Balancing self storage automation and the human touch

Stored in self storage. Okay, we'll just start recording. So welcome everybody. We're going to be talking today about automation. It's a bit of a buzzword as I said. Helps, helps operators save money, improves efficiency, can make life easier for teams. But I think often in the industry automation can be reduced a little bit to things like gate access or alerts. And you know, sometimes we look at operators who are hiding prices behind contact forms or insisting on phone calls before they can move in. And you know, sometimes there's a belief that human conversation can be the only way to grow your sales or grow your basket size. So we're going to dig into this a little bit on this call, dig into a bit about into how automation can be done right, not just what automation is, but how it can be kind of implemented intelligently into your yourselves towards business. So I'm really excited to dig into this with Rennie and Brian and just before we do, I just want to mention one quick thing which is the, the summit, the store summit which is on the Tuesday just before the, the FIDESA kicks off. So if you're going to come, Rennie just reminded me to encourage everyone, if you're going to come along, make sure and buy a ticket for the. For fidesa. You can still do that, I think at the FIDESA website. We're going to be kicking off the summit at 11:30, actually starts around 12 with a couple of talks so please feel free to come along. We've got some food, refreshments and even a couple of drinks will be available to lubricate everybody just before the facility tours start. So feel free to come along. We're also joined by Jimmy, he's the. I'm actually quite intimidated by this because he. I've been watching him play rugby for years and years. So Jim is a former Ireland rugby captain, won the Six Nations, I think three times, former lion and he's going to be talking about his rugby career and some other stuff around his role at Stripe as well. So should be a lot of fun. Okay, Rennie and Brian, thanks a lot for joining. Can, can you please start with introduction? Brian, do you mind going first?

Yeah. Thank you for having me on. So my name is Brian and I started Storage Den which is a remotely managed facility up in Aberdeen and it's been that was opened March 24th so it's kind of got to a mature stage at the moment and just ticking over.

Thanks Bran. Rennie, I don't think you need to introduce yourself but you maybe you might as well.

My Name's Rennie Schaefer. I'm the CEO of the Self Storage Association UK and I also run fidessa, which is the European Federation Self Storage Associations. So I've worked with lots of different operators that have done automation in lots of different ways and lots of different levels and yeah, happy to kind of talk about that and some of the things that work and some of the things.

Great, thank you very much, Rennie and, and Brian, thanks a lot for joining us. So we're going to dig into some questions and feel free to, if you've got any questions of your own, feel free to, you know, type them into the question bar and we'll hopefully have some time for questions at the end as well. Okay, so first of all, question for you, Rennie. I think when people think about automation, sometimes they think about robots replacing humans, but in reality I think it's about freeing humans from repetitive admins so they can spend time where it really matters on things like sales and even dealing with customers at times when maybe they want some empathy and only a human connection can work. When you think about or talk about automation, what do you mean exactly?

Yeah, automation is about improving systems. It's about improving the processes within your business. Now, in some cases that means removing staff. In some cases that means supplementing staff. In some cases it means it's doing things that staff simply can't do. But yeah, automation isn't just about efficiencies in terms of, hey, we're going to reduce our staff costs. Automation can also be about improving the customer journey and particularly as we move into a more personalized world where people expect a personalized service and a personalized answer and they want to feel special. Automation can really help with that. But it can also help do things when people can't necessarily do it. It allows you to interact with your customers 24,7. It allows them to potentially interact with the store 24,7, but it also allows your staff to, to do things in terms of data analysis and stuff like that that allows them to do their job better. So, yeah. Does automation mean a reduced headcount in some cases? In probably many cases, yes. But does it mean that it's removing staff altogether? No, it means it's redirecting staff into things that they do best and they probably enjoy more and like you said, take out a lot of that kind of repetitive duty. But I think automation is just such a broad concept and you can't just pin it down and say, hey, you know, this is what automation is to me, because what automation Is to me will be different to what automation is to someone else.

