How to ensure your customer safety and staff safety in-stores

Convincing customers it’s safe to shop in your store is challenging business owners have likely never faced before. Amidst Covid-19, customer-facing businesses such as retail stores must implement clear, stringent measures to ensure their staff members’ and customers’ physical and psychological safety.

It is essential to develop a comprehensive strategy to decrease the spread of the coronavirus and lower the impact in stores. This involves reducing transmission among employees and onto the customers, thus, maintaining healthy business operations and a healthy work environment. You can take the following steps to ensure customers and employees feel safe in your retail store.

Ramp up your hygiene policies

Clean every surface and object regularly with disinfectant. Provide training and information on how to fight the virus to all staff and suppliers so they are up to date with standard personal preventive measures. Consider whether you should make any changes in your store to ensure that no contamination occurs.

Adjust social rituals

Many workplaces are social environments with standard rituals like shaking hands or having conversations in close quarters. This makes it important to encourage customers and employees to adopt new rituals that allow for people to have more physical space. Train employees to reduce contact during transactions with customers by standing at a distance and use hand wipes and sanitizers after handling money.

Offer hand sanitizer wipes or dispensers

Set up stations with disinfectant at the entrance and exit and throughout your store. To avoid the risk of contamination, select contactless dispensers. Ensure supply of protective equipment so that your staff is using masks and gloves at all times. Some retailers are also offering customers single-use gloves to give them a sense of security while they shopping.

Keep staff and customers informed

Stay up to date with your health authorities’ advice. It is important to develop clear and regular communication with your staff on how the situation is evolving. This includes addressing measures they must be taking to tackle the risk of infection in order to ensure their well-being. You should also communicate your strategy to your customers in-store as well as on your website and social media pages. Keep them informed of the measures you are implementing, and of any possible limitations to service that they might be facing due to the changes.

Keep track of traffic and in-store occupancy

Activate measures to ensure that there are not too many people into the store at the same time. Make sure people can maintain a safe distance as advised by your health authorities. The best way to be able to do so is to use a footfall analytics solution which monitors the occupancy level in your stores and helps limit the traffic to a safe level, all the while keeping customers informed in real-time at the store’s entrance. Shopper Value has an occupancy solution feature just for this measure.