Your spa or wellness facility is meant to serve as a relaxation haven for customers who need effective solutions, and it must also be a great place to work for your employees. So, how do you make sure that it is a safe environment where everyone is respectful and courteous toward each other? The following tips will help.
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Your spa or wellness facility is meant to serve as a relaxation haven for customers who need effective solutions, and it must also be a great place to work for your employees. So, how do you make sure that it is a safe environment where everyone is respectful and courteous toward each other? The following tips will help.
Start by Creating Rules
Like every other profession or industry, safety measures are essential in spa and wellness environments. There are often international, national and local occupational safety guidelines to help employers and employees maintain a healthy and safe work environment. Complying with these regulations can facilitate and improve overall comfort and productivity, which can imply company growth, as well as a good reputation that will attract even more clients.
To deal effectively with uncourteous, disrespectful or even violent clients, you should create and implement a customer behavior policy. Doing so can help you significantly reduce the chances of having to put up with misbehaving individuals who can undermine your business.
Such rules should define what constitutes inappropriate behavior. Having a clear picture of what you consider inappropriate behavior will help spa operators identify and deal with it whenever it occurs.
According to the International Spa Association (ISPA), a spa should have a current policy and procedure in place with respect to sexual harassment, both among staff members and by guests. Additionally, a spa should have employee rights that comply with international, federal, state and local regulations posted in staff common areas in the facility.
To avoid sexual harassment, you may want to educate your employees on professional etiquette, such as the appropriate ways of dressing to work and the manner of speaking with clients while at work.
Related: The Secret to Thriving During Difficult Conversations
Protocol for Upset Clients
The leadership of spa and wellness centers must have a policy of training their employees on how to quickly identify and deal with upset clients capable of causing problems. Such training will ensure that employees are not caught unaware by client misbehavior, and that their response to each case follows a formally approved approach (as opposed to a discretionary response that may attract undesirable legal consequences).
Correctly identify the cause of the problem: Many people tend to blame others wrongly in some situations. The logic here is that a client’s unruly behavior may be a consequence of poor service or a lack of attention to a legitimate complaint.
Spa and wellness center operators must be careful not to make the mistake of ignoring their role when there is a customer service problem. In other words, it is critical for them to assess client problems objectively, without bias.
Have a private discussion: Sometimes, simply having a private chat with an erring client (if possible) may be enough to make them change their unwanted behavior. It is important to patiently listen to the customer with empathy.
Some people default to unruly behavior because they feel they are not being heard and, sometimes, all they want is to be heard and attended to.
We all want to be heard and noticed, and some will create scenes if they don’t get the necessary attention they seek. We all have friends who are a bit like this, don’t we? Such friends are not necessarily bad people; they just need a refinement of their temperament and communication skills.
Apologize if necessary: As noted earlier, it is possible to blame others wrongly in certain situations. One way to rectify such blame is by tendering a sincere apology to the concerned fellow.
So, if you find out that your client’s apparent inappropriate conduct was induced by poor service or a lack of adequate attention by one or more of your employees, saying sorry can go a long way to calming the situation and making the client happy once again. For better results, you may want to offer the aggrieved client a discount or additional service to ensure you don’t lose them to rivals.
Ensuring safety in wellness and spa environments is a broad exercise that includes a raft of sanitary and hygiene measures. But, there is also another kind of safety concern—protecting employees against improper conduct on the part of clients. With a customer behavior policy and the other best practices highlighted above, your spa and wellness business will be able to cope with errant clients effectively.
Yasmine Mustafa is the CEO and co-founder of ROAR, a technology company dedicated to cultivating safer workplaces.
