Customer surveys are a good way to better understand what customers think about different elements of your business. While a survey in isolation isn’t necessarily reliable, conducting these surveys frequently helps to gather a pool of data from which useful patterns can emerge.
What Is a Bathroom Survey?
Somewhat self-explanatory, a bathroom survey is a survey focused on a customer’s experience in your business’s restrooms. Importantly, these surveys need to be conducted in a reasonable manner that is unlikely to impact your customer’s comfort. They certainly shouldn’t be ambushed immediately after using the restrooms and asked to fill out a survey.
One good approach is to ask customers if they’d like to fill out an optional survey near the end of their experience with your business (after their stay at a hotel or as they leave a store, for example). Your business can even choose to offer some small incentive for answering the survey, such as a small discount on the customer’s next purchase, to encourage people to take up the offer.
It’s often easiest to get helpful responses if having customers rate your facilities on certain metrics (usually out of a maximum rating of 5). For restrooms, these metrics might be cleanliness, comfort, privacy, safety, aesthetic, and smell, for example. Then, you can have a small section at the bottom for additional comments.
How Can a Bathroom Survey Help Your Business?
Many customers are reluctant to talk directly to staff members about their experience in a bathroom. A survey, especially if answers can be anonymous, helps put some distance between a customer and your business and can make the experience of giving that sort of feedback less awkward.
These surveys can help to catch details about your restroom you may have overlooked as well as just better understand how people feel about one of the most important parts of your business. The reality is that restrooms can be a make-or-break point for customers, as a restroom interpreted as dirty or otherwise off-putting can make customers feel like your business may have slacking standards in other places too. A good restroom experience is especially critical in hospitality and food businesses, where any hint of a lack of hygiene can easily cause clients to leave and review you poorly online.
Using a Survey to Improve Your Bathroom Facilities
Once you’ve conducted a few surveys, it’s time to use that information to improve your facilities. You can do this by taking these steps:
1. Identify Customer Priorities
While it isn’t a universal rule, it’s good practice to improve what customers want to see changed first. A bathroom survey can help you identify what customers actually care about, so you don’t waste effort where it may not have a major impact on customer experience.
For the purpose of a survey, a customer rating any metric a 4 or 5 should often be viewed as the same if other metrics are rating lower. Most people view both 4 and 5 as perfectly adequate or above average. Be sure to read any section asking for comments on your survey, as these may highlight issues your other metrics can’t catch.
2. Address Big Issues First
Once you know the areas where your customers are least happy, you can then start prioritizing your efforts, addressing the biggest issues first. While it may be logical to fix the metrics with the lowest ratings first, there should be some exceptions.
Privacy and safety should typically be prioritized above everything else, as these may represent real ethical and liability concerns if not fixed as soon as possible. While an unpleasant aesthetic is also certainly an issue to be fixed, this problem is less likely to cause real harm if not addressed as quickly.
3. Approach Renovations & Fixes Realistically
When renovating and fixing a restroom, time and money need to be spent wisely. At least initially, your goal should typically be to get all your metrics to be rated adequately by customers rather than aiming for that perfect 5/5 rating. This is because, to many people, 5/5 means something is fantastic in a particular area, which can be fairly subjective. It can get very expensive to renovate in such a way that you’re consistently getting 5/5s, especially if using metrics like “aesthetic.”
This doesn’t mean you can’t try to improve areas in which you’re already doing well. Improving privacy or smell can sometimes only require relatively affordable fixes for big gains, like changing restroom doors, adding white noise generators, or adopting odor-fighting measures like deodorizing drains.
4. Consider Surveys One Tool of Many
It also needs to be said that surveys aren’t the only tool you should use to maintain quality restrooms. Regular cleaning and inspection are essential, especially because some equipment problems and health and safety concerns may not be obvious to a customer who only uses your facilities briefly.
Problems should also be preempted when realistically possible. If your staff notice dust, staining, mold, or other issues that aren’t yet too severe, fix them beforecustomers start to notice. Set up a regular inspection and maintenance schedule to ensure these problems are caught and dealt with early.
Conclusion
Overall, bathroom surveys are a good way to help customers communicate issues they might otherwise not bring up directly to your staff. Many people just accept that a restroom at a particular business isn’t going to change. They may either view it as passable, so it doesn’t affect whether they visit the business again, or they view it as a negative and judge the business accordingly. Surveys help you evolve your business, so it becomes more appealing to customers over time.
Our team at Alsco Uniforms can help make the process of equipping and maintaining restrooms easier with our restroom services. Explore our site or talk to our team to learn about the many ways we can help improve the restroom experience for both clients and staff. We’re ready to help you today.