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Self Storage in Florida
1300 West 49th Street
Hialeah, FL 33012
Manager: Fidel Rodriguez
Ph: (305) 826-4119
Fax: (305) 826-1562
Sate of the Art Security including individual Door Alarms
Call Fidel today for your $50 coupon!

Total Quality Assurance Services Measures Quality Assurance

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Welcome to our insightful PhoneSmart self storage blog. We offer an insider view of the self-storage industry.

Angela Perry, trainer gives advice on the need and challenges of obtaining caller information.

Self Storage in Illinois Next to Hamman Farm, on the corner of Eola & New York in Aurora, IL. Call Eva (630) 820-8785

Advanced Telecommunication at Total Quality Assurance Services

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Wendy Lane evening supervisor and long time call center rep explores a new option, mobile storage units.

Welcome to the Phone Smart blog. We share this indiser view of the self-storage industry.

Mobile Storage

Secret Shopping Blog Your inside peek

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Self Storage Search Engine Self Storage in Missouri

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Welcome to the self storage blog, PhoneSmart’s diary of its experiences in the self storage business. Today’s blog was submitted by Kay Johnson, a self storage insider. She is one of our many super telesales reps.

“The Wheel”

Sometimes as we sit in our cubicles staring at the screen and waiting for the phone to ring we may feel a bit disconnected from the outside world and from the stores that we serve. We have callers who are happy, polite, nice, sad, angry, stressed out and down right nasty. We answer the same questions call after call, day after day, and count our credit card reservations as the measure of our accomplishment. We fret over our numbers, our percents, and our evaluation scores and develop a sort of tunnel vision that wears down our spirits.

If we start to look and think beyond those numbers we can begin to see a greater importance in the work we do. Just imagine that you are a busy working mother of three needing to retrieve your extra bed from your storage unit for an emergency overnight guest. It is 7 PM and the office at your storage facility closed at 6:30. You know that the gate is working later than that but you don’t want to drive over there if you won’t be able to get in. You call the office number hoping against hope that they are working late and you might luck out. You get a message “press 1 for information” and expecting a recording you hear the friendly voice of a live person who assures you that the gate is working until 9PM.

Imagine that you are tenant of your local storage facility. It is 10 PM and you need to catch a plane first thing in morning. Your bill is due and you are concerned about getting it paid on time. When you call and friendly live person tells you that you can pay your bill online and gives the web page address.

Imagine you are shopping for a storage unit and looking for the best value. You call and call getting answering machines or people who give you a price in a bored voice and hurry you off the line. Then you make one more call that rolls to us and you get a friendly, knowledgeable person who guides you though the selection process and sends your request and your information to the manager so that they can contact you and have the opportunity to serve you.

Imagine that you are a businessman with a very busy schedule and you need to store a sudden influx of excess inventory. You are constantly on the run and cannot spare the time to keep calling if the store does not answer. You call, perhaps expecting a recording and get a friendly voice that helps you select a unit that will work for you, gets the paperwork information started and even reserves the unit you need.

Imagine that you are a tenant and you enter your unit, the door swings closed behind you and locks. You know that the managers have left for the evening. You call out on your cell phone and get a friendly person who calls the alternate number and help is on the way.

Imagine you are the manager of the store that these calls were taken for getting information that will aid in increasing your store profits by having the opportunity to talk with the one that might have gotten away and assisting customers with immediate special needs.

Imagine yourself not a small person sitting in a cubicle in fly-over country staring at the screen, waiting for a call, but at the hub of a huge wheel whose spokes reach out across North America. Imagine the gratitude of the mother of three, the person anxious to pay his bill on time and the businessman with a need, the poor soul trapped inside his unit. Imagine your value to the store that you serve.

Imagine that!

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Thanks for surfing over to the self storage blog. We try to share some great information to help you rent more units. Here are a couple of questions a new client just asked. These are probably good for all of you to look at.

First Question… We are getting CC reservations which we are following up on immediately with no response from that caller. While this is not something you can control, I was wondering how often you hear about this occurring.

Response…It is pretty standard that people are already away from the phone by the time our clients’ store staff calls back the leads and reservations we send.

This is why it is so important that we get to talk to the callers for you…they usually only devote a short period of time to their storage search and then they are on to the next thing. Whoever talks to them when they are ready to talk about storage gets the deal.

We have found that an answering machine message is effective in this case. Your staff can leave a great follow-up message for those who are already gone from their phones after we have taken the lead or reservation.

Whether you say this in person or on the voicemail, it will be equally effective in giving the person a great feeling about choosing your facility and will boost your conversion rates tremendously.

“Hi, I am the manager at XYZ storage, I just wanted to follow-up with you to say we got your reservation for Saturday for the 10×10 climate controlled unit. We have processed your $10.00 pre-payment, which is not an extra charge, but counts towards your first month rent. We look forward to seeing you on Saturday. We’ll be in the office from 10 am to 3 pm. If you need anything to help your move like boxes, supplies or a rental truck, let me know and I’ll take care of it. My name is Bob and you can call me at 212-555-1234. Thanks again for choosing WYZ storage.”

Second Question… We have gotten several reservations
sent to the stores for the completely opposite size than what they
needed (i.e. a customer wanted a 5×5, and the sheet said that your
center recommended a 20×10)

Response…When we select a unit type and then write in the manager notes “really needs (a different size)”, this means you were sold out of the size that the caller wanted. Our system only shows the units that you have available. It will not show a unit with zero available. And our sytem will not allow us to creat a lead without selecting a unit type. So in this case we select any old unit, so we can create the lead.

However, we will not tell a caller, “Sorry we don’t have what you are looking”, for and let them hang up. We will tell the caller that we don’t know what units are coming available shortly and that the unit they want may come available just when they need it. We then take the lead and send it to you so your staff people can look at their customer list and follow up with the caller to get them into the unit they want as soon as it opens up.

This is also why it is important to keep your unit mix and availability up to date. Your odds of renting to someone we can get a credit card reservation from is far greater than someone who we just create a lead for on a unit that you don’t show open.

I hope this helps everyone manage their leads more effectivbely and rent more units!

bye for now,
Tron

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You know the busy season is here when our call center reps are getting people calling them back to reserve storage units. We had one rep get two different people call her back today to give her a credit card to reserve units. They had talked to her last week and decided they better get those units reserved before the storage places start selling out of units. These were also from stores that we answer only rollover calls for. This means that the chances of those callers getting through to us in the call center was about 1 in 5. We usually answer about 20 % of a self-storage property’s phone calls.

So how many other people have we talked to in the last week or so that are calling back to reserve their units? If your sales techniques are sound, you should be renting to 100% of those call backs. Self storage trends show that people do not check out that many stores before making a decision. So if you make a good first impression and allow people to sell themselves on the value of your store, even the ones who you think got away will call you back to rent a unit.
bye for now, Tron.

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