Find out how much you’re saving, and making, in hard dollars with SmartBot’s new ROI calculator.
When investing in any technology to help grow your spa or salon, you want to know that the return on investment is going to be worth the upfront cost.
With tools like AI virtual assistants, you’ve been told that they will save you time, reduce staff hours, and save on operational costs, but how can you work out if the investment is worth it, or that things are performing well, without knowing the results you should be expecting? With SmartBot’s new ROI calculator, you can input data specific to your business to accurately predict how much you’re saving, and generating, by having an AI assistant on your team. Here we break down the 3 key areas the calculator uses to predict the profitability your spa or salon should see by bringing SmartBot on board, so you can be confident in the value it delivers.
1. Cost Savings
Cost savings
When looking at the hard dollars you can save by implementing SmartBot, there are 4 areas that demonstrate this best–call time reduction, call volume reduction, per interaction saving, and hold time reduction.
SmartBotROI calculator has drawn inferences and data benchmarks from trends observed in its customer base, and with your imputed details including per-hour employee cost and the number of phone calls received per location, it can predict the costs your business can save per month or year.
- Call time reduction
Time-consuming admin tasks like bookings, reschedules, cancellations, or answering commonly asked questions, can all be handled 5x faster by SmartBot than by your front desk.
As SmartBot can assist 50 guests from start to finish via SMS in the same amount of time your front desk could assist 5, this faster response time not only reduces costs but also frees up time for your front desk to complete more valuable tasks, leading to happier guests.
- Staff time saved
By triggering an SMS conversation when a call is missed and giving guests waiting on hold the option to get assistance from the bot, SmartBot reduces the volume of calls reaching your front desk by 50%.
As SmartBot is fully handling these requests via text, the number of staff hours needed to take care of incoming calls can be reduced and optimized for more cost-effective tasks—keeping in-store customer satisfaction high, and your costs lower.
- Per interaction saving
As the average front desk operator’s annual salary is $50K, by looking at how many hours they typically spend answering queries, we can calculate a ’per interaction cost’.
Once SmartBot is deployed, we can then recalculate this to a time-to-dollar saving— with most SmartBot customers observing a $5-$10 reduction in the cost per guest interaction.
- Reduction in hold time
Guests do not want to wait, and we’ve observed that approximately 20% of customer calls are dropped due to long hold times. About 70% of these dropped calls could have been new bookings, meaning you could be losing potential revenue with every call that is cut off after waiting too long on hold without assistance.
As SmartBot gives guests the option to get assistance via SMS rather than wait on hold, you can avoid losing potential revenue, adding to your overall ROI.
Income Generation
As well as saving costs, SmartBot can also help drive more revenue for your spa or salon, further boosting your ROI.
After all, the more guests that interact with your business, the more chance there is to generate additional income.
- Product sales
Sometimes guests don’t know what they want until they see it, and as SmartBot recommends add-ons during the booking flow, this can result in new product sales for your business.
We’ve seen that around 5% of SmartBot interactions have converted into product sales, proving that your bot is constantly creating more opportunities to bring extra money into your business.
- Seasonal advertising
You can easily configure your bot to display promotional banners with seasonal offers that are visible to every guest that interacts with your web bot. For SmartBot customers, we’ve seen a 5% conversion rate every time an ad banner is clicked – so be sure to make them look good as they are a great way for your SmartBot to bring in more revenue.
- 24/7 availability
Whether a guest calls outside of your business hours, when your receptionist is busy with another guest, or when you’re short staffed on the busiest day of the week, SmartBot will initiate a text conversation instantly when a call is missed.
This means you can be creating sales opportunities and bring in revenue 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.
- New Bookings
Our customer data trends show that approximately 5 out of 10 conversations with SmartBot have led to new bookings. This means not only is your SmartBot capable of handling phone call overload, post-business hour inquiries, and possible call drops, but it’s also capable of charming your guests into booking an appointment straight from its SMS interface or web chat window. In fact, 5% of our customers’ overall bookings come directly from SmartBot and based on your cost per service, the ROI calculator can work out how much extra cash those bookings could bring in.
Operational Savings
If a brand were to invest in building technology like SmartBot in-house, the costs and time involved with maintaining the product, the resources required to keep it running, and the overall operational cost — never mind the headache — would be enormous! In comparison, partnering with Simplified.io, the preferred partner of Zenoti, is a breeze, and much more cost effective. - Skilled resource cost Simplified.io’s SmartBot is built with the same cutting-edge tech that powers Alexa, by a team of experienced, highly skilled engineers and AI specialists who ensure that SmartBot provides a superior guest experience and is always available and updated in its tech stack.
By deploying SmartBot you can save huge dollars on hiring expensive technical resources, software, and more.
- Lower Training costs
Virtual assistants like SmartBot are built on auto-learn artificial intelligence that ensures it evolves on its own over time, and with the right amount of input configured during setup, it will continue to get better.
The cost associated with hiring and training new staff members to learn and carry out tasks that a virtual assistant can do with minimal onboarding is vastly larger. Once onboarded, SmartBot needs minimal updates and tweaks to stay fully trained and up to date with your policies, and there's no risk of staff turnover which can also be very costly!
- No Set-up charges
With SmartBot, there is no one-time set-up charge involved. Set-up is completely free and carried out by the SmartBot onboarding team using simple DIY configuration screens. As Simplified.io is a preferred partner of Zenoti, your SmartBot also has a deep and exclusive interaction with the Zenoti customer database, at no extra cost to your business. Summary Research shows that chatbots can save businesses as much as 30% on customer support costs, can lead to $23 billion in savings from annual salaries, and are expected to save businesses over 2.5 billion customer service hours by 2023. While these stats are exciting, it’s much more meaningful to know how much your own business will be saving. It can be difficult to know where to start when calculating the ROI from new technology, but by combining the parameters above, SmartBot’s powerful new ROI calculator has made it easier than ever to calculate the true value an AI assistant brings to your team while keeping track of the results you should be seeing.