The volume of unsolicited mail in this country appears to be out of control. In any given week Cochran Road Self Storage receives a dozen mailings from one large phone provider who promises a great business DSL product.

We finally bit the bullet and tried bringing in a redundant line from them, instead of our dependable existing company for various reasons. What a mistake that was! They didn’t deliver on what they promised. Yet I am inundated almost daily with their mailings to various forms of our business name.

Like the old adage, do things perfectly and your customer may tell one or two people. Do something wrong and they’ll tell 10 people about the bad experience. I won’t name the company, however their website promises the moon, the stars and the sky, but they didn’t score a victory in my book.

In visiting various storage websites the same thought crossed my mind: Do facilities really deliver what they promise? Do you? When was the last time you actually viewed your own company’s website?

The home page for our facility is our “Internet Specials” page. Whether there’s a special happening or not, our coupon is still there. I don’t have to update employees if a change is made overnight; it’s there for them to see. They should be aware of up-to-the-minute information regarding the property.

Do your employees know what’s on your website? Do they even have access to the Internet? If not, you should, at the very least, have a training day and printouts of what’s on your website. How embarrassing would it be if an inbound sales caller were to know more about your website and online offers than your own employees? Can you even imagine that?

Case in point: phone a couple of facilities in a neighboring city after viewing their websites and ask a few Web-related questions. You may be surprised at what you learn—or don’t as the case may be. I know I’m going to ask my employees to review our website more often after the few calls I made.

We’re far from perfect here, however this is just one more point I stumbled across in my quest for customer service from that big unresponsive, difficult-to-reach phone company. There’s always room for improvement, and there’s no excuse for promising what you cannot or had no intention of delivering in the first place.

If your site is over-inflated with promises, maybe you should tone it down a bit. Our customers are intelligent people and will figure it out if your site is full of hot air or something equally distasteful that you cannot or have no knowledge or intention of delivering.

If you're unsure what should be on your website, head over to Self-Storage Talk and join the discussion. There are several threads about websites, online marketing and more.