NOVEMBER - DECEMBER 2011
`100
NOVEMBER - DECEMBER 2011
`100
WW
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India’s Spa & Wellness Magazine
VOLUME 01
ISSUE 04
NURTURING LIFE
Jiva Spa
Spa Planning & Design Conceptualizing Spas for Hotels
Spa ParadisePune’s 10 most indulgent
spa getaways
What’s your LOHAS?Adam Horler talks about ‘green’
and sustainable lifestyles
Spa Mantra | November - December | www.spamantra.in 73
B U S I N E S Ss p a
74
82
86
Spa Academy Snapshot
Pure Beauty
Using Spa Management Systems to Enhance
Profitablity
A glimpse of India’s most renowned spa academies
Clarins, the iconic skincare brand has been in India from
the last 11 years...
SPA BUSINESS
PROFITABLITY
Using Spa Management
Systems to EnhanceWriter | Bill Healey
The spa industry, like all
business sectors, is continually
monitoring performance
to ensure they’re meeting
revenue and profit targets. Software
tools have been available for more
than a decade to assist directors in
managing and enhancing the way they
do business.
The spa software market has matured,
and some developers are providing
leading-edge solutions that provide
significant benefits -- from how the
spa’s services are marketed to local
clients and tourists, to how staff and
transactions are tracked. Some of the
more recent software advances also
involve significant reduction in up-front
investment through adoption of cloud-
based computing.
A description of a few of the many
potential benefits follows. This is far
from being a complete list.
IMPROVED CUSTOMER
RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT
(CRM)
“Technology in a spa provides a
conduit for good customer feedback
which, in turn, provides a clear
synopsis of guest needs and
preferences. This vital data allows you
to tailor spa treatments and marketing
activities to focus attention on making
your spa a more profitable enterprise.”
Warren Kok, Director of Marketing,
China National Spa Association.
Perhaps one of the key benefits to
employing advanced software is the
depth of data they’re able to collect
about their guests. Utilizing software
tools, the spa is able to enhance the
ways in which they interact with their
guests.
They’re able to:
• Build and maintain an extensive
database of information on the spa’s
guests. This includes profiles, contacts,
treatment history, retail purchases,
inquiries and complaints. The system
should ensure that the spa captures
and stores data on every interaction
between the spa and the guest through
all communications including email,
telephone, fax, website and personal
visits.
• Message the data into usable,
accessible management and marketing
information. Ensure the data is up-to-
86 Spa Mantra | November - December | www.spamantra.in
Spa Mantra | November - December | www.spamantra.in 87
date, allowing you to analyze historical
data to identify trends. Make the
data accessible to management and
marketing teams on a timely basis,
allowing for corrections to stay in-
line with preset CRM strategy. Use
the software to develop response
and contact strategies that improve
customer relationships, team
productivity and profitability.
• Share data across with proper
management and marketing personnel
to provide staff with a 360-degree
view of the guest. This enables your
team to provide a better service to the
customer, and gives them the tools to
identify sales opportunities based on
the customer’s history and preferences.
This access should be available at any
time, 24/7.
A useful spa management system will
allow you to improve the frequency
and quality of customer contact by
automating and personalize customer
communications. Use personal dates
that are important to your clients.
There are important dates in every
person’s life, such as his or her
birthday, anniversary, child’s birth,
graduation or job promotion. Each of
these events provide an opportunity
to promote the spa’s services and
products at a meaningful time to the
client.
A personalized email wishing the client
a happy birthday, or a special his
and her service on their anniversary
provides a much greater return on
marketing initiatives. Since these
events are significant to the client, the
spa has an opportunity to strengthen
their relationship and increase future
business.
The spa can also send automatic
confirmations for upcoming
appointments, which provides yet
another opportunity to highlight
products and services in a message
the client is more likely to open. These
event-based, outbound messages
are seen as being less intrusive since
they are based on recent interactions.
Some have estimated that event-driven
marketing efforts produce response
rates five times greater than traditional
outbound campaigns.
Consider enhancing your guest
relationships further though the use
of social media. Gartner Research
addresses the growth in the use of
social media to enhance customer
service, forecasting that 30 percent of
leading companies will increase use
of this tactic by 2013. Data from social
communities can be used to enhance
customer profiles, improving service
and guest satisfaction.
MAXIMIZE YIELD PER
TREATMENT
A significant benefit of maintaining
historical data within the system is the
ability to use statistics to maximize
yield per customer. Most spa directors
will recognize that the demand for
treatments greatly exceeds the supply
during certain parts of the week, or
even certain parts of the day. Using
historical transaction data the manager
can recognize when demand is strong,
when it is moderate and when it is
weak.
