So I went into my local franchised hair salon today. I won’t give the name to avoid embarrassing myself about how much I pay for a hair cut (or don’t pay as the case may be). Instead of taking your name as most franchises of this type do, they asked for my phone number. Since I had been in there once before, my info was available and the response was, “Thanks Josh, have a seat and we will be right with you.”

OK, I thought, they use my phone number to track customer data like what area the customer is coming from, how often they come back and their drop off rate. Boy was I surprised when the stylist came to get me and said, “Josh, would you like to do the #2s on the sides and shorten the top like last time?” Since this was a different stylist then my last hair cut, I quickly deduced that they asked for my phone number for their CRM.

Now, I’m not impressed that they could tell when and what my last hair cut was. But I am impressed that a business like this, which probably makes relatively small margins, invested in and actually uses a CRM. I now know they value their customers enough to invest in customer relationship technology. As long as their employees hold up their end of the bargain - be nice and courteous - they will have my repeat visitation for a long time to come.

EDIT: 06/12/06 2:09 PM.

I guess you could argue that they are using technology to replace a human relationship. The argument would be, “A salon that knows you, remembers your name.” Let me tell you why I don’t see it that way. In the world of commoditized items - which I would argue a low cost hair cut falls into - you are going to have employee turnover. Why? Low pay. If I am going to pay less then $20 for a hair cut, they can’t pay their stylist the wages needed to have them employed there for years and years. I - as the consumer - have made the choice to sacrifice service for price. If I wanted a stylist to pick me out a crowd and know me by name, I would go to a more expensive salon. The fact that this place has realized that and made an effort to employ technology to overcome this problem tells me they understand this and all they have to do to live up to their side of the bargain is be nice, be price sensitive and perform adequately.

Technorati : CRM

This entry was posted by Josh Kenzer on Monday, June 12th, 2006 at 2:04 pm and is filed under CRM. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.