CLEANING
FROM UNSEEN SERVICE PROVIDER TO BRAND AMBASSADOR
John McPherson, Soft Services Director, North, for ABM UK, discusses the changing role of cleaning in retail environments.
When you arrive at the Argyll shopping arcade, a gentleman in top hat and tails greets you with a smile. You can ask him about the shops in the arcade and the offers available at this iconic shopping destination in Glasgow. If you're looking for a particular store, he won’t just tell you where to find it, he’ll walk you there. If a guest happens to spill their coffee, he’ll deal with it. Going ‘backstage’, he’ll change into his overalls and clean the area before re-dressing in his finery and returning to his role at front-of-house.
In this, you have a picture of the role of cleaning in retail environments as it is today. Cleaners are customer service experts; ambassadors for the brands they represent who happen to have a particular specialism. It’s more difficult to recollect the cleaners of 15 years ago, to think about their role or even what they looked like. They were unseen providers of a single service.
YOU ONLY NOTICED
WHEN IT WENT WRONG Back then, just about any Operations Director would tell you that their teams did a good job when nobody noticed they were there. The general principle was that you only thought about services like cleaning when something went wrong. Historically, when walking through a shopping centre, you probably wouldn’t have given cleaning a moment of your attention unless there was a spillage on the walkway. Cleaners themselves did their work outside of opening hours so they were out of sight, out of mind.
22 | TOMORROW’S FM
THE DYNAMIC CHANGE Over the past ten years, the dynamic
of shopping centres has changed. This has driven a transformation in the model for cleaning service delivery, and for the role of cleaners. No longer simply retail outlets, shopping centres have become places to eat, relax and play. To accommodate these new services they are open for longer too. Rather than the traditional nine-to- five, they are now open anywhere from 9am to midnight.
“LEAVING THE
CLEANING UNTIL CLOSING HOURS
DOESN’T MAKE SENSE ANYMORE.”
This ‘new brief’ for shopping centres means that leaving the cleaning until closing hours doesn’t make sense anymore. A single, overnight clean starting at midnight wouldn’t sustain the property throughout the day.
PEOPLE BUY WITH
THEIR EYES Cleaners are responsible for the first and last impression of visitors from the moment they park the car to the time they leave. It’s a visual service, which is particularly important in retail environments because people buy with their eyes.
Cleaners need to be working all the hours that guests are visiting the centre. Both experiencing a clean shopping environment and seeing
the cleaners at work supports the positive perception of a centre, and keeps guests coming back.
BRAND AMBASSADORS When cleaning and cleaners became
ever-present, the role of a cleaner changed too. Today, they should be as much a part of the guest experience as shop assistants, waiters and concierge staff, as well as other service providers such as security officers, car park attendants and landscapers.
As ABM UK’s Director of Soft Services for the north, my team looks after the 22 largest retail parks and shopping centres in Scotland. Our employees should be indistinguishable in their approach to guests from anyone else in a shopping centre. That means they can talk through and offers available on a particular day or that they could walk any guest to a particular shop they are looking for at the centre. They must be brand ambassadors, bought into the ethics and core values of the clients we serve. That’s clearly a departure from the days of the unseen service provider.
A TRAINING APPROACH FOR THE
MODERN CLEANER ABM prides itself on self-delivery. Getting it right requires extensive investment in the training of our people. Clearly, technical skills development is an important component part of our training programme but every single course contains a customer services component.
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