How can your Salon be more secure?

Most of us have heard about the recent incidents, where companies have been affected by cyber hacking and ransomware. It was hard to miss when big organisations such as the NHS were affected by these actions. But what exactly is ransomware? And how can I protect my own business against similar attacks?

According to online sources, ransomware is a type of malicious software, designed to block access to a computer system until a sum of money ‘ransom’ is paid. Although, ransomware is usually aimed at individuals, in recent weeks more and more businesses have been targeted as well. It is commonly delivered through phishing emails and attachments. 

Since then we had many enquiries from customers as well as individuals asking for advice on how to keep their salon secure. One of the questions that came up multiple times was certainly the way that Salon Tracker secures data. Not only do we want to talk about the technical site behind our software, we also want to give you a few tips on how you can keep your PC and your client data secure as well. Therefore, this post should give you a better idea on Salon Tracker’s security and ways in which you can protect yourself from happening to your PC as well.

Salon Tracker and Client Data

Our software is a local based programme, meaning it is installed on your computer, rather than a cloud-based solution. Usually you do not require the internet to run the software, unless you have linked online booking to our software or are an owner of multiple salons.

For those on the Enterprise package that use our online features or the HQ function, I can guarantee you that your database is completely safe. We store all data in our highly secure cloud system. We do not share data with anyone else!

Our smart Back-up tool allows you to take actions of your salon security yourself. We recommend that you regularly save your business data at the end of the day to either an external hard-drive or USB drive. You can make duplicates of those or store them in a secure place. Always back up important information as soon as you can. Additionally we advise all customer to safe all software data on a secure cloud storage of their choice.

Be careful with your own details

How quick do we sign up to a newsletter or something that offers us something free. Most of us would not even think twice before typing in our names and email addresses. Therefore, be careful who you give your details too and make sure companies do not pass them onto other companies.


It is also important to keep client data safe at all times and therefore do not share data with anyone apart from the salon team members. Delete them correctly, if a client is asking for it, so that they can’t be restored either.

Keep your PC safe and updated

It is always a good idea to have everything password protected. Choose a strong and secure password and do not keep the same for the next 10 years. Avoid using family or pet names or Date of Births, as others can easily guess these.

Make sure you update your Windows software to the latest version and run regular smaller updates when they are available. Ransomware can affect your whole computer and not just your salon software. If your computer currently does not run on Windows 10, you should have a look into this sooner rather than later, especially if your computer is still running on Windows XP, which is not secure and supported by Microsoft anymore.

Due to that reason, Salon Tracker cannot support software that runs on a XP operating system. It is also important that you install a Virus protection software. Always be careful when installing things from the internet. Only install programmes that you know and can trust. If you get strange Emails, delete them and do not open any attachments. 

Use Salon Software

With Salon Tracker, we have implemented several security features in order for you to ensure that you have the best protection against ransomware.

If you want to prevent staff members from browsing the internet or access personal emails, we have a Secure PC feature build in. Once the feature is turned on, staff can’t navigate anywhere else on your PC other than Salon Tracker itself.

You can also create separate logins for staff members and control permission levels on the system. Do not share your own login details unless you completely trust them. Remember, you can always change your password on our system. If by any chance others got aware of your logins and been using your account, we advise that you get this changed as soon as possible.



If you are still unsure how you can protect your salon and wanting more advice on this topic, then please don’t hesitate to get in contact with us. One of our friendly team members will be happy to assist with any questions regarding our software and online security.

Get in touch now at info@salontracker.co.uk or ring our office on 0113 350 8230.


Salon Tracker x

Feature of the Month: Advanced Business Reports

One of the main gripes from salon owners when we were first conducting our research for software features was that they were struggling for the spare time to track business KPI’s and sales revenue.

This is why when we were designing Salon Tracker, we carefully implemented features in order to make salon owners lives easier and to also save you and your employees’ time.

So this month we’ve chosen ‘Advanced Reports’ as our feature of the Month for May. Especially as you’re all about to enter the peak season for salons in the lead up to proms, weddings, graduations and vacations, you’re going to need a bit of a helping hand in tracking your salon activity!

Salon Tracker’s advanced business reports enable you to find out clear and concise information on all aspects of your business quickly and easily. For those of you with multiple sites, this is a MEGA benefit, as it allows you to access the info from one location for all sites. Which this is great in allowing you to make decisions whilst absent from the salon and all those reports can also be accessed via our Site View app on your mobile phone or tablet. So if you’re on your day off, but still have a niggle about wanting to know your daily takings at the salon, you can have a look at the click of a button no matter where you are!

So, for those of you that have our Professional package or above you will already be familiar with some of the reports, but maybe you don’t utilise them like you could be doing? If you haven’t got our software, then here’s an overview of some of the reports that our system offers and how they can help you significantly.

