Seven Things Your Spa Management System Should Do
As we enter the pool and spa busy season, now is the perfect time to consider ways to boost your business, streamline operations and inventory management, and make internal communications easier for your teams so they can focus on serving customers. Especially if you’re dealing with multiple standalone systems or inefficient software, upgrading your spa management system is a great way to strengthen customer service and customer communications while driving greater internal alignment. Your pool and spa management system should offer the right capabilities to help you achieve your business goals. Below are seven ways that your spa management system should propel your business to greater heights.
How To Manage A Spa Business Efficiently
Every spa and hot tub business should consider using a spa management system to manage business operations. Those who don’t often experience lost time and money, poor tracking of business results, burnt out employees, and unsatisfied customers.
What Is A Spa Operating System or Spa Management System?
A spa business operating system or spa management system is software that helps you manage your business. It may handle only one aspect, like accounting, or it may offer a variety of features so you can manage every aspect of your spa business in one place. RB’s software is an all-in-one solution, with components ranging from marketing to employee management to point-of-sale, and everything in between.
What Are the Benefits of Spa Software?
With an all-in-one solution like RB’s, the benefits are extensive! Our clients save an incredible amount of time and money using our solution, recouping their investment quickly. They cut down on time spent using manual methods of record-keeping like pen and paper, they reduce the need for double data entry into multiple systems, and they ensure accuracy of their records and minimize errors by having one single source of truth for all business information. The software also features several tools designed to drive customer satisfaction and loyalty, make marketing easier so sales increase with minimal effort, and increase the efficiency of your team by ensuring they spend more of their time on revenue-generating activities.
Seven Essential Capabilities Your Spa Management System Should Offer
1: Taking Advantage of New Revenue Streams
During the pandemic, business owners had to develop new programs that create additional revenue streams quickly. Mobile water testing to offer professional, at-home water testing to customers was one of those creative, out-of-the-box ideas. The LaMotte 3585 WaterLink Spin Touch, a mobile water testing system that generates an instant and accurate range of chemical levels and sends results to the customer instantly via email, became instrumental for many businesses. This is the perfect example of why choosing spa management software with extensive industry integrations is so important. RB retail and service software offers an integrated solution for spa businesses, including a water lab sync component that integrates with the LaMotte system and auto-links your in-house database of customers with their water testing data and history. The mobile service feature allows all customer information to be entered in the field and can provide staff with real-time and immediate access to a whole gamut of important customer information — which makes for an exceptional customer service experience.
2: Reducing the Stress of Managing Inventory While Increasing Profits
Every year, spa businesses fall victim to inaccuracies in inventory leading to thousands of dollars in lost profits. Tight inventory control systems can help companies regain control of their stock to increase profitability and compete with big box stores. The ability to integrate your inventory system with that of your vendor suppliers is critical. These integrations allow you to check vendor orders, status, and available inventory before placing orders, so purchasing agents can take advantage of Early Buy discounts and flexible delivery options. Real-time inventory data at your fingertips allows you to carry less inventory so you can control costs and make better buying decisions. Your spa management system should include an inventory adjustment feature to make it easy to import inventory lists from a pre-existing software system or from local distributors and suppliers — even from Excel spreadsheets. It should also offer mobile capability so you can manage inventory right down to the service truck level.
3: Offering Consumers Flexible Shopping Experiences
The pandemic forced many consumers to shift to an online marketplace, and digital shopping will likely stick around for a long time — after all, eCommerce is easier, less of a hassle, and can be done from the comfort of your own home. That means your business needs spa management software with all the latest eCommerce features available for the point-of-sale environment, like an easy-to-use shopping cart with simple check-out offering curbside pickup or delivery. When you give customers an entirely online experience, they can conveniently shop, purchase, and have their product delivered. That level of convenience often results in repeat business.
4: Improving Project Profitability for Spa Construction
Effectively controlling costs associated with pool construction is critical to ensuring construction profitability. With so many variables contributing to job cost, the need for an integrated construction job costing feature for your spa management software system has never been greater. Your system should have flexible job structures and work stage breakdowns to better manage project information. It should also fully integrate all job costing and job progress management with your business inventory, time clock, scheduling, proposals, contracts, purchase orders, receiving, and accounting.
