What drives self storage customers nuts

What drives storage customers crazy?

Tron Jordheim, PhoneSmart

One of the reasons we try to give good customer service is so our customers become low maintenance. There is a cost to each customer contact. Yes, you like to have interactions with your clients to re-sell them on your store, sell them ancillary products and services and try and keep them longer. But there is a cost to each customer interaction. If you had half the interactions with your customers in the future as compared to now, you could save money on labor, materials and electricity to name a few items. So how do you reduce the contacts and the cost per contact? Find out what drives your customers to contact you and try to reduce those incidents. At PhoneSmart, we field rollover calls for rental properties. Most of our clients are self-storage facilities. Our main goal is to talk to rental inquiries and help them reserve a unit. But about half of the people we talk to are current tenants calling about some issue or another. I’ll share with you the main reasons current tenants call, so you can take steps to avoid these calls at your property.

1. To pay a bill. Many of your customers don’t know what they owe or how to pay. Make it easy for your tenants to know their monthly amounts and make it easy for them to pay. Use automatic credit card charges and automatic check withdrawals whenever you can to make paying easy. I know many of your customers pay cash and need to come down to pay. Have extra staff available the first couple of days of the month if you are on a monthly billing cycle, so you can take payments and answer the phone questions. We often talk to tenants who have called multiple times without being able to get through to the store or without getting a call back after leaving a message.
2. Locked out. We talk to a lot of people who don’t think they should be locked out. Some say they did not know they were late on their bill. Others say they have paid and should not be locked out any longer. How are you alerting your tenants that they are late on their bills? How are you taking payments from late payers? How are you re-activating access for people? Yes, some of your tenants are not paying attention and no matter how streamlined and user friendly you make the payment, late payment process, some people will get confused. And some people will get mad at you because they forgot to pay you. It is weird, but that is how people are. So the challenge is to make the denial of access and the re-activation of access process as easy as possible, so your tenants can only be mad at themselves about the process and have no reason to get mad at you. At the same time, you have to learn to deal with the difficult late payers and kill them with kindness.
3. Phone tag. Part of the reason our clients hire us is that it gets busy at the store and the manager cannot catch every phone all. This can be frustrating for tenants who have issues we can’t help them with. Many issues are easy to handle for us and the caller is happy with the experience. Some issues only the store manager can handle. And so Phone Tag begins. Most of the time it is just legitimate time issues. The manager calls the tenant when the tenant is unavailable. The Tenant calls back when the manager is unavailable and pretty soon everyone is annoyed. Many times a thorough message from your staff with clear instructions will help resolve the issue. Sometimes creating self-service options will help the tenants make payments, get account information, etc. Sometimes you just have to get the tenant to come in to the office to resolve the issue. Look at your phone tag incidents and see how you can take pro-active steps to minimize phone tag. Email is a great way to handle questions and issues without having to worry about phone tag and scheduling call-backs. Use it to its fullest. An anti-phone tag strategy will mean less frustration for everyone involved and time better spent.

If your operation could take steps to deal with these three issues, you would go a long way in having happier customers who stay longer. You would go a long way in better managing your staff’s time, which all translates into more income with less hassle. Not a bad plan.

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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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