Day End

Want information on your total daily takings, and in what tender? Maybe you’d also benefit from a tally of total bookings, new customers, new bookings and then information of the first time your system was logged in to and when it was shut down? We have implemented all of this data in to one simple ‘day end’ report for you, giving you a bit of a ‘daily overview’ if you like for your salon. And the bonus is this can also be printed off in receipt format so it is nice and compact for you to carry around.

Cashing Up

A really simple report, which is excellent for when you don’t have time to do the cashing up so you have a salon manager that will do this for you. It only highlights the simple information of how much you have taken in cash and card that day, but it ensures that any discounts, profits and subtotal’s are left out to ensure that this information is still protected from employees. If you require this detailed info, we have then created another separate report for business owners called ‘Sales Summary.’

Sales Summary

As mentioned above, this is your cashing up report with extensive detail, preferably the one you would probably hide from employees and make view-able to yourself only. This being because it highlights discounts given and any profits made on bookings and retail products. If you are a salon of multi-services: i.e. you offer tanning, hair and beauty treatments, this report is broken up by sector. Therefore this allows you to identify your total takings for each separate service/product type so you can monitor performance of one sector vs the other.

Sales by Hour

A relatively new report that we have introduced and an extremely successful one. Especially for marketing purposes. Our sales by hour report highlights your peak and quieter times of the day, in which this is a brilliant tool to use for planning your marketing strategy and implementing campaigns based on that. For example, if there is a particular time of the day that seems to be consecutively quiet day by day, you may choose to create a ‘happy hour’ offer that runs at the same time daily, offering clients particular treatments at a discounted rate. You could combine this with our SMS marketing suite and notify all of your clients of the offer by text message. You can then run the same report a couple of weeks after running the ‘happy hour’ event and see whether your sales have increased for that usually quiet period, to measure your ROI from the campaign.

Commissions by Staff

Keep an instant track of staff KPI’s and monitor upselling, as you can print off a report identifying the commissions generated on all booking services and retail sales per individual therapist. You can then identify performance for whom is generating the most commission and at what value dependent on the RRP of the products that they are selling! This is a great report for rewarding and incentivising staff, to ensure that they are constantly upselling but then also to make sure they are gaining relevant recognition for when they are making sales and performing above target.

So if you are currently a customer of ours, or if you are new and just enquiring into potential software, we hope that an insight in to our reports feature has helped you to understand how simple it is to track salon activity using our management system.

If you want some further info on how we can help you to improve your KPI’s or if you just want a bit of targeted marketing advice, get in touch! A member of our sales and marketing team would love to help! For any of you that are new to viewing our software, you can also ‘try before you buy’. Simply head to http://www.salontracker.co.uk/FreeTrial.aspx to enquire for your free demo and trial, and a member of our team will be in touch with you soon!

Salon Tracker x

How Salons can Prepare for the upcoming Prom Season

As many are finishing exams and summer is slowly approaching, it is also that time of the year that many pupils look forward too: It’s Prom night! 

Sparkly dresses, golden skin and impressive hair up-do’s are all part of the night. For many pupils this is one of the most special times in their school life. Hair and beauty salons are especially busy during this time for a good reason, as they contribute significantly to the outcome of the night. As we move towards summer, there are plenty of opportunities for salons to increase their revenue. Anything from wedding season to May Bank Holidays can be used as a potential marketing opportunity to get new clients through the door and retain current ones. There is more to a prom night than just finding the right dress. A great dress has to be perfected with matching nails and hair. Prom season can be just as profitable as wedding season if you play your cards right and treat your guests like it’s the special day they want it to be.

Therefore, we are breaking down the best strategies this prom season and have decided to focus on SMS, Email and Social Media advertising:

SMS Messages

Pretty much everyone these days owns a mobile phone. Therefore, SMS marketing is still a very popular technique in order to get the word on any offers and special events out there. A simple SMS campaign can be a fast and easy way that ensures the promotional message reaches clients instantly. If you use Salon Software, even better. Many systems have an integrated marketing feature that makes it much easier to send out your campaigns. All you have to press is send and the system will do the rest for you. It’s that simple.

In case you are struggling with composing text messages, we have compiled three examples for you:


<< Attention Prom Goers! Treat yourself and a friend this month @ SALON NAME to a luxury manicure. Two for the price of one! Call the salon or book online <link> >>


<< Hi ‘CLIENT NAME’, Free Blow Dry when you book your Prom Styling @ SALON NAME. Limited spaces available. Book now on 0123456789 or on our website <link> >>


<< Hi ‘CLIENT NAME’ Looking for glam make up for your prom night? Book this week and receive a complimentary treat bag. BOOK NOW @SALON NAME!