Absolutely. I think one of the things that I think is the thing that, the way I think about it is there's a time for automation and it's around processes and things that, where you can enhance the customer experience. But there's a time whenever you can't replace the human touch sometimes with people at certain times in the sales process at the right time, maybe for an upsell, sometimes a human, a human is right. So I think automation, like I said, so such a broad topic, it's really.

About, yeah, it's also, it's also about, it's also about addressing customers are different. Your customers aren't all the same. And if, and if, you know, if you go to McDonald's there's still some people that walk up to the counter and try and order from the counter and then there's others that will go to the big touchscreen and use the touchscreen. And so you can use automation to provide an experience that suits the customer and you can use, you know, personal contact to create a completely different experience. But it's yeah, you got to do, you got to do one size does not fit all anymore. So automation helps you provide different solutions for different problems.

And one of the things I mentioned earlier is like a lot of operators we talk to, they might have automated gate access for example, but they might still be hiding prices behind a contact form or a quote sort of form. So for me, I think one of the most powerful tools are the ones that can remove friction in the buying journey for customers and drive more sales. Brian, in your experience, what automation tools have you implemented that have moved the needle?

So it's really been a mix of software and hardware and I'll just go start through the software. So in terms of emails, for example, obviously now fairly new addition to Stora which is the automated email flows when customers book. But there's things before that which definitely help in terms of, you know, requesting license agreement and having your ID checks done. That just smooths, smooths the process and gives you a consistent process as well. One thing that I have added fairly recently to emails is when a customer moves out, they are requested to leave a Google review. And so when they first cancel they'll get asked and also the day that their reminder, the last day that they'll get asked again. And that's something that I've noticed an instant benefit had several reviews, you know, short space of time just from that alone. Also you can do things like email marketing. I've used mailchimp Clavio where you can create email flows and you can have that automated and almost personalize the experience for the customer as well by using their data. Also things when it comes to advertising, there's a lot of different tools you can use. One that I use quite a lot, Canva, because you can integrate it with other platforms like Facebook, Instagram, you can create content that could come out or to periodically for customers. You can have content specifically for students or businesses. You can really tailor that using the data you get from the customer when they, you know, put their information on when they're looking for a price. So there's a lot of things you can do. And then when it comes to dealing with customers directly. Another recent addition, what I've done, I used to always just. I would call email and then always do WhatsApp as well. I found that helps. And in recent times I've been using it's called short keys, which is in WhatsApp as well. And you can just create boilerplate messages and then you could add their name on. Once you put the message in, it takes two seconds and you're cutting your time down to, you know, instead of writing four or five paragraphs takes two seconds, add their name, personalize that a bit and it just saves a lot of time. And I found that to work pretty well because not everyone has the same response. You can email a whole lot of people and you'll be lucky if you get some responses back. Sometimes everyone's different, but I find especially if you can get through to their phone they have, that's the most accessible place for someone to get a message for them to continue a conversation while they're a customer as well. Not just at the start. Yeah. And then for the other parts of the business in terms of, you know, payments and your banking to accountancy software, that's something you can integrate into your business and automate to save you a bunch of time. And it doesn't cost that much money. It's definitely well worth the investment doing things like that. And then the other thing, like within Sora as well, using dynamic pricing, that's another thing which I've played around a bit since opening up and toyed with it. When I first started, it wasn't something I was quick to use because I was going on at certain prices for when I was a low occupancy. And then as that went up, I was changing the price quite a bit more than I actually anticipated before. So I think it's been helpful more for me Once I've got to more of a steady occupancy rate for different units and then it's really good for just tweaking the price as occupancy goes up or down. So that's been very helpful. And then on the hardware side, yeah having access control through a gate, having that linking in with your, all your locks and people using their phones to get in. I would not have been able to run my site which is three hours, three and a half hours drive away without these in place. It just wouldn't be possible or feasible. So yeah, that's, that's, that's pretty much it for me. Yeah.

