Key Points:
Your leads don’t want to take a gamble.
They see an Extra Space across the street from your storage facility, and they know what they’ll get – even if it isn’t great.
But experts in the self storage industry can and do stay competitive even in REIT-crowded markets. We spoke with Sarah Smith from Empire Storage about how she makes her facility an attractive choice for new leads and existing customers. It’s all about staying proactive, rather than reactive – and doing it better than the big players do.
The secret to a 5-star customer experience is simple: set expectations early and keep them. A standout facility uses a structure to accomplish both ahead of time.
It’s not enough to just hope your team offers good customer service. Facilities that stay competitive meet their customers’ needs before they ask, or to give them a quick and prompt response when they do.
Once a lead becomes a tenant, that first move-in experience tells them whether or not you’ve got things together. Are you organized? Did you give them everything they needed right away? Did they have to wait around? Everything adds up to the story a tenant will tell about your facility.
A tenant who doesn’t have to ask questions has a better experience than one who had to call you. Sarah tells us that new tenant move-ins are critical part of her daily schedule.
And it’s not just move-ins, but resolving any issue quickly, without tenants needing to wait or guess what’s coming next. And according to Springer Nature’s Journal of Brand Management, solving a problem for a dissatisfied customer can cause their loyalty to go beyond what it was before they had a problem – if you handle it quickly and well. Experts call that the Service Recovery Paradox, but in our industry, it just means that seamless problem resolution gives us a competitive opportunity.
A tenant that gets a quick call-back will feel better taken care of. For Sarah, that means having a schedule in place to respond to tenant concerns without letting anything slip through the cracks.
Response time is important, but it’s not the only thing tenants or potential leads notice. Your lawn care, your lighting, and your security cameras tell people if you’re paying attention. And seeing a manager walking around and checking on the facility shows visitors that you care about their stay with you.
The difference here may be hard to spot on paper, but tenants feel proactive service. Does your manager wait for lightbulbs to go out and replace them when they’re dead? Or do they look for flickering bulbs and replace them before it’s a problem?
And more importantly, what’s your actual policy?
But how can you resolve every tenant’s issues with the speed it takes to bring in 5-star reviews? How do you personalize customer care with an already packed schedule? Where do you find time to inspect every camera or walk the facility each day?
You take a page from Sarah’s playbook. You delegate and automate.
Or as Sarah puts it, “Leverage your team and automate with software so you can focus on customer service.”
Automation is less about reducing your effort and more about putting it where it matters most.
In Sarah’s world, that means making customer service hands-on while automating the lower-impact parts. With that automation in place, those steps become more seamless, more predictable, and more consistent.
Consider automating these steps for your self storage facility:
Once you start automating the steps that don’t need direct attention, you’re free to give customers that personalized service they’ll talk to their friends and family about. It lets you pay attention to the details – it lets you find the places your customer experience can get better and more reliable.
And instead of seeing your business moment-to-moment, you have the space to see the big picture.
Sarah puts it best: “Work smarter, not harder.” She recommends new managers make use of their teams and software to make operations smooth and so you can focus on your customers.
Customers want quick response times. They want a seamless experience. And any facility can deliver that – it’s just a matter of which tasks you automate, and which ones you put your full attention on.
A proactive customer experience at a 5-star facility finds problems ahead of time and predicts what customers need. Automation put in the right place gives new leads and existing tenants a streamlined customer experience. And with the extra time on your hands, you and your team can focus on better service handling more complex issues that show you’re willing to go above and beyond.
Make the most of a focused approach. Learn more about training a 5-star team and developing tenant relationships that lead to 5-star reviews – our elite manager series goes in-depth on both!
At StoragePug, we build self storage websites that make it easy for new customers to find you and easy for them to rent from you.
