Five Ways Businesses Can Protect the Health of Customers

The health of your customers or any visitors to your premises should always be the most important thing if you’re running a business or commercial operation, whether it’s a bar, a restaurant, a hotel, a leisure facility or a retail operation. For obvious reasons, this has never been more relevant or weighed on people’s minds as heavily as it does now.

To help you protect the health of your customers when they’re on your site, we’ve picked five key things you can do in combination. Keep in mind also that these are things to help keep you and your staff healthy, too!

Regular deep cleaning 

You’ll no doubt already have some sort of basic cleaning schedule in place depending on how busy you get during the day, but when was the last time your premises had a deep clean?

Bacteria can easily make a home for itself if all you’re doing is a quick vacuum and spritz of your premises. A dedicated, deep clean from a professional company will thoroughly disinfect all areas of your business from storage rooms to kitchens, removing any bacteria with specialist equipment and chemicals. This leaves you with fresh premises where you can have peace of mind that you’re providing expertly cleaned facilities for your staff and guests.

Keep on top of any pest issues

What might seem like a small pest issue can quickly escalate. At the first sign of trouble with pests on your premises, you should contact the professionals for control and prevention services. Pests in your property can bring bacteria and disease, putting your customers at risk — especially where food preparation is concerned.

Whether you have a problem with pigeons getting into your warehouse and contaminating your goods or you’ve got rats and mice entering your restaurant, you should never delay in dealing with them.

At Pest Defence, we can provide expert services for when you need us most with our emergency call-out service available seven days a week.

Temperature control for food

Any business working with food should already be aware of The Food Hygiene (England) Regulations 2006. This requires you to control the temperature for food that can support the growth of harmful bacteria. You and your staff should be well trained in the control of temperatures, whether that’s keeping things chilled, heated or for defrosting and accepting deliveries.

The standards set in your kitchen, prep and storage areas should help to keep customers and guests safe. Any issues with food and bacteria from your establishment could result in a bad hygiene rating and, worse still, could make customers very ill.

Go contactless

It might seem like quite a harmless thing, but it’s long been proven that physical cash usually carries bacteria with it. It’s easy to see how, since coins and notes change hands regularly all day, every day, and that means you have no control over what dirt and disease has been picked up and passed on. Previous studies have found bacteria, superbugs, Listeria and even faecal matter on money, which is problematic for obvious reasons. 

If the pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that we need to adapt — and thankfully the technology to do so has been getting better. Contactless payment is more prevalent than ever, so why not make the swap and help protect your customers from those nasty, microscopic bacteria? You can still operate cash systems to help those who haven’t made the switch yet, but more people than ever have a contactless card because of coronavirus issues.

Undergo a health and safety risk assessment

As our list has shown so far, there are plenty of different aspects of your business that you need to think about when it comes to protecting the health of your customers. That’s why our final recommendation is to carry out a health and safety risk assessment to keep everyone safe. 

These assessments will examine if there are any hazards present that could cause illness or injury, how likely those hazards are to cause harm, and what action you can take to help protect people by removing or controlling the risks. This can include assessing whether your premises are in a suitable condition and whether best food handling practices are being followed.

Remember, these are just five things you can do to protect customers and staff, so there is plenty more besides this that you can do. Following these steps not only helps to protect people, but they also ensure your business upholds the highest standards, giving you a glowing reputation in your area and in your industry. 

If you’d like to discuss deep cleaning and sanitisation for your business, or if you have a pest problem you’d like us to deal with in an emergency, contact us today. We operate throughout Essex and London – including Colchester, Chelmsford and Brentwood – and are specialists in pest control and prevention.