Discover how virtual consultations work and how you can use them to serve more customers and deliver a better overall experience.
Yes — virtual consultations help salons deliver personalised advice remotely, saving time for both staff and clients. They make it easier to pre-qualify clients, reduce misunderstandings, and increase booking confidence before appointments.
The introduction of technology into the salon setting can enable you to serve more customers and deliver a better customer experience. Virtual consultations gained in popularity during the pandemic when customers physically couldn’t visit the salon but wanted to know how to care for their hair in the meantime.
Today, we can use virtual consultations to help deliver a premium experience to more customers. In this guide, we’re exploring how virtual consultations work and how you can use them to modernise your offering.
Virtual consultations are video consultations with customers. This could be live through a video call, or it could be a recorded service where customers submit a short video to help stylists to offer recommendations.
Offering this service in your salon can help you to operate more like an online company, and this can help to boost revenue. Video consultations allow you to offer a service at the top of the funnel, which is marketing-speak for new leads.
These are the individuals who are thinking about choosing your salon, but need a little more convincing. This service can help to increase conversion rates on your digital marketing, which simply means that you’ll get more bookings and more revenue.
There are a few different ways you can make virtual consultations work for your salon. The first would be to offer a live call service, where prospective customers can get in touch with your salon staff and have a live video consultation.
The second option would be a recorded service. In this instance, the customer would record a video of their hair from different angles and then add any questions they might have about what they want to do.
The first option will require your staff to be available at specific times for consultations, in addition to your customers being available at the same time. The second option allows more flexibility, as customers can upload their videos to your website and then you can respond when you have time.
These consultations are also excellent for training junior staff, as they can observe the senior stylists reviewing the videos and offering feedback. In a traditional setting, they might only see 8 consultations per day, but with video consultations, they have the potential to see 20+ consults in a single training session. The videos can also be stored for staff training.
Many people search for a new salon based on trust and expertise. They might start with recommendations from friends, family and social media acquaintances. Next, they will look for evidence of expertise. Those with specific hair concerns such as curly hair, Afro hair or specific colour requirements will be even more selective in their search.
A video consultation allows them to try your expertise before they buy. They might have specific concerns they would like to know how you would address. Or they could even just be looking for inspiration and ideas.
Once a customer has signed up for a virtual consultation, you have access to their email address and phone number. This is an ideal opportunity to follow up with the right marketing message at the right time.
It can also help to speed up appointment times, as your stylists will know exactly what service they are offering when the customer arrives for their appointment. This could enable you to fit more appointments into the day, which can boost your profitability.
When you know what service your clients are looking for, you can stack these services so you can potentially see multiple clients at once. For example, if someone is looking for a wash and style, you can fit this in alongside a colour treatment. It allows for far more efficient use of your stylist’s time.
The rise of AI means that customers are walking into salons with AI-generated images of themselves sporting different hairstyles. They have sky-high expectations of what can be achieved, and this can be difficult for stylists to manage.
The virtual consultation makes it possible to manage their expectations so they will be more satisfied with the outcome. If a customer refuses to see why something won’t work for their hair, you can turn down the service and let them go elsewhere.
They are destined to be unhappy with the results if they have unrealistic expectations, so if they won’t see your reasoning, you can spare yourself the stress of a potentially bad review. It’s far better to manage expectations than to over-promise and under-deliver.
A virtual consultation doesn’t have to be a pre-purchase service. You could also offer this as a post-purchase service as a way to improve aftercare. Customers will appreciate being able to ask questions about styling their hair at home or protecting their hair from heat or washing. This can help them to extend time between treatments without impacting their hair health.
While this might not seem like a good thing for you, it’s a good thing for customer retention. Customers appreciate when their needs are placed above profits. They can see through the attempts to boost the value of their visit and they know when a salon places profits above their needs.
There are some limitations of the virtual consultation. The most obvious is that it isn’t always easy to get a good view of a client’s hair. They might upload poor-quality video which makes it nearly impossible to offer good advice.
To overcome this, you need to have clear guidelines on how to upload video. Include examples of what it should look like so that clients can see how their video measures up.
Another limitation can be seen in colour consultations. Differences in lighting can make it hard to see the client’s natural hair colour, which could lead to incorrect advice. Be sure to include a disclaimer that the video consultation is limited in its scope. It’s still important for the customer to have an in-person consultation before they commit to a service.
Virtual consultations are transforming how salons connect with clients, making it easier to provide personalised services from anywhere. Ready to streamline your bookings and offer virtual consultations? Try our salon software demo to see the difference for yourself.
