Who should be able to confirm a dog grooming booking?

Let a booking confirm itself when everything needed to accept it is already known before the client presses the button. When it isn't, the client can still ask online or by phone, but you or someone you've trusted with that call holds the confirmation. That usually means returning dogs on their usual service book themselves, and new dogs, changed coats and changed dogs wait for a person.

Why does phone versus online miss the point?

Most of the argument about online booking treats the channel as the decision. It isn't the channel that fills your Tuesday with a matted doodle booked as a tidy-up. It's that nobody with the right information agreed to it. A client can type a bad booking into a form, and a casual answering the phone between dogs can say yes to the same bad booking just as quickly.

So ask a different question for each kind of work: at the moment this booking is made, does anyone know enough to accept it, price it and give it the right length? If the answer's already on file, the client can confirm it. If it only exists once someone has looked at the dog or asked the owner, the person who'll get that answer should be the one who confirms.

Sorting your work by what you know at booking time

• Returning dog, same service, same coat. You've groomed this dog, you know its temperament and how long it takes, and the owner's asking for what they had last time. Nothing about this booking needs a decision, so let it land straight in the diary.
• Returning dog, something's different. A longer gap than usual, a full clip-down after a season of tidy-ups, a new health problem, a dog that's gone grey and stiff. The history you have is now partly wrong. Let the client pick a time, but hold it as a request until someone's checked what's changed.
• New dog. You don't know the coat, the handling or the owner's idea of short. Some salons don't let a first-time dog self-book at all: Easy Grooming keeps online booking for returning clients and has new clients complete an intake first. Collect the information online if it suits you, but a person decides.
• Work that needs a conversation. Matting, reactivity and medical changes can alter whether you take the job, what it costs and how long it runs. One salon asks owners of matted, reactive or medically changed dogs to call before booking for that reason. A form question can flag these. It rarely settles them.

The split sits on the dog and the service, so the same client can be in two rows at once: their older dog books itself, the new puppy waits.

The cost of holding every booking back

Requiring approval for everything feels safe, and for a new business with few regulars it's often right. Once most of your book is repeat work, though, approval on routine rebookings means your regulars wait on you for a decision you'd never refuse. You're spending the scarce thing (a person's attention between dogs) on bookings that don't need it, and leaving less of it for the ones that do.

Staff on the phone carry the same authority

If you run a team, confirmation authority is also a staffing question. Decide which people may accept a new dog, which may book a clip-down on a dog they haven't handled, and which may only book a known dog into its usual slot. A receptionist or bather taking calls should be working to the same rules as your booking page, otherwise the phone becomes the side door for every booking you've told the form to hold.

Write the rule down per kind of work. When it changes, change it everywhere a booking can come in.

Keep reading

• Help: choose who can book online and turn on approval
• Help: accept or decline appointment requests
• Should online bookings confirm instantly or wait for approval?
• Should a new grooming client book directly or request review?
• What a dog grooming booking form should ask
• Seglo for pet grooming businesses