People talk about automated automation if it's something new but you know, like you said, a simple access control on your gate is automation because without that someone has to get out and open the gate. So automation isn't new. We've had automation for a long, long time. It's just that there's more opportunity for it now to do different things.

What you were saying there Brandon thought was interesting about using Mailchimp in your WhatsApp message, do you have. I think one of the interesting things with automation, the most interesting things about automation are the ability to at scale send people messages at the right time. For example, like, like you know, you, you picked a time there after the move out or after the cancellation to ask for a review. So how do you, is there an automation in there around whenever this happens you then send this message or have you been able to build something along those lines? Or how do you, how do you.

Yeah, so when I actually first use, I actually don't use mailchimp anymore. I'm already klaviyo. But even still that less so now that store has introduced the new automatic emails. Just you don't, I don't want to overflow their inbox with so many emails but the Clavio is more of a kind of a chaser. If they get the email through Stora when they get the, the price and this is more for.

Maybe a few.

Days later or a week later and then, or I can go just do month to month I see what units are free. Who inquired about those units maybe a few weeks ago, are they still interested? And a lot of the time yes they are and then you can just slot them in or you can, you can look ahead, you can see your cancellations and the way I have it, they, my customers, they have to provide 14 days notice before the next renewal date. Yeah that gives me sometimes maybe a month to actually plan ahead and then When I have, you know, potential customers inquiring for unit size, I know I can say, on this date, this will be free. Would that suit you? And a lot of the time it does work. So you can just slot people in very quickly and you're almost not wasting the money and time you spent obtaining those leads.

Okay, thanks, Brian. So again, across the whole journey dealing with customers, you know, there are moments where only a human will do and there are times to automate. Like how? There's a question for both of you. Like how, as an operator, do you decide what parts of the journey are worth automating and what parts require a human?

I mean, to go first, Brian, or.

You want me to go first? So you go first, Brian.

Yeah, I don't mind. Yeah. So when I thought about this, I don't think it's necessarily like a binary, you know, human touch or automation. It's something you can combine. And there's ways that you can use automation along with their data to create something that feels more personal to them. Even down to when you're doing the emails. Just, even just having their name in the email creates a level of personalization that doesn't feel so, you know, removed from you and the customer. But not every customer is the same. And originally I would have thought, you know, the older generation would prefer, you know, that would just be. They prefer that human touch being on the phone. And it's the younger generation who prefer, you know, they don't speak to you and they just book move in. But it's not really been. Not been the case across the board. I've had customers who are in their 80s, who I never spoke to. They booked online, moved in, stored, moved out, and then just at the end, they're just like, thanks, that's us done, we've moved out. So it's not a case of, you know, fitting everyone in one basket. Yeah, but there's certain things that personally I try at the moment at least do, you know, on a personal level, the calls, calling people back, that's something I know, especially with AI now there's software that's working on that area and I'm not fully convinced yet. Maybe once I see it in practice, that's something that will change. I'm sure at some point in future that will be much more widely used. I mean, we heard, we saw Tom Hornby the other day or week who uses this. And that's perfect example of how to use it. Out of hours, you can answer the phone during the day and when you're not going to be on the phone. You can use that as well. So that it's a really good way of utilizing that one other way. It's more on a personal level that when customers have a problem, that's something that I don't want to automate just in that whenever I've had experiences of having problems with certain, you know, websites or if it's one recently, hmrc, you're funneled into this, you know, automated, you know, operator forced to choose between choices. A lot of time you don't find what the, you know, the solution to the problem and you just are desperate to actually speak to somebody. And I think when someone has a problem, especially in storage, if they say something happens, they can't get into their unit. The last thing they want to do, I think, is go through some operator. They want to speak to a human who can sort them exactly what they're looking for straight away. Just a less stressful process. Again, maybe over time, as AI picks up, it gets better at these things. That's something that could potentially in the future that we necessarily don't need to, or customers might find it hard to even tell if they're speaking to a real person or not. They're becoming very believable.

