Whether it's driving by, looking online, or stepping onto the property to rent or use a unit, what is the first thing your customer notices about your storage facility?
We all know that first impressions are important. You can never get a second one, after all. This goes for your business, as well!
Luke Westbrooks took some time on Gabfocus to discuss first impressions and what your customers notice most when they set eyes on your storage facility.
Question: "What do customers notice most about a facility?"
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:
Curb appeal, always.
From the minute you walk in, if you have light bulbs out, if you have dirty doors, if you have bed frames and mattresses laying in the center of your hallway, if you have weeds growing a foot high on your fence line.
We as managers can get property blind.
You know, we see the same thing every single day. Your tenant may only come onto the facility once a month, once a quarter, once a year, once every four years. Haven't seen it since they put it in a decade ago. Every day they come in, it's a new experience for them.
So being able to say, like, hey, this is how it is. This is how it's always going to be is a huge factor. Like, I rented here because it was clean and because it was well lit and because I was comfortable.
If you come back a week later and all three of those things are no longer true, do you now feel like you made the best decision?
Probably not.
Where if you come in and say, like, "Oh, like, I was here a year ago, place looks even better than it did last time I was here." When you send that rate increase notice, they're not going to say, "Well, what are you doing with it?" It's going to be like, no. I doubt they're going to call you and tell you, "I see what you're doing with my rate increase," but it at least allows you to say, yeah, like, "We are keeping this up. We're doing our best to maintain a quality level of service, and we're not going to slack on that."
And I think that's a huge piece.
Like, we can go back to bathrooms, and are you doing the little things? Are your corners swept? Are your bathrooms clean?
They will notice it.
And ultimately, like our first question is, they're the lifeblood of our property. They can go to any one of our competitors and get the same basic experience that we're providing."
—Luke Westbrooks
