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Thanks for looking at the self storage blog, our diary of the self storage business.

We recently wrote our 230,000th lead/reservation. That give us a little experience to talk about. Many things have remained consistent since we started talking ot self sotrage callers. Here is our take on what we have found.

Callers:
Most callers do not know what they need or how to shop for storage. They often assume that price should be the issue, but they don’t know what their money is buying them. Store features and amenities become a great way to show callers that they are buying more than the cubic footage of storage area. Features and amenities also give us a chance to create some value in the property to justify the cost and to differentiate the store from others in the area.

Most callers are frustrated with the entire storage shopping experience and are not storing because of a happy situation in their lives. Many shoppers have gotten answering machines, busy signals, unprofessional phone treatment and very little help on previous phone calls. Being able to be helpful while professionally selling a property brings a certain amount of relief and comfort to the caller.

Price is usually not the main issue. Most callers are far more concerned with convenience of location and with getting a clean, friendly, secure place for their belongings. Price may be the first question out of their mouths. But it is usually number three or four on their list of priorities.

The window of need is a little wider than many expect. There are many storage callers who do not need a unit immediately but want to do shopping and decision making now. The window of need seems to be about 4 weeks in many cases, but can be as long as three months. This is why you should never give up on a lead.

Callers often think they need to do comparison shopping to find the right location at the right price. What we usually experience is that a great many shoppers will make a decision now if you can satisfy their emotional needs and assure them that the store they are calling will meet their needs and expectations at a fair price. Even buyers who won’t need storage for a few months would like to decide where they will be storing in a few months. You need to take them off the market the first time they call if you can.

You will also get many people who will call you back after a pleasant initial contact and will decide to rent on the second contact.

This is why many of our clients are experimenting with ways to send us more prospective renter calls and less current tenant calls.

The Storage Market:
It is very local. Pricing varies tremendously from market to market, sometimes even within the same town. Callers generally accept this as being a part of local supply and demand issues and a part of paying for the convenience of storing close to home.

The state of Sales in self-storage or how stores sell themselves:

It appears that the standard approaches of educating and counseling callers about storage are outmoded. In a time when demand outpaced supply and most people storing were ignorant about storage, it may have been enough to let callers know your office hours and your features to bring them in to the store. Consumers are becoming shoppers. Supply is exceeding demand in many areas. People have more choices. Competition is heating up in many markets. The “build it and they will come” days are gone. Stores that do not adopt effective sales techniques will simply educate callers who will rent at the next place they call. Most storage owners are trying to create a retail atmosphere and get away from having caretakers on the site and have sales people at the site. This transition is slow in happening. Stores that are not simply being friendly on the phone but are also selling will rent more units.

Missed business:
Stores are missing a lot of phone calls. We talk to about 50 live callers on average per month in the summer for our stores on the overflow call service. Since about half of the people we talk to are current tenants, you can assume the average store is missing 25 rental opportunities in a month.

There is a wide variation in the actual number of calls we take for a store. Some smaller properties in smaller markets only send us 20 or 25 callers. And some larger stores are sending 75 or 100 callers.

Anyway you slice it, that amounts to a lot of money left behind. The bulk of the calls come during office hours while the manager is busy doing something else or while the office at the store is full of tenants and prospective renters. We also get a good amount of calls in the hour or two just before and just after opening and closing.

We also see very little late evening calls from the west coast. Many believe that people like to shop after work. The bulk of the calls we get late in the evening are from the east coast. In our experience, west coast shoppers are done shopping by six or seven in the evening.

What we don’t know is the value of talking to current tenants. Does reaching a friendly person on the phone rather than a busy signal or an answering device help a tenant stay an extra month or two? If that were true, than there would be some real value in making sure all callers got a live voice. We must assume that any excuse a person can come up with to leave their belongings in storage is a good one. If the pain of paying the bill is less than the pain of going and removing the stuff, than the stuff stays. So if the phone experience is not painful, it must help in the long run.

