Jen Fry & Jessica Beck
It All Starts With the Consultation
Directors, Prosper U
Read the Transcript
Jen:
All right. Thank you for having us. We appreciate it. Hello everyone, and welcome to “It All Starts With the Consultation.”
Today, we’re going to be talking about:
- Why the consultation is so important
- What makes a great consultation
- How to implement a consultation system at your school
So, when it comes to any service happening on your student clinic floor, the consultation is going to be the most important time that your students and staff will spend with the client.
So how many of you experience more client complaints than you’d like? Have you ever evaluated what types of the complaints are? Did you determine what can be done to alleviate these challenges?
Most client complaints are because there wasn’t a proper consultation. It could have been miscommunication, it could have been a rushed consultation, or it could have just been that everyone wasn’t on the same page. Most client complaints are because everyone wasn’t on the same page.
So use this time to build a relationship with the guests, make recommendations, and ask plenty of open-ended questions. By asking the right questions, you can help set the rest of your service up for success.
Jessica:
So, the clinic floor numbers are just one part of… Or is another part of how the consultation can really help you impact your school. We know that clinic floor numbers are huge. I mean, it brings revenue. It helps with your 90/10.
So, we really want to make sure that we are able to impact those floor numbers in such a powerful way, and it really does come down to the consultation.
The consultation is a time where your students can start to talk to clients about their add-on services. We start talking about retail. We also talk about things like their next appointment and getting that scheduled on the books so the client is coming in more often.
So, when we are minimizing customer complaints and we are impacting our numbers, those are two huge reasons why you don’t want to leave the consultation up to chance. We want to make sure that every single time a client comes in, our students and instructors are equipped with the information needed to provide an amazing consultation.
Jen:
All right. So at Prosper U, we teach the model, LSCPA. This stands for:
- Listen
- Suggest
- Confirm
- Permission
- Act
Listen
So listen. You have to ask the right questions. We’re never going to ask them, “What do you want to do today?” Don’t be an order taker. Be an order maker. Have your students ask the open-ended questions. This gets your guests talking. So engagement is the key.
We want to make sure that we’re listening to what they’re saying, nodding in agreement, and listening for clues.
Suggest
Suggest, we’re going to solve their challenges. This is where the student’s going to use the information gained to solve the client’s challenges with services and products. So like Jess said, we’re trying to set up that retail sale as well. This is where your students are going to make additional service recommendations. So an up-service. Maybe they need a conditioning treatment.
They should be listening to what the guest is saying and making suggestions to solve the challenges. So, by educating the guests on why they need the service, it takes away from the, “Do you want to supersize that?” mentality.
Confirm
Confirm, so that’s where once the student has a plan, it’s time to confirm. The reason that this is so important is because most challenges occur when the guest and student are thinking two different things.
What the guest is saying is not always what the student is hearing and vice versa. So repeat it back and make sure you confirm.
Permission
Permission, this is when you ask to get started. This is just going to help generate excitement for the service.
Act
Act, this begins the service. It sets the stage and prepares the way for authentic beauty experience. So, we recommend that students perform the listen and suggest portion with the client, prior to the instructor stepping up. When the instructor comes over, they should be facilitating and making sure the student has the proper information to move forward.
Jen:
If there are things that they think the student still needs to gather to complete, they should give the student specific instructions to continue their consultation, and then move on to the next student.
Together, the student and instructor will confirm the services. This is a great time to also confirm price, length of time, especially if you have added on those additional services.
We recommend that the instructor be present for this step to make sure that the right information was quoted and the student isn’t promising things that we can’t make up.
At this point, the instructor should be making sure any additional services or changes are listed on the client’s ticket. How many services have been given away for free because of a simple mistake like that? The instructor asks for permission.
They should make sure that the student and the client are comfortable with what has been discussed and is ready to get started.
Finally, the instructor will give the instructions on how to get started. We really recommend breaking this down into bite-size information. The instructor shouldn’t be telling the student everything they’ll be doing, it can get overwhelming. Instead, break it down into smaller steps. This could just be as simple as saying, “Go ahead and shampoo your client and section them out into four quadrants.”
