admin fees

We have a few clients who don’t like us to talk about admin fees in our phone conversations with people. The theory is that admin fees are pretty much the industry standard, so why risk scaring someone off? If they are annoyed when they get to the store that there is an admin fee, they won’t be for long after they find out it is done at almost all stores. Other clients like us to talk about admin fees, because they don’t want people coming in and being upside over hidden fees and charges. I have found that you can also use the admin fee to minimize sticker shock. When you tell someone that a storage unit costs $179.00, but our admin fee is only $12.00 and there is no deposit, the sting of the price is lessened by the low admin fee and the “no deposit” concept.

You can try any of these approaches and have them backfire on you from time to time. So then you have to decide how you will treat admin fees for your property and go with it. One of the routines we normally do is to take a minute at the end of a reservation or appointment call and do a little policy wrap-up to avoid having the appointment or reservation blow up in the manager’s face at the store later. We tell people about lock, admin fees, insurance and ID requirements. It is rare that a “deal” will fall through because you do this wrap-up. It is far more common that a “deal” falls through at the store if you don’t wrap-up a call.

Some reps prefer to deal with some of the policy issues earlier in the call. It becomes a stylistic issue for sales reps. This may be more than you’d like to know about admin fees, but it is a subject worth considering.
Bye for now, Tron

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Disclamer: This entry is intended to promote our partner StorageMart and some or all participants received compensation.

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