Driving People to the store:
The old tale says that if you can get someone in your store, you can rent to him or her. This proves to be truth time and time again. So our mission is to get people to our clients’ stores. We have found the best way to get someone to the store is to take a credit number to reserve a unit. If this option is not available, a conditional hold or a first-come, first-served reservation is good. If this option isn’t available, for instance the caller does not know for sure when a unit is needed, a site tour or visit works. When all else fails and we can’t do anything to get the caller to the store, a follow-up call from the store staff can do the job. Between the time we talk to a caller and the store calls back, the situation may have changed. Or the store manager may know enough about the local market, that this knowledge can help the caller overcome any hesitancies and come on down to the store.

Effective business models for call centers in self-storage:
There are only a few models that seem to work. We have tried many and will try more. One advantage of being a part of a company that owns 40 storage facilities, is that we can use them as a laboratory, and they can use us as a laboratory.

1- Overflow calls. The store misses a call and it goes to the call center.
2- All calls. All callers reach the call center and do not go to the store.
3- !00% of rental inquiries. An auto attendant sends rental inquiries to the call center and tenant calls to the store. This can be done for overflow or all calls.

In the overflow scenario, the call center is the back-up to the manager and is there to keep the crumbs from falling off the table. The call center can also be used to reduce staffing hours at the store during the slowest periods of the week. It is cheaper to let us handle a few calls, than to keep a person at the site during the slowest times.

In the “all call” scenario, the call center handles all issues but complicated customer service or billing issues. These issues can be sent to the store by email, fax or voicemail for the manager to deal with when time is available. This scenario is ideal for very small operations that do not bring in enough revenue or have enough customer traffic to warrant keeping staff at the site. It works well for multi-site operations that have one person running several sites. It is great for owner-operators who have time commitments outside of the storage facility. It is also good where managers are “Old School” property caretakers and the local market demands that customers get a m

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Welcome to the self storage blog, our diary of the self storage industry.

As we predicted, our phones are ringing off the hook. All week our call volume has been very brisk with a stroing spike around 10-11 am central and 4-6pm central. All our analysis has pointed to this happening. We are staffed up and ready for it. Callers are giving their credit cards left and right to hold the spaces they need.

The callers who wait until Saturday or Sunday this week may be out of luck, as many of our clients’ facilities are filling up fast.

If you do not already retain our call center services, our clients thank you very much. All the callers who got a busy signal or an answering machine at your store have reserved a space at our clients’ stores. Most of our clients are pushing revenue at this point and not occupancy. The cumulative effect of the extra rentals they gained from us over the slow season compounded by the extra rentals they are gaining now that it is busy has put them in a very good position.

If you are a client, we are thrilled to have the opportunity to create profit for you. You may not know this, but our motto is “We give excellent service to our internal and external customers while making money hand over fist for our clients and ourselves.” Not a bad goal to have.

Watch your staffing levels this weekend and into the beginning of next week. You should see the heaviest phone and walk-in traffic of the yaer. Having the last day of the month fall on a Sunday will complicate things for the end of this week and the beginning of the next. Good luck!

bye for now,
Tron

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Welcome to the self storage blog, our diary of the self storage industry. Part of being in business is dealing with problems and errors in a creative way. You know the phrase about making lemonade from lemons. We have tried to use only email in most cases to notify properties of their leads, but we will be changing that practice. Here is the whole story.

Changes in how we send leads and reservations.

In order to help you with conversion rates and make sure all leads get to you, we will now be faxing and emailing all leads, appointments and reservations whenever possible.

There will be no additional charge to clients to do this.

Here are our reasons:

1. Email is becoming less reliable as spamming, viruses and email scams become more prevalent. The more filters and firewalls in use, the greater the instance of emails not getting through. Our system makes sure that emails leave our site correctly, but once they get into cyber space, we have no guarantee that they arrive. We are seeing more instances of emails evaporating than we have in the past.
2. The faster you can follow up on our leads and reservations, the more you will rent. We want to make sure that leads are jumping up in front of your staff, twice if needed, to make sure quick follow-up happens. If you are just getting email, your staff might wait to check email. If you are just getting fax, they might wait to check the fax machine. If they get both, it will be hard to miss both.
3. If there is a problem with either email or fax at your location or ours, you have a back-up copy in addition to the listings on the phone-smart.net site. Back-ups are good.

We also post leads, reservations and appointments on your property’s page on the Phone-smart.net site for you to use as a log and as a triple check.

