The self storage industry has been changing fast in the last few years.
While we as an industry have been historically slow to adapt to new technology and even new ways of doing business, everything has been shifting in the realm of the customer experience, and storage hasn't been immune.
We sat down with Luke Westbrooks of Ziff Real Estate Partners to hear his thoughts on the customer experience and how it's changed in recent years.
Question: "How has customer experience evolved over the last few years?"
Check out the video clip below to hear their answers:
In this Gabfocus Session: Increasing Occupancy with a Great Experience, Luke Westbrooks (Ziff Real Estate Partners) spoke with Tommy and Melissa about customer experience. How it's changed, how to improve it, and how to use it to your advantage.
Check out the full Session to dive deeper!
Don't want to watch the clip? Here's what Luke had to say:
Coming out of COVID really changed everything. Threw a curveball into the industry and really ultimately allowed tech to kind of take its seat within the industry at a bigger table than it had taken before.
Obviously, some of this technology had been introduced into certain markets prior to Covid, but it wasn't until, you know, we go into you can't enter an office and you can't be within 6ft of another individual that you start to see the adoption and the implementation from some of the larger players about bringing tech to the forefront.
There is a double-edged sword, I think, with that application because if you built your experience on a customer service model, and now you're allowing tech to be involved in the experience, how do you make sure that your tech is providing the same experience to your customer?
And they could, and same point, they could never enter your office. They could rent it online, move in, and handle everything digitally.
So how do you take that tenant and make sure that they're still receiving the same level of service and experience that you would have if somebody come in and rented traditionally?
So the convenience of having some of this tech is huge from a customer experience point of view.
Not everybody needs to rent a unit between 9 and 5, Monday through Saturday."
—Luke Westbrooks
