In this video, I’m going to answer the question, should you give makeup lessons to your customers or not?
I’m at the 2022 ASCTA conference on the Gold Coast at the Sea World Resort. I’m going to be part of a panel later that is talking about makeup lessons and the customer experience. I wanted to do a quick video about my take on makeup lessons, and what are the best practices.
Recently, we surveyed our email database and asked them, do they offer makeup lessons or not. And what is your biggest frustration with makeup lessons?
We found out some interesting things from them. We found out that 71% of people do offer makeup lessons. From emailing and surveying our email database, we found that although most people do give makeup lessons, there’s a lot of frustration with actually offering them to customers. And three main things stood out, one, makeup lessons take a lot of extra admin time, and two, customers can kind of manipulate and take advantage of the makeup lessons. And three, it can also take up the spots that a permanent booking could be taken.
So, does that mean we shouldn’t give makeup lessons? I think the answer to that question is no, you should. But when you give makeup lessons, there need to be some really careful considerations. I’m going to leave you with three points that can help you with the way you manage your makeup lessons.
Point one is, you want to be able to hand off that responsibility to the parents. You want to be able to do that through a customer or parent portal. That’s one thing our software enables our customers to do, to hand that responsibility off to the parents because it’s a big admin job if you are booking makeup lessons on behalf of the customers. Two, if you are doing it online, you want to have some tight parameters. I think the best practice is only to give one makeup lesson once every term or once every 90 days. If I’ve seen some customers and people in the industry give to a term, unlimited makeup lessons, that opens the door for a lot of misuse and a lot of other problems. We want to keep it limited. Fair enough if someone is ill, they should be able to have a replacement lesson. But we want to make it limited so it can’t be abused. And thirdly, if you want to set an expiry, you don’t want the makeup lessons to last forever and that should be automated through the right software platform. And that’s something our system can handle as well.
To summarize, I think yes, you should offer makeup lessons. It’s fair and reasonable for customers and enhances the customer experience. But you don’t want it to become an admin burden. And you want it to be a seamless thing that you can hand off to the customer through a customer portal.