The four questions that separate real support from a promise
- Who picks up on a Saturday at 6pm? Saturday evening is when a salon counter is busiest and when software problems hurt most. Weekday office hours is a legitimate answer — but you should know it before you sign, not during. Ours is Monday to Saturday, 11am to 9pm.
- Is there a charge for a site visit? And how often do they actually need one? A vendor who fixes things remotely has a structurally cheaper relationship with you.
- Who is on the other end? A named support team, a ticket queue, or whoever is free? None is automatically wrong, but they feel very different at 6pm.
- What is not covered? Every maintenance agreement has a line where support ends and chargeable work begins. Find out where it is while you are still negotiating.
Judge the first reply, not the brochure
During your evaluation, send each vendor a specific operational question — not a sales question. Something like: a client says she has three sessions left and the system says two, how do I investigate that? The answer tells you three things at once: how fast they reply, whether they understand salon work, and whether they treat a hard question as a problem or an annoyance.
Read the reviews of any salon system in Singapore and you will find they are overwhelmingly about support people, not about software. That is worth noticing twice over: it tells you support is what owners actually value, and it tells you the product differences are smaller than the marketing suggests.
What support cannot fix
Being honest about the limits is part of the answer. Support can recover a crashed till, correct a balance, retrain a new hire and restore a backup. It cannot make a system do something it was not built to do, and no amount of goodwill on the phone turns a structural limitation into a feature. If a system genuinely does not fit how your salon works, excellent support will make that bearable rather than fine — which is why whether it fits is a separate question worth asking before you buy.
Ours, stated plainly
- Remote screen control and WhatsApp, Monday to Saturday, 11am to 9pm. No on-site call-out charge.
- Upgrades and updates included, so you are not quoted for the next version.
- Cloud hosting with daily backup.
- Covered by maintenance: $688 per branch per year from year two. First year included. No GST.
- If maintenance lapses, the system stops until it is renewed.
Questions we get asked
What does FingerBooth's maintenance cover?
Upgrades and updates, technical support by remote screen control and WhatsApp with no on-site call-out charge, and cloud hosting with daily backup. Support hours are Monday to Saturday, 11am to 9pm, which covers the Saturday evening this page is about. $688 per branch per year from year two, about $57 a month, with the first year included in the purchase.
What does remote screen control actually mean?
That in most cases nobody has to travel. We see your screen, take control with your permission and fix it while you are on the phone, which turns a half-day site visit into a few minutes. It is also why there is no call-out fee — there is usually no call-out.
How do I judge support before I have needed it?
Test it during the sales process, when they are trying hardest to impress you. Send a real question on a Saturday afternoon and see what comes back and how fast. That is the best support you will ever get from that vendor, so treat it as the ceiling rather than the average.
What happens when the one person who helps me leaves?
Ask it out loud, of any vendor. Good support attached to one individual is still a single point of failure — yours, not theirs. The question to ask is whether your history and your setup are documented in their system or in somebody's memory.
Is support still there if maintenance lapses?
No. If maintenance lapses the system stops working until it is renewed, and support goes with it. We would rather you read that here than discover it. The full explanation is on what you actually own.