Maintaining a clean retail store is essential when it comes to success. Clean stores improve overall customer experience, impacting sales. When your store promotes health and safety, you ensure regulatory compliance, boosting staff morale and productivity.
Clean retail stores have an impact on customer experience and sales. When customers walk into a clean store, they are more likely to have a positive impression, taking their time browsing your products, increasing the chance of them making a purchase. A dirty and cluttered store, on the other hand, can drive customer away, negatively impacting your bottom line. Customers expect to shop in a clean and visually appealing environment that is free of dust and dirt.
A clean retail store is more than visual appeal, it offers health and safety benefits. With regular cleaning, the risk of spreading germs is reduced, helping to reduce absenteeism. There is also a reduced risk of accidents, such as slips, trips, and falls, due to clutter or ignored spills.
Creating a cleaning schedule and check-list is essential to ensure your retail store remains clean and healthy at all times. This ensures all necessary tasks are consistently completed.
The first step to creating a cleaning schedule is to take a walk through your store, identifying areas that require regular cleaning. This should be high traffic areas, changing rooms, wash rooms, checkout counters, shelves, and floors. Don't forget the windows.
The art to a clean retail store is to ensure a consistent cleaning effort. Therefore determine how often each cleaning task should be completed. Some will be daily, weekly, or monthly, while wash rooms and changing rooms may be multiple times a day, especially during busy periods.
Each task must be completed in a timely manner, based on the schedule you create. Therefore you are going to want to assign responsibility for each task. This can be separating cleaning into departments, to sharing the responsibilities among employees.
Ensure your cleaning schedule and check-list includes general cleaning, such as vacuuming or mopping, wiping streaks and fingerprints off windows and mirrors, sanitising high touch surfaces, along with dusting and wiping down shelves.
Wash rooms and changing rooms require special care, due to high usage. Often these areas need to be cleaned multiple times daily. Ensure toilets, sinks, and mirrors are spotless, along with emptying bins and replenishing supplies. Changing rooms should be mopped or vacuumed, mirrors cleaned, along with wiping down and disinfecting high touch areas, such as door locks and handles.
It's important to regularly review your cleaning schedule, ensuring it is relevant and effective. It can be adjusted as needed, based on busy times, along with feedback from customers and employees.
Your staff have been hired to ensure the highest level of customer service, selling your products to your customers walking through the door. It's not uncommon for cleanliness to take second place, therefore you need to encourage and train employees to follow the schedule to ensure your retail store is maintained in a clean and healthy manner. Encouraging staff tips include:
Creating a cleaning schedule and check-list for employees to follow is a great way to ensure your retail store is maintained in a clean and healthy manner. Cleaning a retail store does take time and effort, which can take valuable employees away from their daily duties. You can partner with a professional cleaning service to carry out the cleaning function for you. For a bespoke cleaning schedule and check-list for your London-based retail store, get in touch with the expert team at Sloane Cleaning Services today.