The Self-Storage Call Center: Part of Competitive Management

As you will readily learn, the value of a call center is much more than an answering service. If you examine the value of a call center and see the wisdom of taking the next step, do your homework. Investigate. Like clothes and cars, call centers come in all shapes and sizes. You don’t want just another answering service. Too often these are mistaken for call centers. Some offer an operator who is working for several unrelated businesses, and has no knowledge of the self-storage business. This person simply takes messages. These types of operations are not effective for turning calls into rental agreements.

Fortunately, many types of call centers exist and provide quality service. Of course, you need the basics: a representative who is live and understands the self-storage business. It’s only natural that tenants and prospects want to speak to a breathing, friendly person when they call, not an answering machine.

The rep should be able to answer questions about rental rates, unit sizes and availabilities, special discounts, features and benefits and, most important, be able to close the deal. This way, you will be able to generate new rentals on a regular monthly basis. You may already know that it costs seven to 10 times more to capture a new customer than retain an existing one. The perfect solution is to do both.

A good call center will also provide an ongoing lead database. If a caller lets the rep know he’s not ready to commit to a rental, but would like the manager to call back at a later date, this allows the manager to follow up until the prospect makes a decision.

There are also web-based call centers that will set up a website for your facility, so you can pull up facility data online. This is extremely valuable for updating information in real time so there is no waiting period.

Then there are call centers that honor credit card transactions, a great convenience. Others offer such ancillary services as mystery shopping, which is a positive training tool to improve staff performance.