Designing with the SaaS Unicorn Zenoti

Have you ever visited a salon and instantly became aware of the spotless equipment and various product smells greeting you along with a hospitable staff? Of course, you have! But, have you ever wondered about the behind-the-scenes action? About the countless hours of employee training, appointments’ tracking and management, upselling and loyalty points, and so on. You may not have spent a second thinking about it but one of our clients surely did. The result- they are now the fifth software product company of Indian origin to join the SaaS unicorn club. 

The SaaS Unicorn’s Journey to Success:

We are talking about Zenoti. Zenoti has successfully managed to disrupt the salon, spa, and medspa industry. Zenoti provides a one-stop platform for thousands of spas and salons across 50 countries. The SaaS unicorn has been securing more market share than ever with a predicted 120% year-on-year growth. 

It provides a cloud-based SaaS platform to seamlessly manage all of the business – from online appointment bookings, POS, CRM, employee management, inventory management to built-in marketing programs and more. This has revolutionized the spa industry by helping them optimize their systems, reduce costs and improve customer retention. Additionally, it has also helped them direct their spending on marketing. 

Well, it is well established that great design is the thing (if not the only thing) that differentiates a SaaS unicorn-like Zenoti- from its competitors. We take immense pride in being part of their journey; helping them with design strategy, user research, and UX UI design. While there is a lot more to do, Zenoti successfully shifted the focus of the industry towards data analytics; which has changed the salon, spa, and medspa industry forever. 

Furthermore, with this platform, the owners and operational managers have been able to understand the customer behaviors, their employee ratings, their product sales. This, as a result, has helped them run their business efficiently and strategize their growth. Naturally, the business focus has shifted towards customer satisfaction, employee happiness, and operation optimization.

Let’s look at some of the growth points that have helped the custom-build SaaS unicorn reach new heights and how UX UI Design has played an important role in it.

Salon/ Spa/ Medspa Owner’s Dashboard Design: 

One of the major challenges for these owners is to analyze the current state and plan their business growth, especially when they own spas across multiple locations. To grow their business, they have to focus on managing and motivating their staff, increase their new clientele and retain the existing ones. They also have to run marketing campaigns and reach their target audience while efficiently running their operations.  

For this, a real-time Dashboard consolidating and highlighting their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats is a big asset. Coming up with a dashboard design,  that provides a holistic picture of the entire business across locations, was a fun journey. We understood how important it was to present the relevant data. However, it was equally important for us to keep in mind that the target users are not data analysts. 

In the real-time Dashboard design, it was very important for us to focus on the health of the entire business. It meant figuring out what defines the health of the business and who the target audiences. It also transcended into understanding their behavior and needs. We also recognized, in the process, what are the major alerts and KPIs that an owner would be interested in. But, above all, we figured how to present the data in a simple and minimalistic way; so that the conclusions, suggestions, and predictions get the primary focus.

To achieve this, we focussed on personalizing the dashboard. This meant providing contextual information and actions, insights that summarized the data backed by suggestions. We also provided options to deep dive further on demand.  With a focus on upgrading the visual style of the application; including overall color palette, fonts, icon styles, and graphical representations- we curated a  dashboard design; that was easy to understand and provided actionable insights. 

Data Analytics for Customer Retention, Satisfaction, & Growth: 

One of the primary areas of focus for any business is customer retention, satisfaction, and growth. In the beauty and wellness industries, business owners have largely relied on word-of-mouth marketing until recently. A recent survey revealed that 79% of U.S. consumers have shared a business recommendation with a friend, family member, co-worker, or another acquaintance – recommendations that result in more footfall. 

Naturally, for a customer to be vocal about a service, they have to be blown away by it. But, one of the major challenges of these industries has been to predict if a customer is satisfied; if they are going to come back for additional services, recommend them to others or not. Traditionally, these industries have used a paper-based feedback model to understand customers’ emotions towards the services.

An even bigger challenge would be to understand the trends of these metrics ( customer satisfaction and recommendations) across all their branches. 

The SaaS unicorn simplified this challenge for their customers by focussing on the Feedback module. We, Divami, designed a feedback module; which will help the spa and wellness business owners, operational managers, and growth officers to collect, manage and analyze customer feedback online. 

A persona or role-based dashboard provided the just right information depending on who was accessing the dashboard. For example, an owner would be interested in the trends across multiple locations. They would like to understand the common problems to retain or satisfy the customers. They would also like to strategize the next steps to increase the business adoption rate. Whereas, an operational manager would be keen to track average rations, the primary reasons for customer dissatisfaction, and fix them on a day-to-day basis to meet his revenue targets.

Tracking Providers and Stylists’ Happiness Coefficient:

In the beauty and wellness industries, the brand image is also driven by the service providers. Well, in other words, the customers’ loyalty could be to the service providers; which would reflect on the brand as well. Furthermore, users generally don’t separate stylists from salon brands. Hence, it has become very important for these business owners to focus on hiring the right people, train them well, and keep them happy. Employee happiness and their loyalty towards the brand is very important; equally important for the business owners is to understand the employees and plan their growth along with the brand’s growth.

We designed a personalized dashboard to monitor the performance of the service providers. For business owners, it is very important to retain the high performers and train the low performers. This dashboard design indicated the contributions of high performers and provided suggestions on incentive plans. Also, as these service providers contribute to a large chunk of the overall operating cost; the business owners would like to analyze ways to increase their efficiency while making sure they are not overloaded with work. It is also important for the operational manager to quickly book an appointment by checking the availability of these service providers. Thus, this dashboard design also included actionable insights driving the growth. 

Final Thoughts:

Dashboards are the best way to get a complete overview of the business, achieve better performance, and, ultimately, profit. To put this notion into a  real-world perspective, Zenoti came up with the idea of an interactive, intuitive interface; that offers a cohesive mix of KPIs to aid the successful management of the salon and spa business. 

Divami has been part of many exceptional journeys of several marquee companies to startups. But, rarely do we get the opportunity to sail on something as spectacular as the successful cruise of Zenoti. The process described in this blog summarizes the partnership-from a feature or view level to dashboard designs.