We continue to take steps to make sure our systems are reliable. We recently added additional servers on our email queue to make sure emails leave our site in a timely and reliable fashion.

We ask that you make sure your email security settings allow for emails from us to pass through. Our emails can be picked up as spam because we send so many and because some firewalls look at the text set-up and identify it as suspicious. We also ask that you check for the “simple” fixes, such as changes in your email address, settings on your PC and user error.

Not every issue is an external one. We recently did some reprogramming in how our emails are re-queued in the event that an email fails to send. Because we are committed to being the best “profit partner” for our clients we can be, we are always looking for ways to improve our technologies and systems. The programming had an error in it and under certain circumstances a failed email did not re-queue and failed to resend. We think we found where the problem was and should have it resolved.

There are too many good reasons to use faxes and emails together.

Thank you for your understanding. We had hoped that using email meant we could eliminate faxing altogether. But the reality is that until further advances are made in email privacy and email integrity, we will have to use faxes as well.

Thank you and best regards,

Tron Jordheim, PhoneSmart Director

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What does it take to get set up with PhoneSmart Call Center Services?

1. Buy-in up and down the line. If everyone in the organization is committed to using PhoneSmart to turn missed rental opportunities into signed leases, you will be successful.
2. Property information. We will provide you with questionnaires and forms to fill out, so we can build the screens that our reps use to sell your property. The better the information, the better we can sell your property to your potential renters.
3. Access to your staff. We need to be able to contact your staff people, particularly the site staff and their immediate supervisors in order to learn as much as we can about your property and in order to teach your people best practices for using our service. We normally have one or two people on our staff coordinating the set-up for you. We try to make it run as smoothly as possible.
4. A solid follow-up system. We can set appointments, take reservations, start applications and create leads, but it is up to your staff to finalize the leases. We can help you create a strong follow-up system if you do not have one in place. You will double the conversion rates of our leads, reservations and appointments by using a thorough follow-up system. If you are making the time and dollar investment to put us to work for you, you will want to maximize the returns.
5. Access to your dial tone provider. We normally like to place the call forward orders in order to minimize the pain you will experience in dealing with the phone companies. Many times the phone companies do the orders correctly the first time. But when they do the orders incorrectly, it can be quite a hassle.
6. Someone tracking ROI. We can give you approximate ROI figures based on what we assume you should be converting to leases. We need you to track our results carefully so we can analyze the program correctly and so we can show you how profitable a partner we are to you.
bye for now, Tron

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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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Our reps at PhoneSmart get to talk to a lot of current tenants at storage facilities. I know our main focus is to help the new rental inquiry callers rent at the store they called. But what would happen to your bottom line if you could increase your average length of stay for an extra month? The self storage association market study shows “Don’t need it any more” as the number one reason that people move out of storage. The problem with surveys is that people usually choose to answer a question in the least controversial way possible. “I don’t need it any more” is very similar to what you say when a retail sales person asks you if they can help you. You say, “I’m just looking”. “I don’t need it anymore” doesn’t tell you if the person had a bad experience or a frustrating experience and then chose to move out.

Part of our goal at PhoneSmart is to give current tenants who call a good experience on the phone. I believe storing is a basic pain and pleasure equation. If the pain of moving your stuff out of the storage unit is greater than the pain of paying, then you stay. So when current tenants vent some frustration on us, or when we are able to help a current tenant with a question in a quick and friendly way, then we have eased the pain of the experience. I would bet that each pleasant encounter with store staff or our staff increases the length of stay by one month. I also believe that a customer who complains and gets some satisfaction is more likely to stay longer than the customer who never complains. Marriott hotels did a study and found that the return rate of guests who complained and felt their complaint was resolved in a satisfactory manner was far greater than guests who never complained. So Marriott spent resources and training time on resolving problems quickly and effectively. They made problem response a top customer service priority. And you know what, their return rates took a very nice jump. So the fact that people said they moved out because they didn’t need a unit any more means a lot of people moved out sooner than they would have if your customer service response time and problem solving routines were better. The self storage association market study also said that 60% of renters stayed more than 7 months. That is powerful stuff. What if that number changed to 65% of renters stayed more than 8 months?

bye for now, Tron.

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