Gabfocus Spotlight: What technology should you automate in your self storage facility?

Adding automation to your self storage facility can be intimidating... Where do you start? Is it worth the investment? Do customers really care? Find out what self storage experts are saying about automation!

In this Gabfocus Spotlight, AJ Osborne of Store Local, Josh Parker of Storage Authority, and Mason Levy of Swivl discuss which technologies you need to automate in order to run a successful self storage facility.

Question: "What technology should you automate in your self storage facility?"

Check out the video clip below to hear their answer:

In this Gabfocus Session: Automating Your Facility, we spoke with AJ Osborne (Store Local), Mason Levy (Swivl), and Josh Parker (Storage Authority). We had a great time discussing automation in the self storage industry.

Check out the full Session to dive deeper! 

Don't want to watch the clip? Here's what the experts had to say:

If you're not doing online rentals today, you're not participating in the market. You're just not. 85% of our rentals are from online mobile. And then we have like another 10% that say they're drive by, which means they're online mobile, too, because they drove by and they said, hey, Siri, they just saw the name of the storage facility, what's their number? And then they call us. So they're online rentals, too. So if you're not doing that, you're just not participating in really the vast majority of our entire industry.

— AJ Osborne

Communication tools. So texting, automated calls for collections, and texting even for reviews, and emails. The less that we have to fold pieces of paper and stuff them in envelopes and stick stamps on them, that whole time consuming and expensive process, do away with that. Just increasing that customer communication digitally is huge.

— Josh Parker

We talk about what we do a lot of times as being the Apple Store employee for your website. Right? Like, how do you greet somebody just like if they're walking into your brick and mortar? I think that probably is number one. I know through our data that like how many people have problems accessing their units, whether they're getting stuck inside the unit or they're trying to get in. And I'd say those two areas just seem like such areas ripe for automating. And again, if you go back to the ROI question, it's going to save you cost, it's going to increase your customer lifetime value because you just made them happy and convenient at a time of frustration. And you continually have somebody that's coming back and wanting to engage you in a way that's smart for you guys, too.

— Mason Levy