How would I communicate with a team member whose communication wasn’t up to scratch with a client?

A client came into the salon on Friday morning, 9am, first appointment of the day, and she had never been to my salon before. She booked in for an hour long lash refill, but when she booked online, she didn’t see the part where we don’t refill work done by other salons.

She arrived and she already had lashes on and my staff told her that we couldn’t do her refills for her that day. She was upset and she left.

But this client was from Darwin, so hundreds and hundreds of kilometres away from where we are. And she was here in town and Googled lashes. We come up first in the Google search, she’s booked in on our online booking at 10pm the night before because I think we’d had a last minute cancellation, so there was a gap there. She booked in and she’s excited to come in and get her lashes done. And then she’s just told by us “sorry, we don’t refill outside work”.

Now, I’m sure when you think about it that way. It’s very easy to empathise with the client.

What actually happened was, she stormed out and then she came back in to tell the girls how unhappy she was that she couldn’t get her lashes done. And my salon manager actually did have a look at her lashes to see if they were able to be refilled. And they weren’t; they were all stuck together. There was no way we could refill them in an hour and have that client walk out the door and for us to be proud to put our name on that work because they weren’t very good lashes to start with.

But I heard about the situation and the girls were like, “Oh, that woman was so rude!” And I am not about clients being rude to my staff, i’m always going to support my team wherever I can. But I spent a fair bit of time speaking about this on the following Monday in our weekly team meeting and I just said “look, you’ve got to come from a place of love. You’ve got to try and think about this client. Maybe they’re in town for a funeral. Maybe something happened and she missed her last appointment and she just really wanted her lashes done and maybe she had a horrible morning. You just don’t know what’s going on in people’s lives”.

And I think if you always show compassion and empathy, you can’t go wrong. We could have delivered the message a little bit softer and made an effort to assess them before turning her away. We could perhaps look at the schedule for the rest of the day and see if we can move a few things around. Like even if you can’t do that like at least trying is making them feel like you care. You’re doing everything you can to try and get that client in.

I really made my team understand that you just have to put yourself in that person’s shoes and think about the way you would react. She may have felt embarrassed because she didn’t see it on our website. There could have been other people sitting around listening to the conversation and honestly I would probably get upset too. I actually ended up getting my receptionist to send her a message and apologise again that we couldn’t get her in and that maybe next time you’re in town you can come in and we can look after her. Just letting her know that we were thinking of her and we felt bad that we couldn’t get her in and we couldn’t accommodate her that day. 

She didn’t respond, which is fine, but at least she didn’t leave town with a sour taste in her mouth about about my salon. And when I went through the situation at the team meeting and explained all of this in length, they all really understood as well. I always let my team know that if I’m ever bringing up something that went wrong or a mistake that was made, I’m never doing it just because I’m a cranky bitch boss and I’m unhappy with the way they performed. I am doing it because I want them to be the best they can be. I want them to be aware of how they could have handled the situation better. I want to teach them, I want them to learn and be and feel empowered about the work and the way they communicate with clients and their team members at the salon. So I really thoroughly let them know that if I’m ever criticising anything, it’s not a personal attack at all. I am just doing it to make them better than they were yesterday, than they were six weeks ago. You can always be growing and improving on your skills and excellent communication skills are a must in the service industry.

Lauren x