call quality

One of the unseen benefits of dealing with a sales organization like PhoneSmart is our internal secret shopping program. Sure we have lots of clients who take advantage of our secret shopping service for their self storage properties. They enjoy knowing that someone is “watching the store” so to speak. Self storage insiders have been promoting secret shopping for a long time as a way to catch employees doing something right, maintain and improve sales technique and hopefully see a sales increase. Part of the challenge of the self storage business is that you have very little day to day control over what goes on at the store unless you are on site often.

When you use a call center like PhoneSmart, you get a very controlled environment. Supervisors and managers are close by to help reps with any questions or problems. We can hear how phone calls are going and how reps are approaching callers out of the corners of our ears as we go about our other duties. As I am typing this entry I hear one of our reps talk up the amenities on a store and urge the caller to reserve a unit now because things will fill up in the next couple of weeks.

We also record all the calls that come in. In reality we capture about 90-95% of them. This gives us the ability to pull calls for all the reps during the month and spot check live calls. Part of the reps’ compensation comes from how they score on these random internal secret shops. We pull rental inquiries to score and we pull current tenant calls. The criteria for current tenant calls is simple: be fast, be friendly and be helpful. The rental calls need to be handled according to our selling system, which requires reps to qualify callers, sell the store and ask for the order. Of course these things are always easier said than done. Most calls are fairly normal. Some calls are unpredictable, tricky to manage and test a rep’s skills. We can also tell who is doing the best job selling, who needs review in some areas, who is sounding bored and who is coming up with innovative and effective ways to sell storage.

For instance today we pulled a call from one of our best reps. The caller had a thick foreign accent and a speech impediment. And he asked a lot of questions to throw off the rep’s rhythm. It was a difficult call. Normally this rep makes friends with difficult callers and takes them off the market for the stores they are calling and makes it look easy. You could tell that the rep was tired and a little off balance on this call. The call never did go in the direction that the rep would have liked. The rep got a little frustrated and you could tell that neither the caller nor the rep were having fun. They never caught a rapport.

The rep listened to the call and no one had to say a word. It was plain as day, so the rep could do a self-correction and attitude check and get back on her feet and do the outstanding job that she normally does. These are the kinds of experiences that make good reps outstanding. If we did not listen to calls and use them for training and correction, we would not be able to offer the outstanding service that we do. How are you keeping up the quality at your store? How are you continuing to challenge your staff to better themselves? How many units do you think you rent every month because you keep reaching for better results?

Make sure to look at his self storage blog on April 27th, when Mike Scanlon, the President and CEO of the self storage association will be our guest blogger.

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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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