Using this data, management can set
pricing strategies to manage demand
at each level. In times when demand
is strong, prices could be increased
to bring demand more in-line with
supply. For times when demand is
weak, enticing local guests with lower
priced treatments may be an effective
measure to increase demand and boost
profitability.
Analyzing demand and setting pricing
models is difficult when maintained
by pencil & paper, or on a standard
spreadsheet. Effective review of
demand, and setting pricing structures,
becomes a much simpler task when
using an effective management system.
EMPLOYEE PRODUCTIVITY
Employee productivity can be positively
affected by the installation of an
integrated Spa Management System.
By electronically integrating the booking
agenda with client profiles and sales
data, spa managers can receive daily
and monthly statistical reports at the
press of a button.
Of particular value is the ability to know
when therapists may have down-time,
or time not booked into treatments.
These staff can then be assigned
to other tasks, such training for new
treatments or cleaning and maintaining
another part of the spa. Analytic tools
will inform management that the
scheduled staff are working toward
making the spa a better place to be.
REDUCE INVENTORY COSTS AND
OUT-OF-STOCKS
Knowing more about the historical
sales pattern at the spa’s retail shop,
and keeping track of minimum stock
levels will assist in lowering the cost of
both retail and professional stock.
When inventory and sales records
were kept manually, the only way a spa
would be able to keep retail items in the
boutique and professional items in the
treatment rooms would be to maintain
a very high level of stock. Managing
Technology in a spa provides a conduit for good
customer feedback which, in turn, provides a clear
synopsis of guest needs and preferences. This
vital data allows you to tailor spa treatments and
marketing activities to focus attention on making
your spa a more profitable enterprise.
- Warren Kok, Director of Marketing,
China National Spa Association.
88 Spa Mantra | November - December | www.spamantra.in
SPA BUSINESS
BILL HEALEYIs a 30 year veteran of the
leisure software industry,
with a history of market
development in Asia,
the Americas, Africa and
Australia. He is working with
India-based IDS Softwares,
managing the firm’s position in the global Spa &
Wellness sector.
Email: [email protected]
B: http://leisuresystems.blogspot.com/
inventory turn times and restocking
times is a very difficult task when manually maintained.
With a properly implemented retail
and point-of-sale system, lower levels of inventory can be stored in both
the boutique and treatment rooms. Each item is given a value that alerts management when these low-inventory levels are met. Further, the system provides re-stock levels to ensure spa
management places an appropriate
order with suppliers.
REDUCING THE COST OF
TECHNOLOGY
”One of our goals in adopting a
corporate standard IT solution is to keep up-front costs as low as possible, and to reduce our carbon footprint while saving on power costs,” Christine Hays, Vice President, Spa Operations, Oberoi Group.
Historically, spas implementing
management software required an up-front purchase of hardware, software and training to the tune of US$ 30,000 to US$ 50,000 or more. This would be for each spa -- a very pricy option
for both startups and multi-property
organizations.
Economic factors have been pushing spas and small businesses toward cloud computing, an alternative to the
costly client-server model. In broad terms cloud computing is the use of
software, platforms or infrastructure offered by web-based service providers. By eliminating the need for costly servers, locally hosted software and extensive training, a site can
realize a significant cost-savings.
Cloud computing service providers
focus their operational expenses on
IT at a higher level than a business with a dedicated IT department. Because of a sharing of infrastructure, cloud providers can achieve better
economies of scale, particularly as their
client base grows. These savings are passed on to the end-users ...the spa.
An added benefit to adopting cloud
computing is the ease of access to the
spa’s vital data -- anywhere, anytime. Spa Directors are a very mobile group. One day they’re at the Indian Spa & Wellness Association’s Summit in Mumbai, another day in Delhi and then
off to Shanghai, Bali, Phuket, New York or elsewhere.
Placing spa data on the cloud allows managers to access corporate data
from their iPhone, iPad or other mobile
device. The manager may be in Paris, but have a need (or simple curiosity) to
see how the spa in Delhi is performing. Cloud computing allows them the simple ability to query spa performance
from anywhere. An interesting bit about the cloud solutions – it can make initial
investment much lower while providing easier access to data from anywhere, 24/7.
After a decade or more of various
spa software options, the industry has matured and now provides a very robust and reliable set of tools to
make a spa more profitable. Following general market advancements,
utilization of spa software has also allowed broader access to vital data allowing the spa to enhance customer service, increase revenues and
minimize up-front investment.
One of our goals in adopting a
corporate standard IT solution is to
keep up-front costs as low as possible,
and to reduce our carbon footprint while
saving on power costs.
Christine Hays, Vice President, Spa Operations,
Oberoi Group.
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