Email

If you rather work with images then email is the way to go. Whoever says email marketing is a dead art form is mistaken. Pretty much everyone these days have access to an email account. Smart phones and mobile data make is possible to receive emails on the go, wherever you are. It is therefore a given to use this opportunity to reach out to mums and their daughters. A visually pleasing email campaign to capture the client’s attention can be just as effective as a SMS message. If you sign up with an external provider such as Mail Chimp you can upload prom inspired images and include any special offers. If you have pictures from previous years then it would be a good idea to include them as well in your template. This way clients can see what you offer and how the end product will look like.

Social Media

Facebook & Co. are great places to spice up your marketing game and get creative. Why not run special prom competitions. This can be something simply such as a selfie competition. Anything from best dress or most dramatic hairstyle can enter the competition. As prizes, you can have a giveaway of products and services. 

Even if you don’t think the idea of a competition is the right way for your salon, there are many more options such as a Look Book of popular hairstyles to get your customers involved and inspired to make an appointment. Include an obvious call to action within any promotion. For competition this can be must be redeemed within 3 months in order for them to return and claim their price. Alternatively, a simple book now will do the trick. Always include your phone number or website if you offer online booking.
REMIND your customers to take pictures in their dresses all dolled up. You can then collect pictures and use them in your portfolio or in ads for next year’s prom season.



We hope you found these ideas helpful! If you have any questions or would like more advice on successful prom strategies then please get in touch with the Salon Tracker team. We are happy to help you with any marketing queries. Happy Prom Season!


Salon Tracker x

How to Handle Customer Negativity and Bad Reviews

Negative feedback can be demotivating and emotionally draining, especially to the owner of a business. You are the founder of the company and sometimes it is easy to take those adverse comments as a personal attack.

The thing is, every business is bound to experience the odd poor review from time to time and this is just due to your clients' personal preferences. So this is the first rule when it comes to handling negativity, to not take things personally when it comes to poor feedback. Why? Because it can affect the way in which you deal with that negative review, especially if you are angry about the feedback that you have received. In the meanwhile, this can then have a bad impact on your business if you are to respond to a complaint in disagreement on a customer facing portal – like social media for example.

However that’s not to say don’t respond at all. Ignoring negative feedback again is one of the worst things you can do. Even if you’re ignoring it, the customer isn’t and neither are the other hundreds of individuals viewing your testimonial pages. So how do you go about rectifying the negativity and re-gaining that clients custom?

The first thing to remember is, everyone makes mistakes sometimes, no one is perfect and quite frankly it’s those little accidents that you learn from to prevent similar situations from happening again in the future. Negative reviews don’t mean that your business is bad. Sometimes it can just be one person’s opinion ‘vs’ another. Not every business is going to be perfect for everyone. It’s like anything, if everyone had the same taste in things then there would be no room for competition or differentiation. The same way if nobody complained, there would never be any room for improvement. So another point is that you shouldn’t let negative feedback deflate you. Instead, take it on the chin, act up on it and use the feedback in a positive way to create solutions so that it won’t happen again. Obviously strive to be the best always, but it’s a guarantee there will still be the odd couple of individuals who have a slightly different idea and therefore they find something to criticise. As we’ve said, this is natural so don’t beat yourself up about it.

Saying that, how should you respond to negativity? As we have mentioned above, the worst thing you can do is disagree with the complaint, even if you do disagree! By responding with an objecting opinion, this can just cause more conflict. As a result, if your review portal is public, this could end up in a long thread of argumentative comments which can then be harmful to your business profile - and you are also highly likely to then lose that client for good. Instead, take the feedback on board, apologise to the customer and offer them something in return for the negative experience. This way, you are keeping the customer happy and hopefully retaining their custom, whilst demonstrating to on-looking clients that you handle negativity well and strive to make improvements in the future. And we know nobody likes a negative review on their website or social media network, however 9 times out of 10 there is at least 1 or 2 poor reviews on every business website you visit, especially if they have reviews within the 1000’s. As we have mentioned, you can’t please absolutely everybody, as there will be always something that doesn’t quite fit someone’s taste. Therefore sometimes a couple of poor reviews actually make your company seem sincere and genuine, as long as you are acknowledging those reviews with an apologetic response.

However, on a very rare occasion, you could receive a review that is threatening, that could be personal to individual staff members and may be verbally abusive. These are the types of feedback in which are an exception to what we have mentioned above. You may need to launch investigations in to those remarks, as to what caused the client to react so aggressively. However, sometimes some of these reviews may be completely out of order, and therefore if you are linked up with a trustworthy review site, you can often appeal to have these removed. In these cases, deleting the review is sometimes the required option.