Job Estimating
- RB’s software provides a job estimating system that allows you to enter customized template questions specific to your business, so salespeople don’t miss any job specs or questions necessary for creating an estimate.
Job Contracts
- Instantly create a professional contract that becomes the primary document that allows you to set up and manage progress and track costs automatically.
- You can also add ‘hidden items’ to the contract that will not appear on the customer’s sales order for special order items used for creating purchase orders. Though hidden from your client, these special orders are integrated with your business management software and can still be tracked.
Actual Job Costing
- RB’s job costing software allows you to pull each job from a Sales Order/Contract, then gives you the option to enter the ITF (Insurance, Tax, and Fringe) rate and select whether inventory, labor, expenses, and subcontractors are taxable or non-taxable.
- By having an integrated construction job costing software system, users can point and click to create picking tickets for the merchandise and supplies to be taken to the job site and deduct them from inventory within your business software.
Managing Variances
- Allows managers to view the bid price side-by-side with the actual costs so they can manage any variances and perform progress billings.
Job Progress Management
- Allows you to customize the program for the physical steps of the specific types of construction and renovation jobs your company performs.
- Gives you the ability to manage the job with progress management tools that work hand-in-hand with your business software’s scheduler system to schedule appointments and daily job activities quickly and easily.
5: Harnessing Data to Boost Sales
One of the most valuable things your business can do is capture and harness data through spa service reporting software to target specific customers for specific offers. The goal is to capture critical information about every customer who comes into your store, calls your service department, or purchases through your e-commerce site. To do this, you need to build a valuable customer database documenting what your customers own and buy, and what they don’t own and don’t buy. This database allows you to run more effective, targeted sales campaigns and take advantage of new market opportunities. Your spa management system should have an integrated CRM database pulling customer information from your POS transactions, water testing lab, and service & construction departments.
It should be able to combine duplicate customers, import new or purchased customer lists, and build on your mailing and email lists by tracking all sales and customers through the system to keep your database clean and trustworthy. It should provide analytical tools to help analyze CRM data to, for example, identify top customers, manage workflow, and run regular reports. It should also be integrated with business software to capture valuable data like:
- Transactional details
- Profile details
- User-defined details like whether the customer has a salt chlorine generator, how old the spa is, and more.
With RB Retail & Service software, your sales and service information is all in one place allowing you to really drill down to communicate with customers. It’s easy to know who hasn’t purchased chemicals lately, who hasn’t had a service call or who has an older model spa.
6: Capitalizing on Marketing & Sales Opportunities
Aside from outstanding customer service, professionals agree that great deals delivered through strong marketing tactics help lure customers back. Once a customer owns a spa, it’s important to stay top of mind with potential repeat customers and ensure they don’t take their business elsewhere. Today’s software technology gives pool and spa businesses a guaranteed system for scheduling sales promotions. Superior business software allows you to create promotions with definitive start-and-stop dates that can apply to products, services, or construction offerings.
By setting all details in the management system and linking to outbound e-mail and other communication tools, you don’t have to worry about missing marketing opportunities. RB’s software features an event planning module that lets you set your sale prices for specific sale dates so they automatically go into effect for each event, which takes care of a big task you won’t need to worry about during the busy season. By selecting the products in advance and deciding on the sale prices early, you can make sure your margins remain profitable.
7: Improving Employee Communication and Productivity
Taking advantage of the busy summer season requires frequent and clear communication not only with prospects and existing customers, but also internally with employees. Effective internal communication will make employees more engaged and productive, and it will also save you money. You’ll need spa management software that makes it easy to:
- Keep your team updated on company information or procedural changes with inter-office alerts, reducing the frequency of meetings so your staff can focus on customer needs while still staying informed.
- Keep your office staff, sales team, and service techs connected with follow-up calls — you should be able to use your software to track customer calls and forward calls to the employees in the field.
- Communicate customer information to employees. RB software offers flag messages, allowing staff members to inform coworkers about customers with outstanding balances, in-store credit, open quotes, etc.
- Create an internal brainstorm with wish lists, a great place for the team to drop ideas before they are forgotten.
- Help your sales team up-sell and cross-sell with automatic alerts. RB has a “related items” feature pre-programmed to alert employees of relevant add-on items to offer customers based on what they’re already purchasing.
RB’s spa management system offers all of these capabilities and much more — everything you need to not only support but boost your business during the busiest time of year.
