User Friendliness
We start the key features list with user-friendliness because we just cannot stress enough how important it is. When you are spending your hard-earned money on cloud-based spa software, you better make sure that it will be easy to grasp and extremely user-friendly for all stakeholders i.e. guests, your team and you. A spa software that may not be very high on features but comes with an easy learning curve is a far better choice in comparison to a product with high-end features, which requires a rather complicated set of steps to use. As a spa owner, neither do you have the time nor the resources to understand the complexity of each and every process. Further, for the benefit of your clients, it is important that they should find processes such as booking an appointment, updating personal information, settling invoices, and giving feedback to be simple, convenient and fast. Ideally, if your guest wishes to connect with you over a call, the software should allow them to do so in 2-3 steps.
In other words, the cloud-based spa software should be so easy to use that it becomes the second nature of your staff and your clients to rely upon it.
Actionable Insights
The cloud-based spa software that you choose should be capable of becoming the nerve centre of your business. Essentially, it should allow you to get both a micro and macro views of your enterprise. Consider it to be like your personal executive assistant, who crunches the numbers and collects information from all sources to present for decision-making. Ideally, it should give you a unified dashboard, which not only pulls data from various modules such as bookings and appointments, invoicing and payments, sales, marketing, employee management, inventory management, and customer management and populates it into reports that are easy to comprehend and show the real state of affairs such that you can take data-driven decisions.
Whether you run a single location brand or a multi-location brand, the software should be able to generate on-demand location-specific and comprehensive overall report. We particularly love Zenoti’s reporting module which comes with over 100 types of pre-set reporting formats to choose from, allows you to create customized formats, presents you with a dashboard with all the relevant information in one place, and is intuitive enough to analyze the data to provide marketing suggestions.
Data Security
Amongst the primary advantages of a cloud-based system, over a legacy system is its enhanced data security feature. Your cloud-based spa software is the all-in-one backbone of your business and stores crucial personal and financial information about your business, your guests and your staff. Therefore, the system must be highly reliable and equipped to keep your data safe from theft and loss. As the data in a cloud-based spa software is stored, and updated on a remote server over the internet it is extremely important for you to evaluate the security features of the product. Do ensure that your selected spa cloud-based spa software complies with the latest security standards and has robust system-designed checks and balances such as role-based data access authorization and geo-fencing to keep the data absolutely secure.
Scalability
The product you choose should be capable of growing with your business. The “personal executive assistant” empowered by artificial intelligence and machine learning should assist you in growing your business from a single-store brand to a multi-store brand. Thus, it should support high volumes of data, and data migration and be modular in architecture such that based on your need you can start utilizing other advanced features without having to even consider switching to a new cloud-based spa software.
Budget Control
An important, and perhaps a great tool to have in your cloud-based spa software is the revenue control feature. By analyzing past purchase and sales data, the systems should intuitively help you set budget controls for inventory and other expenses. While this may seem to be too trivial a feature, believe us in the long run it will help you. In a world, where payments have transformed into “tap and go” it is very easy to overspend. This is where the software comes in handy and ensures that you do not go overboard.
You may have noticed that in this blog we have not listed other features such as appointment booking and scheduling, invoicing and POS, inventory management etc. because these mainstream features would be existing in almost all cloud-based spa software. Therefore, it is important to also focus on the lesser-known must-have features as investing in a cloud-based spa software should never be based on short-term business goals, but always be based on long-term goals.
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