How to make a hygiene regime to bring your customers back, Trust Pilot and PR lessons from The Office.

Hello, welcome to the Speak PR podcast with me, Jim James. I'm your host today and I have been running a PR firm for over 25 years and on this podcast I like to share information and insight that I've got about how companies like yours can get themselves noticed without spending a lot of money. Now, this morning I had a conversation as part of a webinar about encouraging customers to get back to work and to shops and in this particular case, how to get them to go back to sports therapy centres. Now, the whole area of business where the hands are on and people are close to each other, whether it's sports or restaurants or lifestyle, obviously has one major obstacle right now and that is a lack of confidence. There's a lack of confidence in the consumers about places being safe. So it's really the hygiene factor that is going to be the topic for this today's talk and how you can rebuild trust in your organization's handling of hygiene. It used to be that before COVID we didn't even think about hygiene unless maybe we look at the star rating for the kitchen on a restaurant. But the assumption was of course that all establishments conformed to the necessary standards. Now the problem is that the standards have all been increased and people don't necessarily trust that the new standards are being followed. But also companies and organizations, and people like physiotherapists for example, have now to communicate that they've actually taken action and that they are safeguarding the well being of their staff and their customers while when they're moving and going into their facilities. Now one of the observations that came out today was that cheaper, less regulated physiotherapists have been starting to open and taking on business, but without really heeding all the new government guidelines. They have maybe less expensive facilities and they've got customers who are maybe not as interested in the, in all the frippery and all the normal security and sanity of the hygiene factors. So the problem with that is of course that these unqualified professionals are taking business from the qualified ones. So in the same way that the Internet has enabled fake news to become commonplace, it's allowed furus to look as professional as the professionals. Now, I'd never heard the term a furu before and I have to thank Brian Hill for this, but it's, it's a term that I looked up after the talk. And a furu actually started off as a Norwegian, a Norwegian word, the furu, which is actually a kind of pine tree. So maybe the original expression comes from not Being able to see the wood for the trees. But now a furu is a fake guru. So it's someone who is saying and professing to be good, but actually they're not. And this is applying across many, many industries, from financial services to physiotherapy, to coaching, and anywhere where individuals are practicing with or without qualifications. Now the International Coaching Federation, which is the largest organization in the usa, believes that the number of coaches has grown to somewhere around 55,000 worldwide. But I think that's even a little bit, a little bit small because in the UK alone, the number of employed and self employed sports coaches and instructors has been reported by Statista as being over 109,000. Okay, so we've got over 100,000 people in the sports field, physio coaching instructors, and there are some 70,000 physiotherapists alone employed in the UK. So this means that we've got at least 150, maybe 200,000 people who right now are looking at how to get their customers and their patients to come back into the clinics. Let's not even talk about yet. Dentists, for example, and any other service that you might run that involves some proximity between the person providing the service and the client. So the question really now is how do, how do companies and facilities reassure their customers? And as I reported on an earlier podcast, some only 24% of people, employees, are actually feeling comfortable going to work themselves because they don't trust that the facilities will have the certain hygiene levels that they need to keep them safe. So hygiene now has become probably the biggest issue facing all companies, especially those in the service area. So how do we do that? Now the army, apparently, according to Brian Hill, who was in the army, has a term safe, where they use the prefix safe, for example, a safe drill, a safe round, a safe guard, a safe house. And that seems like a nice terminology, terminology that we can be using in our marketing and our public relations about our facilities being open and being safe. Now how do we do that? How do we do that? Well, I think that there are a few ways, ways. One is to start to actively highlight what programs you've got in place around hygiene. Now the growth market in the UK is one of them, is hygiene and cleaning. Now it's possible to start to use the fact that you're either partnering or hiring professional janitors and cleaning services to be part of your marketing proposition. Now there's a company, for example, called Nesbits out of Bristol that provides a huge range of authorized and high quality cleaning products. So if you don't want to actually hire a janitorial service, you want to do it yourself. Could you be using established brands that other consumers are already familiar with? If you, for example, are using Rubbermaid or you're using Dettol, how can you create the reassurance for people coming or thinking about coming, that you're investing in hygiene? Because investing in hygiene is investing in their well being. And that's really now what this is about. It's about reassurance. Now it's also possible to then start to demonstrate to people that you're doing that. Now something that has become quite interesting at home could be something that's done in your office and that is to be recording yourself filming your cleaning, or for example, posting photographs of the facility being cleaned. In Singapore, where I live for a number of years, in the, in the toilets, also in Hong Kong, at the toilets of the airport, there are in, there are little monitors and you click a smiley face of, you know, how clean is, is my toilet. Now they're doing real time monitoring, obviously, and cameras. So it's one opportunity to start to demonstrate to your consumers or your customers or your patients your regime for hygiene. So this term just made that up. Actually, the regime for hygiene as a theme for some marketing is one that could really resonate right now. Now it's possible, for example, to install cameras in the reception area. It's possible to have people see the cleaning taking place. And certainly in China, where I lived as well, for 12 years, there were large televisions in the reception of the restaurants. And the televisions were showing, not tv, but they were showing the people working in the kitchen. So they would televise in real time the staff, in order to show you that they're all clean and that they're washing the knives and the bamboo and so on. So streaming information from the office or the factory or the patient care area is one option, one opportunity. And if you are then partnering with a well known brand, a catering or a cleaning company, make sure that they've got the same certification as you're aspiring to have and you create this alliance of cleanliness. Okay, so the hygiene regime has an alliance of cleanliness and you're lining all the partners up using established brands that consumers and patients recognize and trust. Don't try and build the trust in the, in the cleaning products. That's not your