NOVEMBER - DECEMBER 2011

`100

NOVEMBER - DECEMBER 2011

`100

WW

W.S

PA

MA

NT

RA

.IN

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: healeywe@gmail.com

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.