wonky tech solutions require you to educate new hires about each individual piece of software. That leads to an unsatisfying experience for employees and unnecessary friction in the workplace. The potential for human error also increases, and when it comes to operations, those errors can introduce costly obstacles to business success.

Managing a beauty franchise or multi-location business is hard enough as it is. Badly designed and ineffective tech solutions magnify those challenges and keep business success at a greater distance by introducing higher costs and even more obstacles. On the other hand, by improving customer experiences at every level and supporting and empowering employees, beautiful technology puts business success within reach for beauty franchises.