Have you heard of Barney Stinson’s Lemon Law for dating?

Dubbed as one of the most inventive ideas by How I Met Your Mother’s resident playboy, the Lemon Law is similar to the lemon laws for cars. It entitles a person to call off a date at the initial five minutes if he or she feels that the rendezvous is hopeless. Many people say the Lemon Law is harsh but equally reasonable, especially if you want to avoid bad dates.

But how does this relate to your business? Simple: running an establishment is a lot like dating. You need to attract, get to know and engage your target market if you want to build a good, lasting relationship. However, if you haven’t invested any effort into seducing your customers, they may also decide (within the first five minutes or less) whether or not to shop, eat or do business at your establishment.

So, how do you prevent your potential customers from lemon lawing you? First, take a good look around your shop and make sure these situations don’t exist.

1. Overly attentive staff – When a prospective customer enters your shop or your restaurant, you would want to make them feel welcome. However, remember that there’s a fine line between being accommodating or proactive and being pushy or overly persistent. A retail store or restaurant staff that keeps hovering or following customers around isn’t being helpful, but is actually annoying customers. Thus, it’s important to train your staff to be pleasant and helpful without being intrusive or turning out to be a nuisance to customers.

2. Nasty smell – When shoppers go to the fish or the poultry section of a supermarket, they understand that they’ll have to deal with some unpleasant smell. However, a different story can be said if a client complains about offensive odour in your restaurant, gym or office. This is a major turn-off for customers and may speak badly on your merchandise and your establishment. For this reason, hiring a professional cleaning company to keep your space looking and smelling clean definitely makes good business sense.

3. Rude, uninterested staff – They are the complete opposite of the overly attentive staff. Rude and uninterested staff basically treat customers as if they were a hassle and that they have better things to do than provide clients with decent products or services. And to say that they are bad for the business is an understatement. Never tolerate staff with rude behaviour as they discourage and drive away customers, and can even hurt your reputation.

4. Slow and sloppy service – Customers understand that they can’t always be served immediately, which is why they have to queue in for a while. But when you’re keeping them waiting at an unreasonable amount of time, you’re not only testing their patience, but you’re basically leading them to your competitor’s doors. So how do you remedy this? Possible solutions include putting efficient systems in place and hiring a sufficient number of staff to accommodate customers.

5. Dirty bathrooms – Cleanliness, as they say, is next to godliness. While no establishment has been glorified or regarded a sacred site for maintaining sparkling clean bathrooms, many customers view cleanliness as a reflection of one’s quality of products or services. Thus, if you have dirty and stinky bathrooms, prospective clients may assume that the same scenario occurs in your kitchen or your business processes in general. And nobody wants to get associated to anything messy and stinky, right?

Admittedly, though, keeping bathrooms and other areas clean can be a real challenge, especially if you don’t have the people and the time to do it. That’s where we at I-Kleen Cleaning Concepts come in. As one of the trusted cleaning companies in Sydney, we understand that businesses have different needs in terms of cleaning and upkeep. Hence, we offer a tailored cleaning plan for your establishment to ensure that no customer gets disappointed and takes their business elsewhere again. We offer retail shop, strata, gym and office cleaning services Sydney wide.

Customers are getting more practical and wiser these days. So, if you want to get picked and not be lemon lawed, be sure to offer exceptional customer service and maintain clean and hygienic premises. Of course, you can call I-Kleen Cleaning Concepts to help you with the latter!