How to Cater for Both Walk-Ins and Pre-Booked Appointments

Whether your clients have pre-booked appointments or are walk-ins to your salon, their time with you is precious and clients can’t always fit their schedule around the fixed appointment slots that you have. To help increase the amount of clients you can bring into your salon during the average week, we take a look at how to cater to both walk-ins and pre-booked appointments.

Whilst mixing a walk-in model with an appointment diary can be difficult at first, in a world where time is short for many, being able to offer flexible booking times for your clients will mean that you are more likely to guarantee filling up all of your time.

The trick with running a mixed model is that you don’t want to upset waiting clients by seeing a client who has just walked through the door. But there is a way to be able to cater for both walk-ins and pre-booked appointments whilst keeping everyone happy.

1. If you have a member of your team who is quite popular with your clients, it might be a good idea to introduce pre-booked appointments for them and have your younger and less-experienced members of staff dealing with walk-in appointments.
2. Open online booking for specific times, such as when your salon is quieter and promote the available appointments through your social media channels. This will encourage clients in when you are less busy and can be a great way of getting people in last-minute.
3. Consider setting up priority booking for the most popular times of the week. If a client wants a desired slot, then they pay a premium for the privilege. You will know when your most popular times are and which ones fill up quickly so this may be a great way of introducing a priority booking. Even at a small cost of £2 to secure the slot, clients will be more than happy to pay.
4. For your walk-in clients, it might be a good idea to have a ‘wait board’ in your reception area that lets clients know how long the queue is. This is really effective if you have a couple of members of your team solely dedicated on dealing with walk-ins as the wait should be kept to a minimum. Most walk-in clients will require a simple cut or a blow dry, so the chances of having to block out a couple of hours for a cut and colour will be rare.

Do you use a model similar to the one we’ve discussed in this post? If so, we’d love you to leave a comment below and tell us how effective you’ve been finding this for filling up your time in the salon.

For more information on how to utilise appointment booking within Premier Software and for information on how to fill last-minute available appointments, email our representatives at [email protected] or alternatively call the team on 01543 466 580.