Jessica:
Absolutely. I really want to hit on two things here. One of them is the confirm portion. So, when we talk about making sure that the right services are listed, that we’re making sure that everything has been discussed, I mean, this is another reason why you could end up with an upset customer.
So, maybe services were added on and the price wasn’t discussed, and then we get to the checkout portion and the guest services rings everything up and tells the guest a price that they were not anticipating paying for it all. So, that’s one way that that can lead to an upset customer, if we’re not making sure all the prices and services are listed and discussed.
The other thing is, let’s say you have a customer who’s been coming in for 10 services now, or five, or whatever the number is, and they’ve always paid a price. They always get the exact same services, but what happened is that they weren’t actually charged the right amount.
So, then you go to charge them the proper prices, you make sure everything’s written down, and all of a sudden, the client feels like you’ve just increased prices on them without notice, when they’ve been getting the exact same thing for multiple appointments now. So that’s two big things when it comes to confirm that we really want to make sure that we’re covering.
Length of time, I know when I’ve been behind the chair at the salon or at the school with clients and students. We would have a client who would tell a student, “I need to be out of here in 15 minutes,” and we just finished shampoo in their hair. So, making sure that the client has the appropriate time to dedicate for their service that day, that they understand that services at a school take longer than services at a salon.
Now, one thing Jen, that you talked about was the consultation and how important the “listen” portion is. That we’re asking the right questions, we’re gathering information to solve challenges. Between teaching at the school and being behind the chair, what are three to five of your go-to questions that if students had to ask only these questions, these would be starters for them?
Jen:
I love that you asked that, because I do have a set of favorite questions that I ask every single time.
The number one I like to ask is “how often do you prefer to come in?” So, I want to know what their maintenance is going to look like. If they’re coming in and they’re about to do a big change, maybe really red, bright hair, or a really short haircut that’s going to require a lot of maintenance and they’re not willing to come in that often, I need to have an honest conversation with them and maybe come up with a game plan and be their leader so that they know what that looks like.
I want to set them up to win. So I always want to know, “What’s your maintenance look like?” I want to know what their home care routine looks like. That’s a big one too. Same thing.
Maybe they’re cutting their hair all off and do a cute little bob that requires styling every day and they are not willing to do that. So maybe we need to compromise and come up with something else.
What products are you using? How often are you washing? By asking this question, like we talked about earlier, that’s also setting you up for that retail. I want to know what they’re using and what I need to do to set them up to win.
I like to ask them, this is a really good one, “What are your goals for today?” So what’s their goal? Maybe it’s, “I want to look better.” “I want my hair shorter.” “I want my hair brighter.” Or “my skin’s been dry. I want it to feel more moisturized.” I want to know how they want to feel when they leave, so I know what the main thing I need to focus on is.
I like to ask, “If there’s one thing you could change, what would it be?” By asking that, it tells me what their number one challenge is, and the number one thing that I need to solve. And then the last thing I really like to ask you is, “What do you like best about your hair, your skin, your nails?”
I want to know what feature I want to bring out more. If they really like that link, I’m going to keep it. So these are just some good questions I feel like are main ones in your back pocket that’ll help really set you up for success.
Jessica:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). I mean, Jen gave examples of those on the cosmetology side, but those questions can be used for skincare, for nail care, for massage students. I mean, those are very generic questions across any field of study that your students are going through to really start to gain information on add-on services, retail recommendations, pre-booking recommendations, to make sure that we’re creating a service that benefits the client, that really suits their needs and their desires, because we don’t want to teach our students to be order takers.
As Jen mentioned, we don’t want that “supersize it” mentality. We want them to be order makers. We want them to craft beautiful, customized services for those clients who are coming into them. So the consultation model, just to recap is LSCPA: listen, suggest, confirm, permission, and act.
So now that you know the system behind it, how do you start to implement that within your school?
Really with anything that you’re going to implement, it starts in the classroom. I cannot stress how important it is to start teaching the consultation in the classroom to your students.
