Clients should be able to update their own details online
complete
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Colm O'Neill
Problem: Salon clients who want to change their email address need to contact the salon, the salon contacts us and then we update it, and communicate it back to the salon's client, sometimes via the salon.
This is very heavy touch and not an edge case - it might surprise you that it is the number one support ticket driver in Finland. It's people changing work address, student address, old email providers to gmail, and married women who have changed their name.
If a salon changes it in Phorest Cloud, it won't change their online booking account email address.
We don't see the clients who don't want to contact the salon so they sign up again with a new email address, and a fake phone number, creating a duplicate client.
Phorest Product
complete
This functionality is now available in the Online Booking platform.
Phorest Product
open
Sonja Lorscheidt
in progress
Sonja Lorscheidt
Thank you for highlighting it, Colm.
I can confirm that all current research confirms that this is a problem in all regions.
What if we'd even go further and see if we could allow ALL salon clients in ALL salons to update their personal data and manage their notification settings or Marketing consent?
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Colm O'Neill
Sonja Lorscheidt: Do you mean like a single account for all salons? There used to be a single Zanadoo account for salon clients which could be used to log in to any salon and it was a real nightmare as none of the users knew, and they could not register to any other salons after their first one.
I feel this approach works well for marketplaces who have their brand all over the booking experience but not for us. I don't think we want clients making "Phorest" accounts?
I think it is good in principle though, especially as will eventually want salon clients managing their cards there too and if they need to do that in multiple accounts that would not be ideal.
For people who visit more than one salon, there is a current minor issue where the browser can only save one password for one domain (phorest.com) for one email address, so one unified login would solve this too, but this could also be solved if we offered Google and Apple logins.
Sonja Lorscheidt
Colm O'Neill: Yeah, that created some confusion before and because we did it a bit secretly, wasn't a great UX. My focus is more on offering the option to manage their client profile to every salon client and every salon.
So the focus is on the user need being able to manage details and notifications, viewing service history, vouchers, treatcard points, offers etc.. - whether they use OB or not.
Marketplaces have one shared profile and it's much clearer for the consumer because they know the brand. If we'd knew that the same client visits different Phorest salons, this would be much better for our data analysis as well though. We would know the real number of consumers that visit Phorest salons and could identify their patterns much better.
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Colm O'Neill
Sonja Lorscheidt: Yes definitely agree that empowering them to update their details across multiple salons from one place is a good idea if we can figure out a way to do it well. Also when signing up for a new salon they could choose which info to copy across from their existing profile like card details, birthday, etc.