Call centers move in new renters. Messenger

In self storage, you have two ways of getting business. People either drive by your location and stop in… or they call you on the phone. Yes there is some business being generated from the internet, but it even involves the telephone. Almost every means of marketing involves the telephone. Even people who drive by your store often call first before coming in. Your current tenants see the telephone as their primary means of communicating with you.

So from a marketing stand point, you really only have two assets. 1. Your location. 2. Your telephone.

How do you leverage these assets? Most people understand how to find a good location, build an attractive facility, put up good signs and keep the curb appeal looking good.

Once you build it can you handle the calls? Many people think that the site staff can handle any and all situations that will come up at the store. You hope your store staff answers the phone in a polite and professional way and that they are good sales people. But the fact is that your staff cannot answer all the phone calls you get. You get phone calls before hours and you get phone calls after hours. You get phone calls when the store staff is already on the phone. What happens to these calls? They go to voicemail or they get a busy signal. If these are your current tenants, they will be frustrated that they could not reach anyone live. If they are people shopping for a storage unit, they will call the next storage place on their list and keep calling until someone answers the phone.

Allowing calls to go unanswered is like closing your driveway for parts of the day. Would you rope off your driveway so no one could come in for half hour intervals during the day? Probably not.

So what do you do with the over flow calls? Send them to a call center. Call centers are designed to handle your phone calls when you cannot. The technology available today allows the call center to have up to date information on your availability, pricing and specials. The reps answering the phone for you can be trained sales people who talk to self storage callers all day long and know how to help people shop for storage. The call center’s job is to help your callers talk themselves into renting with you, so that when they hang up the phone they put away the phone book and cross “Find storage” off of their to-do lists.

The call center acts as your sales backup making sure your sales calls don’t end up talking to your competitors. A soon as the call center sales reps are done talking to your caller, a report of the call is emailed, faxed and loaded to a web page for you so you can do a quick follow-up call and make sure the prospect comes in to rent. It is all quite seamless. The callers are happy to have talked to someone who could help. Your staff is happy to have rented a storage unit while they were unavailable. Everybody wins.
Sure it is fine to have someone fielding your missed phone calls. But what does it cost? Pricing structures vary depending on the provider and the anticipated call volume. But suffice it to say that in most markets you will pay for your call center service with the first rental the call center gets for you in any given month. Most storage businesses are missing enough phone calls to rent to at least several people a month from their call center leads and reservations. A storage operator could easily quadruple the investment in using a call center.

The call center is only going to be as good as the information you give them about your property. Make sure that you have painted a clear picture of your project and that the call center people know about all your best features and your competitors’ worst features. Keep your call center up to date on changes in pricing and specials. They can’t handle your calls well if you don’t give them the info they need. Make sure to let the call center know when you will be closed for business or when you have staff changes. The more the call center knows, the better they can help you rent units.

Your store staff has to be accepting of the idea of other people talking to their customers. It is sometimes hard to let other people handle your business for you, but your customers would much rather talk to a friendly and helpful person than your answering machine.

A call center can also help you predict what your sales results could be. You know how many calls go to the call center, because the call center tracks this and lots of other information about call performance. You will easily be able to come up with sales ratios from the call center reports that you can apply to your store performance so you can see whether your call center and your store staff are giving you top sales performance with your rental opportunities.

You are able to evaluate your call center’s performance in several ways. The call center will not only give you reports on things like speed to answer, average call length and answer percentages but can also send you the sound files of phone calls so you can hear how your calls are being answered. This helps you be sure that you are using a call center that is interested in giving you the best performance possible.

Using call centers to help rent more units is not a fad. It is standard operating procedure for many companies. All the largest storage companies use call centers. Most use an in-house call center. Many, many other operators use call centers, too. There are about 1,000 independently operated storage facilities currently being serviced by an outsource third party call center. There are a small number of call centers that specialize in self storage and handle calls from all around the US and Canada.

There are only a few reasons not to use a call center. If you own a smaller facility that generates very few phone calls, you can get away with forwarding your missed calls to your cell phone. This works as long as you and your family are willing to handle the disruptions a ringing cell phone can cause. It means you are never off the clock.

Even smaller stores do well with a call center. A call center doesn’t have to field too many calls to make it a profitable endeavor. Even if your call center talks to only 10 callers a month for you, they are probably going to rent 2 units for you.

How much is a missed rental worth? In most markets a rental is worth $800.00 on average ($100 a month times 8 months). So if your call center got you two rentals a month that would be worth $19,000 a year in revenue. The nice thing about a call center rental is that the revenue goes straight to the bottom line. Once the call center gets paid, you have incurred no additional overhead. You haven’t increased your electrical cost. You haven’t increased payroll. A call center can be a very profitable relationship.

It will happen that the first few weeks or few months using a call center will create a few challenges. Every store is run a little differently and it will take the call center a little while to adjust to any of your store’s peculiarities. Your staff will have to get used to having sales support backing them up. They will need to learn to get good at following up on leads that the call center creates. And your staff will have to make sure to keep the call center up to speed on any developments at the store.

After you have gotten comfortable with your call center and your call center has gotten comfortable with you, you will find that it takes very little effort to keep the momentum going. Your call