So we need to give the students time to want to understand the why, but also have practice in performing the consultation. So one of the easiest places to bring the consultation in is whenever you’re teaching them any kind of a technical service.
So, what we love to do and what we recommend at Prosper U is to make little consultation cards. So when you’re teaching your students a new service, talk about questions you should ask for that service. So if we’re talking about a facial, how often are they coming in? What are their challenges that they’re having? So you can start to build up that plan.
We want to talk about challenges to listen for. What are those keywords that we’re listening for, but also what should we be looking for?
We want to use our observations of what we’re seeing can best benefit the client. We want to talk about additional services that would be great to pair with this, so students have an easy way to offer something that’s suitable for that service. Also, what kind of products would be best for this type of service? And then how often is the maintenance?
So when we think about this, there are different types of services that are going to be recommended to come in every two weeks, could be four weeks, could be 12 weeks. It really just depends on what that is. So, making sure your students have a knowledge of what they should be doing. What you can do with that is the students could use them as flashcards to study.
They could also use them as little cheat sheets when they’re out on the clinic floor with maybe a first-time client. The first time they’re performing the service, they’re really nervous. They’re already just trying to remember how to perform the service, let alone having to think about the questions they need to ask them, the services they need to recommend and what products to use.
So, having a little cheat sheet for them is a really nice way for them to be able to feel more confident out on your clinic floor.
So another area of teaching the consultation in the classroom is role-play. Role-play is some people’s favorite thing to do. Sometimes for a lot of students, it feels very uncomfortable. They don’t like being on stage in front of everyone.
So there’s different ways you can role play with your students. You can pair them up, where you have just everybody is going at the exact same time. Your instructor’s walking around the room, listening in where they can.
You could each day have a different pair of students go to the front and role play in front of everyone so you can give more specific feedback.
If you have extra time, you could have everybody take turns coming to the front. We just recommend bearing that up. So if you do have those shyer, more introverted students, they don’t feel like they’re always on stage or that they’re always getting called out.
No matter how good our intentions are, if we start just giving feedback of what they need to be doing differently, they’re going to start to really turn in on themselves. They’re going to start to doubt themselves. It could even cause a bad relationship with their trust in the instructor.
So we want to make sure that anytime we do role play, it’s in a very safe environment. I highly encourage for other students not to give constructive feedback. They can give positive feedback. Have the other students support one another and share what they’ve done really well, but don’t have the other students tell them what they need to improve on. They’re all on the same level. So that’s not the kind of feedback that should be coming from your other students in the classroom.
Now, one thing that I want to share is when I was at Eric Fisher Academy and I was the education director, we obviously took that consultation and we took it out on the clinic floor.
That clinic floor is another classroom. I want to say that again.
The clinic floor is a classroom.
We should never just leave our students to try to figure out what to do, let them fumble through, assume that they’ve learned everything they need in the classroom and they’re just going to make it happen. This is an opportunity to work one-on-one with our students and their clients through that.
So, when we were at the Eric Fisher Academy, the expectation is that the instructor interacts with the students at least five different times during that appointment.
For some schools, you may be thinking, “Five interactions, that is unreal.” Our ratio is 25 students to one instructor. They’re also guest services and they’re back bar. They’re entering grades while they’re on the clinic floor, whatever the case may be. We know not every school is the same, but I really want to stress how important it is that those instructors are interacting with the students through that technical service, because it is still a time for them to gain education.
So our first interaction was during the consultation. The instructor needs to come over and be a part of that, make sure everybody’s on the same page, go through that model that Jen talked about earlier.
At least twice, the instructor came over and interacted during the actual service itself. Sometimes it was more, but it was never less than at least two times. Then we always wanted to come over once for a haircut to do a wet check, make sure everything looked good, and then we would come back over for a dry check to make sure that we were doing a final sign-off. Everything was happy. The client was happy. The student was happy. That we all met our expectations for what today’s service was going to be.
Jen:
Jess, I just want to add. Even if you’re stopping by, it’s not always a long check or long talk. Sometimes it’s just real quick just to stop in and let them know, “Hey, you’re doing a great job,” just so that it also makes the guests feel comfortable to know that you’re staying involved and that the student’s doing a good job.
