Is Your Productivity Too Low?

As one of the six growth indicators, productivity measures how busy service providers are during your scheduled business hours. Many salons and spas struggle with productivity, but most don’t know how to improve this important metric. Ideally, a business should be shooting for 75-80% productivity, but it’s not as simple as increasing a percentage on a report. Productivity is affected by many factors, including other growth indicators, so it’s important to understand the root of your productivity rate.

Increasing Productivity

Increasing productivity is achieved by giving some TLC to the other growth indicators. Think frequency of visit (FOV), repeat client retention, and new client retention. If you have Millennium or Meevo software, your front desk should be monitoring each service provider, department and overall business’s productivity using the Real-Time Monitoring Station (RTMS) or Smart Center.

Increase your productivity with actionable items such as:

1. Train your employees on growth and create a culture around pre-booking.
2. Set goals on productivity in Millennium or Meevo 2 and have service providers and front desk team members monitor them using the RTMS or Smart Center.
3. Implement up-sells and cross-sells and enable the automated features in Millennium.
4. Use industry-proven scripts to maximize conversations between your team and clients for pre-booking, up-sells, and cross-sells.

When Your Productivity Rate is Too High

While there are several ways to increase your productivity, what if a service provider’s productivity is too high? It’s time to raise your prices! If a service provider’s productivity is too high, they are maxed out and cannot re-book existing clients or book new ones. This usually happens above 85% productivity. As a result, his or her client retention, frequency of visit, and productivity will start declining.

“Promoting” service providers by raising prices makes the clients happy for their trusted provider. If clients are upset about the increased pricing, suggest they try a service provider with a lower productivity percentage and pricing tier.