If you run a service based business such as a fitness studio, hair salon, you will no doubt wish to spend all your available time earning money from clients and doing what you are there to do in the first place. So how do you free up your time spend on admin?
1) Use an appointment scheduling software
Are you taking appointments by phone or email? Rethink what you are doing. Not only are you creating a headache for front desk staff and wasting time, you are creating a system prone to error. Furthermore you are putting off customers for whom the phone is no longer a preference or perhaps possibility.
So, if you are a service based business like a physiotherapist, yoga studio, hairdresser or nail salon, using booking software like Better Clinics or Better Bookings benefits you in a multitude of ways. For example this opens up the other 16 hours of the day you aren’t manning a phone, creating far more opportunity for clients to book and more time for you to spend with clients.
Proper booking software can also serve to send automatic reminder sand drastically reduce hours spent calling and confirming appointments. By reducing error and creating a single source of truth you will find your daily admin reduces dramatically so you can bill more hours with customers.
2) Automate your social media
Having a strong social media game is almost essential these days for marketing and promotion. the downside is, it takes precious time away from your clients. How much of your time is it taking though? Next time you post, take stock of all the time that goes into logging in, completing the post, sharing, then duplicating for your other platforms.
A better approach is to use a social scheduling tool such as Hootsuite to schedule and automate your weekly, fortnightly or monthly posts. By planning out your social in one session, loading the content, choosing all of your platforms at once (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter etc), you can save masses of time. Through automating and scheduling all platforms at once you can then tick this task off and not have it pop up every other day as a ‘to do’. This of course means more focus on clients.
3) Answering customer inquiries
Responding to your clients on email, through your website and social sucks time out of your day piece by piece when you could be earning money and providing the best service you can.
Do your best to automate these often repetitive questions until you have time after your clients have left for the day to weed out those which need a personal touch.
Start with automated responses on email. As soon as you receive an email set your system to automate a response which acknowledges the email, promises a time frame for response and very importantly, offers alternative solutions. Think about adding FAQ’s and the usual responses, add links to your website with further information on services, direct them to your online booking service etc.
When it does come time to respond if necessary, have a range of simple templates, do not wast your time crafting an original response every-time. There are many apps, functions and tools available to automate much that could be done manually that you should really take the time to investigate all of your options. It adds up.