Having a seamless move-in basically means there are no stalls or gaps in the process for the tenant.
How do you do that? More importantly, how do you make it happen when there are multiple ways to rent, and many of your customers are probably renting online without talking to a manager?
Our expert panelists, Denise Bowley and Kevin Mullis, gave Tommy and Melissa their opinions on how to create a seamless move-in experience that benefits both you and your customers.
Question: "How do you make a move-in seamless?"
Check out the video clip below to hear their answers:
In this Gabfocus Session: Optimizing Your Day-to-Day, we sat down with Denise Bowley of Self Storage Science and Kevin Mullis of Bob White Self Storage. Their goal? Breaking down the day-to-day management of a self storage facility. They talked about best practices for rentals, move-ins, and more!
Check out the full Session to dive deeper!
Don't want to watch the clip? Here's what Denise and Kevin had to say:
I think you need to make sure they have their gate instructions, their insurance information, vital statistics about the property such as access hours, business hours, how to contact us—All of that information.
Inform them of when their rent is due. Hopefully you've got them on auto-pay, but you still need to let them know.
If you've got a QR code for a review, you want to make sure that they have that at the time.
We also give everyone a map. Now, if it's in person, one thing that I've always been adamant about not doing is not giving the gate code on a business card. And so many people do that. But to me, if you leave that card laying around or you drop it. You know you're moving, so everything is unorganized to begin with, and I just don't want our gate codes on our business card all over town."
—Denise Bowley
"Denise pretty much checked everything.
One thing I do like to do is text the information to that customer. Text or email. That way they always have that on their phone.
Of course, we all get the calls after hours, 8:00 at night. They're trying to get into the gate. What's my gate code? And so if they can just pull that up in a text on their phone from our store contact, it kind of eliminates that.
It's helped us out a lot.
I would say for those customers that are moving in during business hours, if you're a manager, that—I mean, 90% of the time you're sitting at the office waiting for that next phone call to come in—If you're out on property, just doing a property check, and you notice someone is out there sweating like you said, go grab them a water bottle out of your office.
Make that impression on them.
The more you do that, the more you build trust with that customer, the more they're going to refer people to you, and it just builds a long-lasting relationship."
—Kevin Mullis
"Yeah, and I think you have to have a manager who knows how to shift from sales to customer service within an hour because you're selling when you're renting, and when they're moving in, it's customer service.
We also like to drive by just to make sure everything being stored is supposed to be stored, that there's no hazardous materials.
So we'll drive up and ask them how the move is going and just kind of look in the unit to see what's going on."
—Denise Bowley
