Lesson 101

Client experience and retention

Style memory: what the last groomer wrote, and where it lives

A style saved on the booking is gone by the next one. Three cards on the pet hold the cut, the coat and the handling, and whoever is on the table next reads them without asking.

3 min read · Owner · Running day to day
Open in Petboost

A regular comes in every eight weeks and nobody can remember what was agreed in March. The answer was written down, just on the booking, and the booking is six visits ago.

Anything true of the dog rather than of one appointment belongs on the pet. There are three places for it, and they do different jobs.

Three cards, one per body area

It sits on the pet, on the Care & Grooming Templates tab under Preferences.

  1. Open Customers & Pets and select Manage on the dog.
  2. Open the Care & Grooming Templates tab, then Preferences.
  3. Under Grooming Templates, write the style into Head and Face, Body and Tail or Feet and Legs.
  4. Optional: add a reference photo under Photos & Attachments on the same card.
  5. Select Save & Publish.

Head and Face, Body and Tail, Feet and Legs are separate records, so a new groomer can read the face without scrolling through the legs. Each one takes a photograph as well as words, and a photograph of the length the owner asked for settles more arguments than a paragraph does.

Feet and Legs above is empty, which is what an unwritten card looks like: the product offers its own prompts rather than a blank box.

Tip

Write the card the first time you get it right, not the first time you get it wrong. A note that says "shorter than last time" is useless to the person reading it in eight weeks.

The coat is three pickers, not a sentence

Coat length, density and type sit on the pet as attributes rather than as free text, because a picker is searchable and a sentence is not.

  1. Open Customers & Pets and select Manage on the dog.
  2. Open the Care & Grooming Templates tab, then Preferences.
  3. On the Coat Type card, choose a Coat Length, a Coat Density and a Coat Type. Each one saves as you pick it.

One choice per category. Picking a new coat length replaces the old one and leaves density and type alone, which is why a dog whose coat changed over winter needs one picker changed and not the whole card rewritten.

Check

These three are the ones that decide time and money later. A double coat is the attribute a matting surcharge hangs off, and that is the next lesson.

Where the rest of it should live

A style belongs on the pet. A step you do on every dog booked for a service belongs on the service, and a one-off for this visit belongs on the booking.

  1. Open the booking from Appointments.
  2. On the Notes & Attachments tab, select Copy from prior visit on the note box you are filling.
  3. Select Copy last visit, or Copy these notes on an earlier visit.
  4. If Notify customer? appears, answer it, then select Publish Changes.

Copy from prior visit is the one to reach for when last time was right and today is the same. It only copies like for like, so an internal note never lands in the customer-facing box by accident.

Trap

A handling warning is not a style note. "Kicks on the back nails" has to show every single time, so it goes on the pet under Quick Notes or as an attribute, where it fills the run sheet column rather than sitting in a preferences card nobody opens mid-groom.