It has happened to nearly everyone, you walk into a public restroom in a restaurant, a store, an office, and your senses are suddenly appalled by sights and smells. Or let’s be honest here, by the trash and stink! Well, as a business owner, let this be a lesson to you. The cleanliness of your bathroom or the lack thereof, can make or break your business.
Social media has recently experienced a run of bathroom rants from customers of restaurants, stores, and businesses for their horrific restrooms. In most cases, it happens in small businesses, but chains, franchises, and big box stores are not immune. If your company is offers services, goods, or hospitality to your clients and customers, your restroom impacts their perception of your company across the board. It can become a rant on social media or the topic of conversation when your customer tells his or her friends and family about your business.
Your Image is At Stake
In today’s business language, this means your brand is at stake. Customers and clients, who use your restroom facilities, will undoubtedly equate your bathroom’s cleanliness with your business overall, meaning a clean restroom effects your repeat business and your bottom line.
Bathrooms, especially in small businesses, often get overlooked. Tiles crack. Mirrors are broken. Paint and finishes get dirty. Floors aren’t mopped to shiny perfection. Soap dispensers fail to get refilled. Paper towels miss the trashcan and hit the floor. Cleaning isn’t up to par and the bathroom often ends up worse than those awful porta-potties at outdoor events!
You may even see the bathroom as a nuisance while still being a necessity that your customers expect. But, in reality, your bathroom either puts a seal of approval on your business or a ‘do not enter’ sign. If your bathroom is the latter, smelly and in disarray, you need to do all you can to save your image.
Steps to a Clean Restroom and a Spotless Image
Keeping your business’s restroom clean and your image spotless is simple with these easy tips:
- Keep the bathroom well-stocked – toilet paper, soap, towels.
- Clean the walls. Clean the toilets. Clean the sinks. Clean the doors. Clean the mirrors. Clean the changing table. Every day, multiple times if needed.
- Repair the tiles. Repair the mirrors. Repair the hardware. Repair leaks. Repair and repaint the walls and ceilings as needed. Keep everything in good working order.
- Change the lightbulbs.
- Make sure the bathroom door locks. Privacy is a must!
- Ensure the bathroom smells fresh, whatever it takes.
- Establish a cleaning schedule for your employees, that includes routine clean-up and restocking. Depending on how often your customers use your facilities, this should probably be every hour or every two hours at the very least.
- Rotate the cleaning schedule among employees, daily or by shift. No one likes the job, but it has to be done, and as the saying goes, “many hands make light work.” Offering an incentive to the bathroom cleaner each day won’t hurt either!
Your restrooms should be a source of pride for you, a place even the most sensitive customer can go and be satisfied with your cleanliness. Following these steps will keep your bathroom clean and your image spotless. Your efforts will be rewarded by positive social media reviews and word-of-mouth referrals.
If you find you and your employees are so busy, the bathroom cleaning duty cannot be easily resolved, call on the team at Tidy Team Cleaning Services to do the job for you. We offer customized cleaning plans to meet all your needs, from mirrors to toilets, we’ve got cleaning down to an art.