The most upset, confused and insulted a service has made me feel. Their technical skills are good, but their soft skills are nonexistent ie. courage to own up to mistakes, confidence to ask for clarification, focus to listen to what you want, or ability to not appear like an a@!hole.
The Story
I rarely spend money on luxuries on myself, but after being frustrated with the look of my hair for two years I decided to do something about it and splurge on myself. I live in Mount Pleasant, so I did a little research to find the city's highest quality and best reviewed hair salon and found Salon Blu (in retrospect most of the good reviews mention an employee by name and the bad reviews generally have an issue with the business, so I should have asked for a specific employee). Their website is confusing to use, so I called by phone and asked for a recommendation if I wanted a haircut and color, plus good style advice. They refused to give this to me because apparently the employees are all robots and have equal skill levels in everything, so I scheduled an appointment with an employee who had worked there for a couple of years (this is the only way they distinguish between them).
I first went to a 15-minute consultation appointment, it only last five minutes and she had me sit in the chair that was lowered all the way to the ground, while she towered 3.5 feet above me. It made for a physically and socially uncomfortable conversation, but I left thinking she had a grasp on what I wanted.
One week later I was back at the salon for the cut and color. She had asked me to bring some photos in to clarify what I wanted, but both my phone and computer had broken that week and I lost the photos of what I wanted, so we did a quick look at some more photos. I am a natural blonde and I wanted to go darker, but still look natural. She showed me a photo of someone with hair color of Megan Markle and I said that is way to dark, so we looked a bit more, felt good and moved on to the actual dying. Fast forward two and a half hours of forced small talk and she reveals my hair to me...it looks the same, but the lighting in there is weirdly dark, so I think maybe it will look different at home. I went to the front desk to pay my bill and give her a 20% tip because I like to tip well, I was paying with card, but the receptionist asked me if I wanted to increase my tip by 20 cents, to bring my bill to an even $153. I don't see how this matters because I'm paying with a card and it just made me feel like she was judging my 20% tip as too little.
I get to my car and yeah, it's the exact same color, like impressively the same color, like if you wanted to find red shoes to exactly match a red dress this is the person to do it. I had never dyed my hair before that day, so I know what my natural color is. I called back day or two later and they said I could come back in, so I do. I get there, and the hair dresser's explanation is that she knew she had gone too light, but hoped I wouldn't notice and also because this was my first time dying my hair she thought I would not want a change. I guess me saying that Megan Markle hair is too dark, because it's almost black, made her also think I was unsure. It was fine for her to think this, her mistake was not voicing this thought, to reconfirm what I wanted and also ignoring my, as the paying customer, instructions. But I shook this off, because I didn't go to the hair salon looking for honest people with a backbone to voice their thoughts and own up to mistakes, but looking for people skilled with hair. So another two and a half hours later and I'm on my way home. I wash my hair, because at this point the hair salon smell is making me nauseous and she has only dyed about an inch of my roots a warm dark brown, it is very nicely blended into the rest of my blonde hair, BUT IT IS STILL MOSTLY BLONDE! I can notice the change because I look at my hair every day, but my husband, mom, dad, two sisters and grandmother can not see a difference.
Again I call and get the manager. Who basically blames me for not being descriptive enough. Sure, I did not use hairdresser jargon to explain what I wanted, but I thought 'I am blonde and would like a darker hair color' was clear and at the very least did not translate to "I am blonde and would like to still be blonde, but with very dark roots'. I asked for another hairdresser because I did not think myself and the other girl where on the same page and the manager starts guilt tripping me saying the first girl won't get paid for her services. That is upsetting news, but what also is upsetting is going to a salon three times, spending over five hours there, getting looked down upon for tipping too little and not knowing hair salon jargon, paying $153 and still not getting what I asked for.
I did not go back again even though I did not like my hair and they did offer to try to fix it again, but I was pretty f*#king tired of dealing with Salon Blu at this point. read more