So how is it you then build back up from those poor reviews and overcome them? (With the exception of the uncommon threatening reviews that we have mentioned above, these should be dealt with in a separate manner)

Once you have responded directly to the customer, showing empathy and apologising, this then often makes the customer re-think their review. For example, if you resolve the problem by offering a small gift or discount on their next purchase or service, this may then prompt the initial poor reviewer to actually come back with a second response accepting your apology. New clients that are browsing your portals want to see positivity, and see any mistakes being resolved quickly, in which your apologetic responses to poor reviews reassure those new clients. Every business receives a complaint over time, sometimes generated from something as simple as the product/service wasn’t quite right for that particular customer. This is what makes a credible business! As your business expands, you are likely to have to deal with further poor feedback in the future. However, as long as you are seen to be empathising with complaining clients, this is okay. It’s like the old saying, if someone has a good experience somewhere, they’ll mention to friends. If someone has a bad experience somewhere, they’ll mention to friends who will then pass this on to other people – like Chinese Whispers. That’s why it’s so important that you use our tips to ensure that you acknowledge criticism and put faith in your clients that you will build solutions to prevent similar events from happening again in the future.

Salon Tracker x

How Salon Tracker can help Tanning Salons

Remember, last time we spoke about tanning security at the salon and how to avoid being fined? Don’t worry if you have missed it. I will include a link at the end of this blog if you want to catch up on it. While the topic of security is obviously a very important one, it is however as important to get the basics right at the salon from the beginning. Meaning, if you only concentrate on one aspect of the salon but neglect things such as management and customer care, it can be just as damaging as bad security. Here at Salon Tracker, we have developed a system that helps you with the day-to-day tasks of running a tanning salon. From managing your bookings to cashing up at the end of the day, our smart features are designed to make every salon owner’s life easier. 

You are probably asking yourself how the system can help you and your salon. Let me introduce you to a few features that are especially handy for tanning salons:

Managing bookings, walk-in’s and more

When your salon is busy our software helps to keep track of customers, manages walk ins and waiting lists. With our smart sunbed view you are always in control of the beds. You can see which ones are occupied and which ones are free, or if they’re all occupied you will see which one will be available the earliest. As the software is using a countdown mode for the beds, this is easily trackable.

Our bed view lets you put customers directly on sunbeds and you can easily track their minutes from there. We have built a waiting list and walk-in option into the system, meaning you can manage customers according to their needs and wishes. Giving clients an accurate queuing duration if they are in a waiting list is beneficial as it lets manage busy periods better. You can track minutes used per customer, which is stored on their record card or via the report feature. 

Timer Integration 

With our timer integration, you can operate your sunbeds directly from your reception area and see a countdown of those minutes on a live calendar. Furthermore, this also ensures business security, as sunbeds are operated solely from the system, meaning staff members cannot override the system or delete existing minutes. 

Security and Tanning Rules

As you know we’re all about security but we wanted to reflect on this again. Salon Tracker improves security to the highest level. No matter if you want to set booking rules that can’t be override, want to oversee what staff members can and can’t do on the system or want to avoid customers tanning under someone else’s name. It is all possible.

Tanning rules are built into the software, meaning you can set a skin type; stop under 18’s using the sunbed and set a 24h warning for fair skin types if they return within that period. Furthermore, if you add a Pin/Passphrase to a customer’s client card, it ensures that only that person can use the sunbed, once they have provided the pin. Alternatively, you can integrate with one of our fingerprint readers for an even securer option. 

Groups and Special Offers

Now you can manage groups and special promotions directly from the system. If you have loyal customers or friends and family, you can now create groups such as VIP in order for them to receive a discount on every booking and purchase. The system will automatically recognise members in that group and will apply the discount to the overall transaction.

Moreover, you can also run special offers such an unlimited tanning month or if you have a ‘Happy Hour’ promotion on during a specific time of the day or week. Special offers are easy to manage and the system will automatically turn the feature off, once the offer has expired. All you have to do is to set an expiry period and everything else will fall into place.


As you can see, the software is feature rich and will make managing your salon seem like a piece of cake. We specialise in tanning salons and therefore, our features are unique and beneficial to your business, whether you operate a coin system or integrate with sunbed timers. Now that you know a few features it is time to try it out yourself and see how it can transform your salon. 

Don’t hesitate to book your 14-day FREE trial now: http://www.salontracker.co.uk/FreeTrial.aspx

And in case you want to catch up on our last tanning blog, which discussed security options on our system, then click here: http://www.salontracker.co.uk/News.aspx?id=How-to-Ensure-that-your-Tanning-Salon-is-Secure-as-we-Enter-Spring/Summer

Salon Tracker x