Jessica:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). One other thing I just want to touch on really quickly are three really quick tips to implement the consultation on the clinic floor.
So, the first thing is setting your students up in workable spaces. You’ve probably heard them called zones before, we use that terminology as well. So those could be groups gathered by classes. It could be by their shift. It could be a mixture of students. But, making it in a workable space so that your instructors aren’t running all around your school to try to take care of their students.
Putting them in one set area for the day is just such a great time management feature for your staff.
The second thing is rotations. So sometimes, we have a tendency to wait on the students to ask us for help, to come grab us, to raise their hand, but in order to make sure we’re meeting everybody’s needs, because not all students are going to speak up, we recommend a rotation and it’s like a typewriter.
You start with the first student, and you move down the line until you get to the last student and you go all the way back to the beginning. As Jen mentioned, it doesn’t have to be a major stop. It’s just a check-in, make sure they’re good.
If they need more attention, give them more attention.
Then, the final thing is to facilitate, instead of perform the consultation. So our instructors should be facilitating a consultation. They should not be performing the consultation for their students. Some instructors get in the minds that as soon as they step behind that chair with the client to talk consultation, they start performing it themselves. They get into stylist mode, esthetician mode, barber mode, whatever the case may be.
So everything that the student has done goes by the wayside and the instructor starts over from scratch. There’s a couple of things that does.
One, it takes a lot of time, but two, it doesn’t build the student up as a professional. It doesn’t help support them, so they are ready for what they need to do after graduation. So, we want to make sure we’re facilitating, we’re putting that student in the driver’s seat as the professional, and we’re making sure they have the resources needed. We’re making sure they’re hitting all the points needed.
Just like any technical service, we’re giving them steps. We want to make sure that they are completely covered through that process. So by learning how to provide an amazing consultation in your school, you’re setting your students up for success after school.
Your students need more than just the technical skills to be successful. They need the soft skills, they need the business skills. It is really a whole package deal.
Especially with the way customer service is now, we want to make sure that all of those needs are met. So we want to give our students the foundation to increase their service ticket, their retail ticket, their pre-book numbers, because when students know how to ask the right questions, when they know how to make recommendations and confirm with the client, they’re able to build trust. They’re able to build that relationship with the client.
So, we don’t want to leave the consultation to chance. We hope that you’ll minimize your customer complaints and that you’ll maximize your clinic floor numbers by implementing the LSCPA consultation model at your school. So, any questions that have come in, we would love to be able to answer those for you.
Chris:
Yeah, I’ve got a question real quick. Jen, I know that you put in the chat some ways to get a hold of you. If I want everybody to look at that, what are some other ways? Where can we follow you on social media? What about your website? If somebody is interested to learn more, what’s the best way? To contact you through these emails?
Jen:
Yeah, absolutely. Or definitely look at our website. We have a brand new website we just launched and it’s beautiful. I’ll put that in the chat as well.
Jessica:
I know Parker did put it up before as well in the chat, too. Then a lot of our social media, we would love to have you follow. It’s @myprosperu on Instagram. It’s prosperupro on Facebook. I will say a lot of that is directed towards students. So if you are wanting some resources for your students for business knowledge, have them go follow us. We put up tips from Eric. We do tips from some of our other team members. We do some blog posts on our website.
We also have an app that is free to download. If you’re not a Prosper U school, it has our blog on there. It also has a couple of other great little free calculators that your students can use to calculate what they would need to do to reach their desired income, and what they need to do just to live off of their current living expenses.
Chris:
Awesome. Well, thanks so much for sharing. Thanks for being with us. Thanks for being a part of The Beauty School Summit. We’re grateful to have had you. It’s so much information. I mean, I’m sure you guys could have just gone on and on and on about this awesome stuff. I know it’s a short amount of time, 20 minutes, but we appreciate you being here. Thank you so much, you guys.
Jen:
Thank you.
Jessica:
Thank you so much for having us.
Chris:
Absolutely.