Whether you manage your own property or employ a manager (or managers), there are many tasks to perform that take away time from other important aspects of the business.
There are ways to improve your day-to-day operations to save your managers time.
With the right software and processes, you can make life easier for your storage facility’s manager and let them focus on the things that matter most!
The days of being able to compete in a busy market with little effort are gone.
Demand is still higher than it was years ago, but there’s more competition than ever. If your managers are spending all of their time on collections, overlocking, making rounds, taking payments, and other tasks not related to sales or marketing, you’re all losing out.
This is why you need to make life as easy as possible for your manager.
Would you rather have your manager return a call to a potential lead or respond to an email to answer a routine question?
If you’re like most operators, the answer is probably for the former. The problem is that the latter is incredibly important, too. You can’t neglect your existing customers to maybe secure new ones. But you also can’t ignore new leads all of the time in favor of the current tenants.
There are ways to fix this problem (and others!), save your manager precious time, and give yourself just a little extra edge in a competitive market.
With the right technology and processes in place, these very common parts of your manager’s day can be either completely automated or made much easier. This way, they can focus more on sales and marketing endeavors, physical activities that can’t be automated, and other important tasks!
Overlocking units can be a bit of a pain.
First, you have to check which units need to be overlocked. Then you need to grab the lock, physically find the unit, and place the new lock on. And eventually, you’ll probably need to come back out and remove the lock.
And that’s not even mentioning what happens if the tenant has placed more locks than they were supposed to, taking up the lock space where you’d typically overlock.
While this might not seem like a huge time sink for just a single lock, how many tenants forget to pay each month at your facility? How many times does your manager perform this task over the course of a year?
What if you could have it all happen remotely? Better yet, what if it was automatic?
You can accomplish this with locks based on Bluetooth or other digital access technology.
The ultimate form of this solution has your access control integrated with your property management software. This way, when a tenant is late on rent, it automatically revokes their access to their unit’s digital lock (and maybe even to the main gate). Then, once they’ve paid, the access is automatically returned—no interaction from the manager is even necessary!
Remote and automatic overlocking almost completely eliminates the work required by the overlocking process.
Customer service isn’t an area you should cut corners in.
That being said, there is plenty of space for your to tighten up your customer support game and save your managers a little bit of time without neglecting your customers and delivering worse service.
For the purposes of this post, we’re talking about chatbots.
Having a self storage chatbot on your website isn’t a replacement for your manager’s customer service skills. It won’t make it so your managers are never having to interact with customers.
But does your manager really need to answer that phone call or email about holiday hours? Is their time really best spent answering the kinds of questions where they could basically copy-paste an answer from a previous conversation?
For these low-level customer service matters, a chatbot can pick up some of the work for your facility’s manager and save them time. Let your manager answer a sales-related call rather than send virtually the same message about gate hours or due dates to an existing tenant for the hundredth time.
If you’re not already sending automatic payment reminders via text or email, now’s the time to start.
First, most of your tenants will be much more responsive if you notify them this way.
Second, it’ll save your manager a lot of time and pain.
Automated reminders mean they don’t have the burden of making sure mailed reminders go out. Because these reminders increase on-time payments, they also reduce the amount of time your manager will spend making calls to tenants that have missed their payments!
These days, many people would actually prefer to rent online.
Make it easy to do, make it clear rather than confusing, and most of your customers will opt to find the right fit for them through your website.
Having a good website that attracts customers and is easy to use is critical in the modern self storage industry.
And if your website is designed well, it can save your manager a lot of time they might otherwise spend on customers that found you online and needed to call in to rent their unit.
Do you still have your customers coming into the office to finish their rental by going over the rental agreement with the manager?
Not only does this hurt your rental rate, but it’s also sucking up a lot of time for your manager.
Instead, consider e-sign!
Enabling your customers to sign their lease online means they’ll already have all of the paperwork done on their own before they step foot on the property.
This is a win for the customer and for the manager.
How often does your manager have to spend time in the morning returning calls or emails that came in overnight?
You can cut down on this with a flawless contactless rental process.
Not only is this a preference for many customers—and yes, not having this means you may be losing some rentals in competitive markets—but it also makes less work for your manager.
Instead of having to respond to overnight reservations or inquiries, your manager will only need to check completed rentals that came in overnight and ensure the unit is prepped and ready for their scheduled move-in!
You can reduce their workload even more by making use of digital locks and automated confirmation messages. Have their access codes and any related apps sent to them via email or text message so that all your manager needs to do is ensure the unit is empty and clean.
Many of these tasks are crucial to the success of your storage business. That doesn’t mean that your manager needs to spend hours a week dealing with them.
Utilize these strategies to help free up some of your manager’s time. This is especially important at larger facilities with hundreds of units that still only employ a single manager!
Save your managers time with these software and hardware tips so that they can spend more time maintaining the facility, securing difficult leads, and helping customers that have questions and concerns beyond the basics!
Learn more about running your storage business efficiently! Here are some other great resources:
At StoragePug, we build self storage websites that make it easy for new customers to find you and easy for them to rent from you.
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