Reducing wait times and increasing service sales for barbershops and their customers.

How much time have you spent waiting in line at your local barbershop or arriving and then walking out because the queue is too long or you’ve ran out of time? Let’s just say it’s probably more time than you think.

We’ve been working with the team at Tuipoint to create a solution to this exact problem. We worked on a similar app last year, which has given us a great knowledge base to move forward with and when given the opportunity to take it to the next level we jumped at it.

Let’s talk through a few of the problems we’ve solved throughout this project.

Finding a barbershop and choosing your service

The app in its most basic form is to allow users to search for a barbershop, choose a service and join the queue. We’ve allowed users the ability to search by list or map view in order to find their perfect barbershop as easily as possible.

Allowing customers to make bookings in advance

It’s inevitable that people like to plan ahead and so we wanted to make it as easy as possible for users to make an advanced booking. There are two types of users we’re catering for here:

• A customer who doesn’t care who cuts their hair and just wants an appointment on a specific date at a specific time.
• A customer who has their ideal barber and will make an appointment based on the barber’s availability.

We needed to create a solution that catered for both of these user types in the easiest way possible, and so we built a three-step process that allows users to pick by date or by barber.

Making cancelled slots an intuitive experience

When designing an app it’s important to think about the what-if scenarios. What if a customer joins a queue and something pops up and they have to cancel their appointment? The customer has the right to cancel if there’s still time but the barber is entitled to open the slot up to be rebooked without affecting his other customer’s position in the queue. We needed to think of an intuitive way for users to be able to join cancelled slots but also make them aware of the time and services available.

On a barbershops queue page, we have organised barbers by their queue length, beginning with the earliest available barber. If a customer in a barbers queue has cancelled then they would become the earliest available barber if they now have the shortest queue. When a customer taps on this barber they are presented with a screen of cancelled slots but also with the option to join the end of their queue. These cancelled slot cards present data about the duration of the appointment and the types of services available in that time. This avoids disappointing the user if they were to find out that the slot was only 14 minutes and all that was available was a beard trim.

The In-Store Experience

Not all customers will have the Tuipoint app on their phone at first and so we needed to create a way for users to still join a queue at a barbershop. Barbershops that use Tuipoint will have a Tablet set up for their users to choose a barber, select a service and join the queue as a guest. This experience follows the same flow as the mobile app to make everything as succinct as possible.

Tuipoint is now live in both the App Store and Play Store and is kicking off in New Zealand with plans to become worldwide in the coming months. At the moment the app is focused on Barbershops but there are ambitious plans in place to make Tuipoint available to a variety of services including Nail Bars and Tattoo Parlours.

We’d love to hear your feedback on Tuipoint, let us know what you think!