job. But what you can be doing is showing people that you're using these established brands and that you've got a system and a regime. Now you can also use, for example, hub staff have got a time tracking app. Now they have a time tracking app for cleaning staff with what they call geofencing. So what it means is when staff go into a particular facility, it tracks that they've gone into that facility and it creates metrics, it creates data and that data can be streamed in real time to your website, for example, or even to a Facebook live. So it's possible then to stream your results in video, but also the data of the cleaning crews actually going in. Now in Singapore, the national environment agencies issued a sanitation and health advisory and they have an infographic which they have created for their staff. And they've created that also for the stall holders in the hawker centers, which are these outdoor feeding centers where it's of course possibly a haven for something like Covid. So it's not just about you having a plan, it's about making sure that all of your staff have a plan as well and that the staff know what the habits are. Because you're only going to be as clean as your cleanest member of staff. And you're going to need to make sure that everybody is educated about the regime. But, but also if you decide to film, for example, take pictures, it's a good idea to make sure that everybody signs a form to acknowledge that they know that there is filming taking place in the facility. Because you don't want to have a privacy issue. Needless to say, you can't film people in bathrooms. You can only take still pictures and not of people there obviously. But so with the technology comes some responsibility to inform people. But one of the ideas as well can be to actually install, for example a visitor management system. At the moment, if people come into your facility, what do they do? Do they have to sign on a piece of paper? Do they have to stand next to somebody? Well, visitor management systems where people come in and now you can get them where you simply scan a QR code, a quick response code. Modern digital offices have got these. Well, receptionists can have them because now you don't necessarily need to come into contact with people. You can have people come and they can receive a prior booking just like they would do with Eventbrite for example, and they're scanning. So we're replacing some of the old fashioned sheets and enhancing security at the same time as improving hygiene. So this regime for hygiene go goes throughout the whole process now with social, mobile, analytics and the cloud, what's called smac, the opportunity for collecting and sharing information about what you're doing is greater than ever. And you don't have to be in the facility anymore to be collecting that. So There are some 2000 IP camera models available on the Internet. So they come from big brands like Panasonic, D Link, Sony. And in Beijing I installed one of these cameras, very low cost, 20, 30 pounds. And it would take pictures when anybody moved and it would send those pictures up to the Internet and I could monitor them myself. So if you've got staff going in to do cleaning and you want to make sure that you know that they're there, you can also install some technology in your, in your office or your facility to track them going in. But also that then creates proof point that you have got that. Now what you can also do of course, is to start to get customers who are now coming back in to display a confidence with your facility by using a platform like Trustpilot. Now, Trustpilot.com is used by over 300,000 businesses worldwide apparently, and they have over a trillion ratings. Now these ratings are displayed on your website. They're also displayed on Google. So it means that you can verify reviews from people that are coming to your facility, for example, and that can also then contribute to your Google seller rating. You can upgrade and you can have automated review invitation emails so that customers can leave feedback as well. And they can get a friendly email reminder, so you even get more reviews. So your Google seller ratings, your social sharing, they even have a widget tester so you can run an A B test on your website to see whether if you have this and don't have this trustpilot on your website, how do people respond and do they buy more or less or make more bookings? Now, trustpilot as a technology is free for the basic package, so you can actually have trustpilot.com on your website for free. Obviously it works if you've got enough people. But you can also use this if you've got people coming into your facility or your studio or your practice and get people to give a reassurance. Because as I shared the other day about the banks and the new startup bank called Counting Up, I was looking for reassurance by other people. It's not enough to read their own pr. What I'd like to do is to see what other people have said about them. So you can have with Trustpilot, £165amonth if you want to add in some of the bells and whistles, including more email, for example, and you can upgrade to £449 if you've got a really big organization, maybe a chain of restaurants, for example, a chain of hotels, or a chain of practices and physiotherapists. So you can get reviews, you can showcase your reviews, you can manage reviews, and you can analyze reviews. So this is all geared towards demonstrating that your hygiene regime is in practice and that other consumers and customers or partners or staff are coming and buying into what you've created and are feeling safe. And this is really going to be a key part of getting people back into the system and back into life in general. Now, of course, one opportunity that may come out if you decide, for example, to go down that path of streaming the content, is you might create a new version of the Office. Now, the Office, for those of us that remember we started all the way back in July of 2001, so it's nearly 20 years old now. Created and written and directed by Ricky Gervais and Steve March Merchant. Now it's it's one of those great success stories in the UK that only ran two seasons, so it only actually had very low ratings. So if there'd been a trust pilot for the Office, it wouldn't have done very well. It actually only had two seasons, but it went on to become internationally known. And recently in America, the American Office became the Internet's favorite show. And amazingly enough, the outpost of the Dunder Miffin Paper company as an office show is worth a hundred million dollars a year. So now the business of watching other people doing their business has become a bigger business than the business itself. And maybe that is an inspiration to you, because it could be that the inspiration of taking an initiative on the health regime and making hygiene your regime and making social sharing and getting people back to work could be a, a lesson that you can grow and share and actually monetize at some stage for your own business. And definitely any of the winners right now will be companies that other people want to talk to. So it'll be great for your own pr. So thank you so much for listening to this episode of Speak pr. My name is Jim James. If you like the show, please leave a review. There are many other podcasts in the series and I invite you to listen to those as well. If you got any comments or views, please do send them to me. I'd be more than happy to listen and to respond. Thank you for listening to the Speak PR podcast. My name is Jim James and until we meet again, I pray that you have good health, wish you a profitable business, and ensure that you keep on communicating. Sa.