Booking an appointmentFront of house · 29 Clarendon Road, Aylesham

One company, two jobs — choose which leads

Front of houseChairs, basins and the side room at Aylesham Back officeAnother salon diary, held from the same building

Ringing up, and what we will ask you

Written to you, the person who wants a chair on a particular afternoon.

Ring while the door is open: Tuesday and Wednesday 09:00 to 17:30, Thursday 10:00 to 20:00, Friday 09:00 to 18:00, Saturday 08:30 to 16:00. On a Monday the door is shut and the phone is not answered at this end of the building. You can write to salon@njprettyface.info at any hour; that address is read when the door opens and again before it shuts, so an email sent on Sunday evening is answered on Tuesday morning.

Five things get written into the diary when you book, and having them ready shortens the call to about two minutes:

Which piece of work — a cut, a cut after a wash, a root colour, a brow shape. If you are not sure what it is called, describe it; the length is our problem.
How long it took last time, if you know, and with whom. A diary built on real lengths runs on time.
Whether you need the side room with the door shut, which rules out two of the three chairs.
Whether anyone is coming with you, and whether a child needs a seat in the window while they wait.
A mobile number for the reminder, and whether a text or an email suits you better.

Allow the booked length, not the hoped-for one

A cut and finish on dry hair is booked at forty-five minutes; after a wash it is an hour. A restyle is seventy-five, because the talking at the start is longer and it is done before anything is cut. A root colour is an hour and a half, around thirty-five minutes of which is spent sitting in chair three while it develops, and that is time you can read in. First colour appointment here means a separate ten-minute skin test, at least forty-eight hours in front of it, and there is no way round that one.

Moving it, cancelling it, or arriving late

Ring during door hours to move or cancel, and the diary is changed while you are on the phone. Outside those hours, write; it will be read at the next opening, and if your appointment falls before that reading, ring instead. If you are running late, ring rather than hurry: past about fifteen minutes into a booked slot the work has to be shortened to what still fits before the next client, and we would rather agree that with you than decide it for you. Under-sixteens are seen with an adult who stays in the salon.

The same call, taken for somebody else

Now to another owner. This is what the identical phone call looks like when the diary belongs to your salon and we are the ones answering.

We answer in your salon name, from the script you write at stage one, and we work in your software rather than ours. The five things above are the same five we ask your callers, except that the service names and the minutes against them come off your own list, not off ours — if your cut and finish is booked at fifty minutes, fifty is what goes in the diary.

A booking taken at the desk reaches you three ways. It is in your diary straight away, because that is where it is typed. It is in the day log with the time of the call, the number it came from and the words asked for. And it is on the handover email written at the close of that covered day, grouped as bookings taken, moved, cancelled and not arrived.

What we will not do on a call: quote a price we have not been given in writing, add time to an appointment that is already short, promise a particular member of staff who is not in the diary that day, or take a card number. Those four go to the name on your escalation list, and the log says so.

The order of a covered day is set out on Diary cover, and what has to exist before the diversion is switched on is on Taking on a salon.

What is in the diary line itselfThe same fields whichever salon it belongs to

Name and number

As given on the call and read back once. A misheard mobile number is the single most common reason a reminder never arrives, so it is repeated digit by digit before the line ends.

Service and minutes

The service as it appears on the list, and the minutes that list gives it. Where a client asks for two pieces of work in one visit, both lines go in, back to back, with the turnaround between them left in place.

Chair or room

Three chairs and one room cannot be swapped freely. Anything needing the door shut is booked to the room, and the room holds one person at a time, so it cannot be double-booked while something processes.

Processing time

Colour that develops is marked so the chair shows as held and the stylist does not. That is what makes a second client possible in the same half hour, and it is also what makes a badly kept diary collapse at four in the afternoon.

Notes agreed on the call

Only what was actually said: a skin test already done and when, a wheelchair arriving, a child in the window, a preference for a particular chair. Nothing is written down that the caller did not say out loud.

The numbers above are structure, not promises about availability. To find out what is genuinely free this week, ring the salon while the door is open.