Cloud computing is the way of the future. You may have noticed cloud offerings from huge companies such as Adobe, Microsoft, Apple’s iCloud and Google’s Drive suite. The MethodPet grooming software also takes advantage of cloud computing (as well as additional cutting edge frameworks), even though we’re much, much, much smaller than those companies.

From a technical standpoint, there are a host of features to take advantage of and you application scales alongside your company growth, but that isn’t a top concern for you as a dog groomer is it?

What you want to know is, how does this help your grooming business?

We will get to some of the more general ways that our cloud software can help your grooming salon or mobile grooming business, but first let’s start off with a specific example.

If you’re a member of any of the active groomer groups on FaceBook or elsewhere online, you may be familiar with a competing grooming company coming out with a press release saying that they were doing an ‘extensive update’ and by doing so, all of the users’ data will be lost / re-added. Groomers had to start all over again and they weren’t happy. Rightfully so.

With MethodPet, a calamity such as that will never be the case. We can push updates live with no interruption in service to any of our users.

We can push updates live with no interruption in service to any of our users.

This means if I have a brilliant idea for a feature in the middle of the night, we can built, test and push the feature to all of you with no service interruption.

This also means that if our community of users would like to see a change, that can happen!

Doing so requires some fancy technical terms that our grooming software takes advantage of, but we’re able to do this thanks to the cloud

We can built, test and push the feature to all of you with no service interruption. 

Grooming Software that has Remote User Access

I remember searching for a grooming scheduling app when running my mobile dog grooming business. We had 3 vans, 5 groomers, me plus a scheduler that helped me make appointments.

What I couldn’t stand was finding out after-the-fact, or realizing on the pricing page that we were going to need to pay extra for each employee to access their schedule remotely. What??

All of the sudden that nice looking monthly price skyrockets into almost $200/mo for the most basic set of tools.

With MethodPet, if you’re on a 10-user/mo plan – all your users get access anywhere, anytime as long as they have an internet connection.

This also means that there is no mobile app to download or extra step to take, is right there on the web. We felt this was a more straightforward and convenient route to go with for everybody. This way you don’t have to worry about employees accessing, downloading or updating apps, simply direct them to the proper MethodPet log in page and away they go!

Speed & Security

Speed is great and let me tell you, MethodPet is FAST but I think security, online safety and data integrity is far more important.

Cloud computing shines in this light as well. Since we’re in the cloud, we get access to the same tools and resources the massive enterprise companies get access to. This in turn means we can (and do) deploy the same powerful resources, firewalls, monitoring, backups and data integrity that fortune 500 companies do.

Online Booking

Let’s take a moment to discuss online booking…

Much like the current “smart” mapping features on the market today, online booking always bothered me.

What the groomers who helped us build MethodPet have found (along with myself) is that online booking doesn’t work.

MAYBE basic online booking sort of works for a grooming salon, but for a mobile grooming business? No way.

There are simply too many variables to make it an effective tool. Even if you could build out tons of restrictions, variables, mileage checks, time checks, breed checks there is simply too many things that could go wrong and now you’re calling a customer trying to explain to them why you cannot accept their appointment for a specific date and time.

“Well I’m sorry, my online booking software didn’t know I was 3 towns over, and need an extra 25 minutes due to extra traffic on a Friday afternoon. Or that your dog is usually naughty and takes almost double the time I have built in for your breed.”  

See how things could get messy?

So what do you do and what does this have to do with cloud-based pet grooming?

Well, this doesn’t have anything to do with cloud-based I suppose. It does related to MethodPet…Which is cloud-based so yeah, let’s go with that!

Anyway, what you do is offer the client a way to request appointments, with no implied guarantee. You also let them select a desired date/time and a backup date/time. You then build a module on the groomer dashboard to keep track of these and quickly make appointments out of these requests. This is what we did. Is it a little confusing? Let me provide an example:

1. A client would like an online grooming appointment.
2. They log in to their client dashboard and are able to easily request one.
3. They put in 01/01/2021 at 2:00PM and a backup date/time of 02/01/2021 and 2:00PM.
4. You get alerted and can see on your dashboard all the client details and the times they would prefer.
5. If one of those dates fits your schedule, you simply click a button and BOOM, appointment is scheduled and the client gets alerted.

How easy is that??

Sorry to get off on a tangent, but that is a really cool feature we’re proud of and I simply do not like how many others are offering online booking.

In the End

Access anywhere, fast, super secure, super easy updates that you don’t have to do and a dynamically changing, upgrading app right in your pocket, or tablet, or desktop.

As you’ll see mentioned elsewhere on this site, MethodPet grooming scheduling app is built by groomers, for groomers. When we set out to tackle this project, we wanted to overcome as many pain points as possible. These pain points we experienced first hand in our mobile grooming company, so when it came time to sit down and do the work, we tried to alleviate these issues for our fellow groomers.

We think you’ll love it :)