A sneaky trick guaranteed to get clients to check their voicemail.

Here’s a typical scenario.  Your stylist Julie suddenly has a rash of morning cancellations.  You start calling her afternoon clients to see if they might want to come in earlier.  You leave a bunch of voicemail messages, and yet no one calls back.  Sound familiar? Does it seem like more and more clients aren’t checking their voicemail these days?   Guess what, they’re not. The best way to get clients to check their voicemail, is to not leave a message at all. Well, not exactly.   Here’s an idea, try sending a text message via Google Voice. In most cases, we find that clients respond within minutes after receiving a text message from us via Google Voice. It’s not just Millennials who only communicate via text messaging these days.  Our clients do too! That’s right.  Allow me to introduce you to Google Voice.   Google Voice is a voicemail service from Google that enables users to send free text messages, customize their voicemail, read voicemail text transcript, and more.  Google’s voicemail service is available for free to all Gmail users. It’s a good idea to communicate with client via text message from a neutral, company owned phone number instead of your staff’s personal cell phones. Plus, it’s safer too.

Here’s how to set up Google Voice for your salon or spa:

Step 1) In order to set up Google voice for your salon and spa, first you’ll want to create a dedicated Google account for the business.  To do that, visit http://bit.ly/1qrfZbu

Step 2) Log into your newly created Google account and go to Google Voice.

Step 3) Establish a new Google Voice telephone number, see image below:     4) Once you have a new telephone number established, now you can call or send a text message from that number right from your computer. It’s that simple!   Here’s a screen shot of some text conversations that we recently had with clients:  

Lastly, a couple of key things to remember when using Google Voice.

1)  You always want to let the client know who the text is from when texting them because they will not recognize the Google Voice phone number. Notice above where we always state who’s texting them and that they’re texting from MFX Salon.  

2) Google Voice is packed with a host of features. Too many to include in this post. To learn about all of the features of Google Voice, visit http://bit.ly/1qJxc0i   Your turn.   Have you ever communicated with clients via text messaging outside of text confirmations? If so, what kind of response have you received from clients?