Restroom Cleaning In The Retail Sector: A Breakdown of The Process

By Surbhi Dixit Blog

Best Practices For Restroom Cleaning In The Retail Sector

Introduction

Did you know that the restroom facilities at your store, mall, or plaza play a huge role when it comes to your overall customer experience? That’s right; around 69% of people have had a bad experience, and 55% of customers never even return to do business with a company if the restroom conditions are poor.

More importantly, apart from its impact on a commercial retail business, an untidy restroom also harms people’s health.

Do you want your customers to have positive experiences with your business always? Are you looking into the best ways of maintaining cleanliness and hygiene at your store or mall? If yes, you have come to the right place. Let’s dive right in and find out more!

Hazards Involved With Unhygienic Restrooms

You have already seen how an unclean washroom can create negative or poor experiences for customers. Such experiences can hinder your business, sales, and brand reputation. Apart from these effects, here are a few hazards that unhygienic restrooms can cause.

An unclean restroom is a breeding zone for different types of germs and microorganisms. These disease-causing microbes can stay on surfaces for long periods and infect people who come in contact with it. Moreover, infected people can further transmit these germs and diseases to other people.
An ill-maintained restroom is also hazardous to the safety of the people. For instance, people can slip in washrooms if the floors are slippery and wet.

Identifying Unhygienic Restrooms

Did you know that restrooms take up only 5% of space in an average commercial facility, but it consists of 20% of the dirt? Furthermore, 80% of building complaints go towards such unclean restrooms.

If the restroom in your facility has one or more of the following issues, it is dirty.

Dust, dirt, and stains on the floor, slabs, handles, etc.
Wet and slippery floors.
Foul odor.
Smudges on the mirror.
Overfull or broken trash cans.
Lack of essential toiletries and supplies.

To eliminate poor customer experiences and reduce building complaints, you must clean and maintain hygienic restrooms.

How Should You Clean Your Restrooms?

Below are a few different approaches and best practices that you can follow to clean and maintain your retail facility restrooms.

To not get overwhelmed with too many cleaning duties every day, you can split or divide the entire process into small stages. These stages may include,

1. Spot Cleaning

In spot cleaning, your maintenance and sanitation staff check the restroom’s condition multiple times during the day and clean the dirty spots in this process. The checks may involve checking the availability of essential items like soap and avoiding overflowing trashcans. Ensure that you make a routine of this and follow it every day.

2. Daily Cleaning

Daily cleaning involves proper and comprehensive cleaning of the restroom. It is generally done before opening hours, or sometimes even after the closing hours, as the restroom traffic is at its least during these times.

3. Deep Cleaning

Deep cleaning usually takes place once a week or once in two weeks. It goes a notch above daily cleaning to ensure fully hygienic restrooms. Any repair work, scrubbing floors and walls, cleaning every nook and corner of the washroom, etc., are all practices followed in deep cleaning.

Apart from dividing your cleaning regime into small stages, a few practices that you should follow are,

Before cleaning, ensure that you or your maintenance staff wear protective gear, like gloves and aprons.
Always clean from the cleaner side to the dirtier side and from the high to the low.
After cleaning, disinfect the surfaces to reduce any microorganisms.
Use enzyme drain openers to avoid any clogging. Use acid drain openers only if extremely necessary.
Systematically plan and clean the restroom. Start from the inner sides and clean your way out.

Impact of Clean Restrooms

1. On Public Health

Firstly, clean and hygienic restrooms eliminate the transmission of germs, thus reducing any spread of diseases. The only way of maintaining this reduction in transmission is through regular cleaning and disinfecting practices.

Because researchers have found that, on average, you can find around 500,000 bacterial cells per square inch on bathroom surfaces in just an hour after disinfection and sterilization.

Now, not all of these bacterial cells are dangerous to our health. But developing and maintaining a clean environment in restrooms can avoid the growth of any hazardous cells and germs.

2. On Retail Businesses

Like how dirty restrooms create a poor experience for customers, a clean and hygienic one creates a positive experience. Clean restrooms help brands attract customers to their business since it builds a positive and clean brand image.

If your store is in a mall or a shopping plaza, clean restrooms may even affect your business. Research shows that 30% of customers keep cleaned sanitary facilities in mind while choosing a shopping center. Furthermore, 66% of customers also said that clean public sanitary facilities play a vital role while recommending shopping centers to others.

Conclusion

Maintaining cleanliness and hygiene in restrooms is an essential responsibility that you should diligently accomplish. It helps in creating and developing your brand name and enhancing your customer’s experience.

But the management of a retail sector is not easy, be it a single store or an entire mall. Therefore, to reduce the workload off your shoulders, we at Service Master Clean offer a comprehensive Retail Facility Management solution.

In this solution, our trained team of experts even offers a professional washroom management program. We also provide food court services for malls and even use AI and IoT for intelligent building maintenance.