Industry Challenge

Background

Lakme Salons is a 500 salon strong chain providing beauty services to the Indian consumers. We are present in Metro, Tier I-III cities at present. 50 of these salons are company owned salons and the balance are Franchisee owned salons. The difference between the two models is that in the Franchisee owned model, the operating cost of running a salon is borne by the Franchisee owner and hence, revenue also goes to the Franchisee owner; Lakme gets royalty on such sales as a fixed % of the total sales from the Franchisee owned salon.

In terms of the technology related infrastructure setup, following are the platforms Lakme provides:

• Centralized POS – All Lakme salons are set up with POS provided by Zenoti (major service provider in the beauty retail space).
• Mobile App – All app related appointments are routed through one Central App provided by Lakme

Challenge

Lakme revenues in a Franchisee owned model are fully dependent on the Franchisee partner ensuring 100% billing in Zenoti. However, we have found from experience that there is significant leakage that happens in terms of billing in Zenoti vs billing manually/not providing a bill at all. Considering we have walk-in customers and cash paying customers, it is difficult to have a digital trail to every service rendered in the salon.

We currently review and control this through frequent audits of salons across various commercial parameters. These audits are manual in nature.

Solution needed

We are looking for a technology backed solution to put an end to revenue leakage. There are two ways by which revenue leakage happens:

• Customer took services at salon but was not billed
• Customer took services worth x at salon but was billed only a part of x

We are looking at solutions that create a trail from the time a customer walks into the salon till the time she walks out split by appointment, check in, service delivery, payment and feedback.