Picture the following scenario: You have your two small kids with you while you’re shopping in a general retail store. Suddenly, your youngest starts doing the potty dance. You hurry to the store bathroom before there’s an accident. Even though the store is clean and orderly, you find the bathroom’s another story. The floor is dirty and covered in paper towels. The stalls are gross, the stall door won’t lock, there’s little to no toilet paper, and the soap dispenser is broken. Even if you normally like that store, how likely is it that you’ll return to this store after that experience? I wouldn’t want to. Imagine this same scenario in a restaurant, and you have a recipe for a grand, “brand disaster” on your hands.

Bathrooms and Your Brand

There are a lot of things that affect the customer experience in a store — and you might not think that restroom cleanliness would make all that big of a difference. For some people, though, a dirty public bathroom actually creates feelings of anxiety, fear and disgust — feelings they’ll remember. Trust me, these are feelings you don’t want to have associated with your brand. In these situations, your bathroom can take over your brand.

We’ve seen firsthand the impact cleanliness has on in-store sales. A recent study found that 94% of people would avoid a store with dirty bathrooms. Women comprise a significant portion of shoppers in general retail stores. While some people may put up with a dirty bathroom for themselves, moms are likely to never return to a store that’s too dirty for their kids. (And don’t even get me started on the germ-conscious folks of today.)

Data Must Be Visible and Actionable

In many bathrooms, you’ll see a little cleaning chart on the wall with the initials of the employee assigned to clean the bathroom that day. Those lists are then logged by the manager and eventually (hopefully) passed onto the corporate office. For companies with multiple locations, data about bathroom cleanliness gets tossed into a giant pile of someday-we’ll-get-to-those papers, while the corporate leaders that need that information are left in the dark about where to make changes. If company leaders manage to determine which stores are doing poorly, what system do they have in place to ensure all pertinent data is visible and corrective action is in place?

If you’re serious about improving the quality of your brand by making sure all of your locations are meeting brand standards, you need an easier and more efficient way to identify problems and verify solutions.

When individual store managers and employees know they’re not being held accountable, performance often becomes lax and the quality of the customer experience can decline. You start to see this in stores where the management is reporting cleanliness and conduct in line with brand standards, while customer reviews are telling a different story. Company decision makers need a way to improve accountability in each of their stores, because that which gets watched gets done.

So now we have identified three major issues that need to be resolved:

1. How are you keeping track of issues that could be identified?
2. Once you have identified those issues, how to you know if the prescribed corrective action is actually being taken?
3. How are you comparing what the managers say they do to what their customers are saying?

An Effective Solution

Technology exists, which requires no capital investment and minimal IT support, which can easily resolve each of these issues in a simple and effective way.

RizePoint’s business performance software allows managers to take the pen and paper out of the equation and get data into the hands of company decision makers instantly. Here’s how it works: Managers make their rounds with a digital device like a smartphone or iPad. Then, from the RizePoint platform loaded on their device, they’ll complete the audit forms requested by their company superiors. This data is instantly uploaded via the cloud to company decision makers, who can determine corrective action procedures immediately (or you can automate these according to the responses given). Managers are then notified instantly of the corrective action required and have to submit a report back to corporate as soon as the correction has been made.

In addition, it’s available in 40 languages, which allows managers worldwide to capture data in virtually any language they may need.

This type of business performance software allows you to address each of the three major issue previously mentioned by providing:

1. A quick and effective way of diagnosing problems
2. Measures for holding each manager accountable for completing corrective action.
3. Information so you know exactly how stores are performing when you compare them to customer reviews

Another benefit of this automated process of return and report is the ability for your company to determine which stores have the best practices already in place. Lets say that of your 100 locations, these are 30 that are nailing it every time when it comes to restroom cleanliness. You can then dig deeper and see what the best practices are, what they’re doing right, and then use that information to train the lower-performing locations and bring everybody up to the highest standard.

“Stalling” your store’s profitability is a brand disaster that can easily be remedied. Use the technology available to stop reacting and start responding today.