Do you know about PhoneSmart?

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What is the PhoneSmart?

PhoneSmart is a wholly owned subsidiary of StorageMart. StorageMart is a company with assets of 300 million dollars that currently operates 46 storage facilities. The owners of StorageMart, the Burnam family, formerly operated Storage Trust. One of the larger storage businesses in the country, Storage Trust contracted with a third party call center to handle its incoming calls and received many thousands of calls a month. PhoneSmart was created based on the experiences and successes at Storage Trust.

PhoneSmart Call center is a solution for two of the most perplexing problems in the self-storage industry.

1. Facility managers can’t answer all the phone calls their facilities receive. Managers are often out on the site showing units or doing facility maintenance. When they are in the office, they may be walking a new tenant through a lease, visiting with a current tenant or making past-due calls. Mangers can miss calls; and potential renters call before and after hours, too. Do you know how many calls your stores miss? It might be a painful answer.

2. One of the primary ways people find out about a storage facility is through the yellow pages. I don’t have to tell you how large a chunk of revenue a facility’s yellow page advertising eats up. It is enormous. What does it actually cost to get someone to call your facility? A lot. If your manager can’t get to the phone for one reason or another, is the caller going to call back… or move on to the next ad in the yellow pages? How much money do facility owners spend to help their competitors fill units? Even if you get a lot of your renters from your location, most people call first before coming in to your stores.

At PhoneSmart, we turn those missed calls into profit. PhoneSmart is a roll-over call center. Any time the manager can’t get to the phone, or is already talking on the phone, the new caller is forwarded on to us.

We have made a huge investment in the latest telephone technology. Our technology enables us to separate the people calling about renting a unit from the people calling to talk to the manager about issues other than a new rental. If the person wants the manager, that call is forwarded to the manager’s individual voicemail box. The manager can retrieve the message when things calm down at the store and then return the call.

Our system also determines the exact facility the caller had dialed and brings the current information for that facility up on the computer screen in front of the sales person answering the phone at PhoneSmart.

We can then walk the caller through a consultative sales process. The caller makes a reservation confirmed with a major credit card, which is forwarded to the store manager. If the caller does not have a credit card or is unsure of a move in date, the information is automatically faxed or emailed to the manager for timely follow-up. We have developed several excellent ways to drive callers to your store. We can help you integrate systems and procedures that will convert as many of our leads into rentals as you possibly can.

PhoneSmart is not an answering service. PhoneSmart has many advantages over an answering service type or customer service type call center. Because we focus on the rental calls, we can reduce the total cost of call center services to our clients. Forwarding tenant calls to the manager means the manager can deal directly with people she or he is on a first name basis with. When we do talk to your current renters, we can give them a great customer service experience, by answering basic questions for them or referring them on to the store manager.

Because we ask for a bonus from our clients when we write a credit card confirmed reservation, our motivation is to maximize every call. It also means we can offer performance incentives to our reps. Other call centers hire lower wage “operators” or “customer service reps”. We hire sales people and invest in their training. Therefore, we not only give a professional presentation of your facility, we also sell it. Our job is not to clear calls, but to send people to your store. The credit card confirmed reservation is a great way to get people to go to your facility.

Another benefit of dealing with PhoneSmart, is knowing we are a part of a successful storage business. We know about self-storage. We have also made the commitment to be a leader in call center technologies. Because of our commitment to technology solutions, we have an experienced IT expert on staff .

If we can create just one new rental a month that a facility otherwise would have missed, our service pays for itself in almost every instance.

What results can you expect from us?

PhoneSmart has been taking calls since December of 2000.

StorageMart compared total occupancy rates in June of 2000 for their established, mature stores with total occupancy rates for these stores in June of 2001. There was a 7 percent increase. The only operational difference was PhoneSmart. I’m not sure we can claim all seven points, but we were certainly responsible for several of them.

In 2002, PhoneSmart was credited with 16% of total rentals for 34 StorageMart stores, totaling over 2,500 rentals. If we can talk to people about your site, we can help you rent units.

PhoneSmart talked to over 100,000 self-storage callers in 2002 for all of its 40 plus client companies. That adds up to a lot of experience, experience you can put to work for your company.

PhoneSmart sent its 200,000th lead/reservation in April of 2005. Our experience in turning inquiries into rentals is second to none.

PhoneSmart also offers a secret shopping service to help you make sure your phones are being answered correctly at your property. We have recently added a sales lead follow-up service to help you make sure you are renting to as many of the leads we create as you can. And our sales training material will help your staff sell as well as we do.

PhoneSmart is also actively preparing for the future. We have a redundant phone center that is located on the other side of town on a different spoke of the phone and utility grid, so that in the event of service disruptions or disasters, we can continue to provide great service to our clients through our back-up center. We continue to develop our technologies to be able to offer superior service for years to come.

We have been providing secret shopping services to clients for 3 years. Some use us just for monitoring. Some use us for moving their sales and customer service programs forward. We are mystery shopping professionals who know how to mystery shop. We give your staff a chance to shine and give you a chance to make some real improvements. This secret shopping blog is one way to help people learn more about the secret shopping business.

To find out more about PhoneSmart and how it can help you profit from your missed calls, email Tron Jordheim, the PhoneSmart director at tron@phone-smart.net or call 1-866-639-1715. Forgive us if you are put into voicemail, we may be busy writing a credit card confirmed reservation for one of our forty plus clients. Or you can find us at www.phone-smart.info .

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Disclamer: This entry is intended to promote our partner StorageMart and some or all participants received compensation.