MioSalon Review

 

 To tell it short and sweet 

MioSalon is a simple and easy-to-use salon software based out of India and the US. The current customer base appears to be primarily from Asia. The software is the closest to the requirements of India and the Middle East. It is easy for customers from these countries when they see MioSalon aware of their tax structure and unique client client behavior. One of the differentiating features of MioSalon is how they allow you to import your existing data through excel sheets. For ex. You can import your customer data, gift voucher data, inventory data, and almost everything into MioSalon. Even at a later stage you can download these templates, make changes and reupload them. This interplay with excel will be really helpful for salons who have been managing their salon with excel sheets.

 How does MioSalon Manager fare on the essential features of a salon management software? 

  1. Online appointment scheduling
    1. MioSalon gives you a code to embed your booking calendar on your website. You can customize the color of the background, the text and adjust the frame height.
    2. There are many settings for online booking. You can enable/disable online bookings, sales of gift vouchers, and show/hide the service prices. Depending on your needs, you ask for the customer address also, which is helpful when doing at-home services. Enable the option to allow customers to select a staff of their choice.
    3. You can also enable online payment gateways if you want to collect payments ahead, for your appointments.
  1. Staff management
    1. On the staff module, you can add or search for your staff. You can see the staff, their working hours, and their appointments. It is possible to customize the working hours by splitting the working hours or by adding a day-off.
    2. MioSalon offers great flexibility in setting up staff commission profiles. Commission profiles can be set for sales targets and for items. For commissions that are based on sales targets it can be offered as a set percentage or value for different slabs. Or, it can be cascading where commissions from each slab is calculated separately, and then added to reach the total commission. This gives flexibility to salons following either of these.  For commissions based on items, it can be done as a global commission percentage or value for all items or differently for each item.MioSalon shows you the staff and the commission profile mapped to them.
    3. You can assign products to staff for sales or internal use. A separate report will show details of the product usage which can be filtered by staff or the product.
  1. Sales promotions
    1. Gift vouchers help you boost your sales. On MioSalon, you can create and redeem gift vouchers. There is an option to include or exclude taxes. Apart from setting validity and terms and conditions, MioSalon also allows you to apply to these to your various branches. The voucher code is generated when the sale is made and shared with the customer through the invoice.
    2. On MioSalon, you can create packages with multiple services and play with the number of sittings for each service in the package. Packages can be redeemed at the time of purchase itself or later. If you sold a package offline and want to add it to MioSalon, it is easy. Download the packages report as an excel sheet, edit, and upload again.
    3. Discount coupons can help in bring customers back. On MioSalon, you set a value for discount for the next visit based on a sale value for the current visit.  The coupon can be issued based on multiple conditions like gender, customer segment, branches. Additionally, you can add terms and conditions for the coupon.
    4. It is also possible to send SMSes to customer segments about discount offers on services.
  1. Point of Sale
    1. On MioSalon, you can manage invoicing, tax, and payment settings under the POS module but you make sales from the Quicksale module. For invoices, you can customize its look and feel, set permission levels for staff with respect to invoice, and opt between applying taxes before or after discounts. You can add new taxes, and when  multiple taxes apply you group them as a tax group and apply them.
    2. Under payment settings you can add new payment methods and choose locations where those methods are accepted. If you want, you can set one of those methods as default for each location.
    3. Under quick sales, you can select a customer and add the items under sale, which can be a service, product, gift vouchers, or a package. The payment can be collected with any of the payment modes or via gift vouchers. Apply discounts, taxes, and get the invoice.
  1. Marketing
    1. SMS Greetings: MioSalon allows you to set up SMSes for birthdays or anniversaries. There can be more than one SMS for each occasion with each message triggered on defined intervals. However, beyond this, there are not many options to do a full-fledged email marketing or SMS marketing campaign.
  1. Locations
    1. You can manage multiple branches on MioSalon and make one of them as the admin branch.
  1. Reporting
    1. In MioSalon, you can see the different reports under the Reports module or see the charts on the dashboard. On the dashboard, you can see insights about customers, sales, and staff. The sales insights has charts about revenue and recent sales. It also shows top products and services which can be filtered by value and percentage. You can also see the total bill value and cancelled bill value. On staff insights you can see staff performance as a chart and a table. On customer insights, you will see the details about how customers responded to your offers and promotions. It will also show customers who churned and defected.
    2. In the reports module there are built-in reports about appointments and sales, membership, campaign performance, feedback, SMS usage, reward point, prepaid balance, expenses, gift vouchers, and cash registry.
    3. Each of these will give unique perspectives and charts. For ex. The feedback reports will have the responses to all the surveys you did with customers. Some of these reports can be downloaded as excel and PDFs.
    4. The reporting module in MioSalon is rich in charts. You get a quick understanding of your business’ performance at a glance.
  1. Client management
    1. You can upload customer data as an excel sheet and map the columns to MioSalon columns. MioSalon has a reward points system, prepaid payment method, and memberships to retain customers.
    2. Prepaid payments gives bonus value to the customers which is valid upto a few days. This will motivate clients to go for the pre-payment option and return to the salon within an interval.
    3. Add multiple services at a discounted prices and create memberships.  You can sell and redeem memberships from the QuickSale section.
    4. You can also set up a reward points system for your clients. Set up the ratios of bill value to reward points and reward points to purchase value for the points.
  1. Inventory
    1. You can maintain your stock in MioSalon with supplier and product details. It is possible to place and receive orders from the Inventory module. MioSalon allows you to manage multiple branches and therefore you can transfer in or out some stock between the branches.
    2. Some of the stock can be marked for internal use. Choose a service, allocate some products for use with that service, and every time a service using that product is performed, the stock gets automatically reduced by that amount. Alternatively, you can just mark products for internal use and bill them along with a service during a sale.
  1. Services 
    1. You can create multiple services and service groups. You can add new services to an existing group or a newly created group. If you want to create multiple services at once, you can upload the new services template. While adding services you can assign staff, set prices and taxes, and decide whether the service should be available for online booking or not.

 How is the user experience?  

MioSalon provides a good user experience. The navigation is smooth. They follow the easy-to-follow tree and branch structure, which in our opinion is the best when you have many features. Where MioSalon needs an update is on the UI design. Don’t get us wrong, the design is subjective but it is not the latest. The product does not have a steep learning curve and you can set your salon up on the app fairly fast.

The online booking page experience is not very customizable except for colors. However, the primary option is embed, the user experience depends on your website as well. Post appointment confirmation, clients will get notifications which can be customized with booking parameters.

 Value for money  

MioSalon has not published their pricing on the website. You have to contact them for the pricing. In one of their CEO’s earlier press releases, they had stated that it is $10/month for a network with access to all the features plus one Serviceable staff and $7/month on the addition of each Staff. The premium price for the software is $59/month for 8+ Staffs. If we consider that, MioSalon is a great if it works for your salon.

 Help and support   

This is an area where MioSalon has a substantial amount of work to do. The help documentation is incomplete, and also does not return relevant pages for keywords. Many times, it is better to do trial-and-error on the product UI and learn a feature than check out the help documentation. MioSalon has live chat managed by a small team who responds in a few minutes. They prefer us to give them a call to get the necessary help which will not be scalable when MioSalon has to go after a huge customer base.