How to move your clients from one program to another

The reason most salons stay for years with a program they are not happy with is not the price: it is the fear of losing the client base along the way. Two hundred records with their phone numbers and history are not typed in again, and nobody wants to discover halfway through that something got left behind.

The good news is that the move is shorter than it looks. Four steps and one afternoon.

1. Export from where you are

Every management program lets you export your clients to a file, usually in CSV format, which is a simple spreadsheet. Look for it in the settings, under "Clients" or "Data".

If your program does not let you export, you have already learned something important about it, and it is not good. Your clients are yours; a tool that holds on to them is telling you how it plans to hold on to you.

From whatever file comes out, what really matters is the name and the phone number. The rest is welcome but not a blocker.

2. Choose the key so nothing duplicates

This step is what separates a clean move from a mess. When the list is loaded, the system has to know how to recognise that a person already exists so it does not create them twice.

The phone number is a better key than the email. Plenty of people share an address — a couple, a family — or simply do not have one, whereas the phone number is unique and is where you are going to write to them. In ClaudIA you choose which one to use, and records that already existed are never overwritten: if there is a match, what you already had is kept.

3. Bring the last-visit date

This is the field almost nobody carries over, and the one that pays best.

If the file includes when each person last came in, the new system knows from day one who has been away too long. That is exactly what you need to win back the clients who stopped coming or, in a clinic, for check-up reminders to start working without waiting a year to build up your own history.

Without that date, the system starts blank and takes months to learn who your schedule is missing. With it, the first week already tells you who to call.

4. Check the result

A move is not finished when you upload the file, but when you check what went in. You should be able to see three numbers: how many records loaded, how many already existed and which ones came with data that was unusable — a badly typed number, an empty row.

That third number is the useful one. It is usually small and takes ten minutes to fix by hand, but only if someone shows it to you. A system that says "imported ✓" and nothing else is hiding precisely what you needed to review.

If your clients live in your phone, that works too

Not everyone comes from another program. In many small salons the client base lives in the phone's contacts, and that moves across as well: you export your contacts and pick one by one who is a client, so the plumber and the suppliers stay out.

One warning worth being clear about: you cannot send marketing to someone just because you brought them in from your phone. Appointment reminders yes, because they are not marketing; anything commercial, only to people who asked for it. That is the law and it is also common sense.

What not to bring

Use the move to leave behind what no longer serves: duplicate records from years ago, people who moved away, numbers that no longer exist. A base of three hundred real contacts is worth more than one of a thousand with half of them dead, and it saves you paying for volume that gives you nothing.

The acid test: can you get out again?

Before you finish, do the check nobody does: ask to export your clients from the new tool. If a clean file comes out with the history, you have changed house without changing landlord. If it does not, you have just moved somewhere you will not be able to leave.

In ClaudIA it exports whenever you want, with one click. It is the same idea we set out in what ClaudIA does not do: we would rather you could leave than have you stay because you cannot. You can see it for yourself at soyclaudia.app, or at soyclaudiadental.com if you run a dental clinic.