Welcome to the final installment of our three-part series on common salon management mistakes. We’ve covered data security and email marketing, and now it’s time to focus on a couple bad habits we see salon owners and employees guilty of on an all-too regular basis.
You’re making a salon management mistake if you are:
4) Not logging out of the reception desk computer
We see this mistake all the time. The salon owner logs in to the front desk computer to access important info like payroll or to run a report and then gets called away suddenly…and forgets to log out. Now all that personal and/or private information is right there for any employee – or client – to access.
It’s important to train yourself and your employees to always log out of the reception desk computer when stepping away. Better yet, choose a salon management solution that comes with an automatic log out feature. With SalonTarget any user can set a log out time for an idle computer, much like a smart phone screen goes into locked mode when not being used.
5) Not using strong passwords
We get it. Our worlds are filled with passwords. Email passwords, bank passwords, Netflix passwords – it’s endless. And it’s tempting to create easy-to-remember passwords for all those accounts. It sure beats clicking the “forgot password” link all the time, right?
The problem is, easy-to-remember passwords are also easy-to-hack passwords. Believe it or not, the most commonly-used password is “123456” and the second-most common is “123456789.” Crazy, right?
Even if the service you use has two-factor authentication you should still create a strong password to prevent hackers.
What’s a strong password? With SalonTarget we require all passwords to include a number, an upper case letter, a lower case letter, a “special character” (e.g.”?”, “@”, “#”, etc.) and at least 8 characters total. We do this both for the salon owners/employees AND for the salon clients.
Why? Because hackers are not pimply-faced teens sitting in basements randomly typing variations of your birthday and street address to access your account. Hackers are “bots” programmed to enter millions of password attempts. The easier the password the faster the bot can hack into your account.
If your salon is guilty of one or more of these common mistakes, please reach out to schedule a time to learn how SalonTarget can help. We are a salon management software built by salon owners, so we understand first-hand the many challenges you face.