The right technology can level up your storage business at every stage.
It can take a successful business to new highs, and it can help solve the problems of a struggling storage business.
But there are risks to using technology, too. Technology needs to improve things for both you and your customers. Otherwise, you may alienate and lose out on customers. So how do you make sure this doesn't happen at your facility?
Join us in listening as Raheem Amer of Mini Mall Storage breaks down how you can remove (or even prevent) any tech-related bottlenecks at your storage facility.
Question: "How do you fix customer bottlenecks with your technology?"
Check out the video clip below to hear their answers:
In this Gabfocus Session: Storage Tech Summit, Tommy and Melissa are joined by Raheem Amer of Mini Mall Storage and Storable's Chuck Gordon. They get into the weeds about all things tech, including where the industry is with tech, how to best utilize it, and how to fix some common problems.
Check out the full Session to dive deeper!
Don't want to watch the clip? Here's what Raheem had to say:
I think the biggest one that we did as an exercise is just go through the whole process as a customer. Right?
When you search for storage, are you able to find your listing pop-up? If not, what are you doing?
Marketing-wise, website presence-wise, local listing-wise? How are you driving traffic to your property? And when they do land on your page, how easy is it to rent? What's the process look like? How cumbersome is that process?
If people fall off during that journey, how do you ping them back? How do you get them back into the pipeline so they can finish the process?
And then once they rent, how do they get their code? How do they access your property?
As Chuck said, what's the access control system at your property? Right? So we have sort of invested in OpenTech, so it gives us the visibility of every gate in North America. We can open and close anywhere in the world, so it gives us the ability, even at our unmanned properties, if somebody runs into a problem, it opens the gate up. If there's a gate that goes down before a customer calls us, we already get alerted that there's a problem happening at the property, and we've already sent people in to help out with the situation.
The last thing I need is a customer calling me, telling me that there's a problem. I want to make sure that we have systems in place that can sort of scale up those exceptions so we can get in front of it.
And then once the customer gets through that, what does security look like?
Do you have AI cameras that can alert you if there's nefarious activities going on on the property? If somebody leaves something behind, we get alerts through our camera system, and then when the customer gets to the door the last inch, what kind of technology have you leveraged to get through that?
Do they need to have a live person there to give them access to that unit? Have you gone to just a tag system where something's just tagged and anybody can get into any unit? Or like we do? We use DaVinci Lock system. It's a low tech because we're in primary and secondary and tertiary markets. We didn't want to rely solely on technology to the nth degree.
So we use a low-tech but technology feature that's easily accessible through texting. And now the customer can get through that and has access to their unit.
And then at any point, we have a chatbot, we have call center, we have a VoIP phone system that a customer can be routed to whoever they need to.
If they get stuck at anywhere along those points, they can reach a live person, and we can immediately answer."
—Raheem Amer