Yeah, definitely. Complaint handling is something you want to try and kind of deal with at a personal level. But it really comes down to what do people do better than machines and what do people do better than machines at the moment versus what they potentially do in the future? But also I think that you can, in some cases, you're using automation to make it more efficient, make it quicker. If you're talking about the customer journey, if you've got a full online process, then that means that customer can go through the whole online process. But that doesn't mean that it. There's no value in a person ringing them up after they've completed the process and saying, hey, I can see you've booked online. You know, I just want to check that you're familiar with the login procedures. Or we just want to check you've got the right storage size or whatever else. You can do that at your convenience and you can still have that engagement. And, and ironically, sometimes the customer will pick the phone up then when they wouldn't have picked it up before because they don't want to talk to a customer, to the staff. But if they've already booked with you and they've gone through the CO process and then they see your number come up, they're going to go, well, hold on maybe something's wrong, I better take that call. And. And so it gives you the chance to give that customer interaction. So I think that, yeah, people, there is definitely a role for people and there is definitely a role for people for certain customers as well, like Brian said. But it's about understanding what your people do well and getting them to do that, but also get your people. I mean, AI is a lot of things, but it's not actually creative. It doesn't really. I mean, you can ask it to draw a picture, but it's just drawing a picture from what it knows. It doesn't create a lot of stuff. And so think, think creative. Spend some more time on your marketing. Talk to people, you know, do the things that people do and that. And play to your strengths.

Yeah. This leads on to my next question for you, Rennie, which is about, you know, there is a. The danger isn't necessarily automating too much, it's about automating the wrong things. So, like Brian just talked about, there, there's a. There's an emergency. The last thing somebody wants is to be stuck talking to a chat bot because I need a human to help me right now. Like, there's a fire or I'm locked out or I'm locked in or whatever it might be. Have you seen mistakes for any. Or what mistakes do you think or see operators making most often?

Yeah, that's the thing.

I mean, yeah, I think, I think chat.

I think chat's a classic example. I mean, chat is a fantastic way to interact with your customers. And more and more customers are looking to do chat, but they want it to work. They don't want to kind of. They don't want to kind of go, you know, ask a question, come back in 20 minutes. Oh, yeah, I'm back now. You know, Can I answer that? Yeah, it's meant to be a conversation. So if you can't have it as a conversation, then don't do it. And you don't want, you don't want the AI chatbot just to feed you rubbish a bit like Brian said, you don't want to be pushing, you know, Three, two, one. You know, can you tell me what, how to do with this? Oh, well, please restate the question. You know, so if, if the chat bot isn't doing it properly, you're better off not to have it at all. You're better off to have a WhatsApp link or something where you, they can WhatsApp. Your message comes through to your phone. You can then just. You answer it depending on the severity of it, how quickly it is and all the rest of it. I think that the phone thing is a challenge because obviously people are trying to get from having call centers and things like that, but people still need to. Sometimes people still want to talk to you and I think you need a way for them to do that. Now, if your systems are good enough, then customers won't need to call you that often and when they do call you, then it'll be important and it'll be something to speak to the person for. I also think in terms of pricing algorithms and stuff like that, dynamic pricing is amazing. Obviously, everybody knows that I'm a big supporter of dynamic pricing, but it needs a human touch and there's always exceptions to every rule. So you don't want to kind of. You don't want to give the machines full control of the car, just at this point in time. There's places where you want to step in, but also it's about how you feed the data into the system as well now. So AI and all the stuff we've talked about. A lot of automation requires training, it requires input, it requires to understand your business. It needs to know what's important. And all that stuff can only be done by the person. So, yeah, I think you can get too caught up with automation. I think you can adopt technology before it's ready and I think you can also push people towards automation when not particularly ready. I think we're definitely in a hybrid period at the moment where the trick is to offer multiple solutions to multiple customers. So some people will go down the automation route, but if they don't, if they still want to talk to a person, then they should be able to talk to a person. If they still want to be able to, you know, come into the store, then there's an opportunity for them to come into store and potentially somebody comes out to store to meet them or whatever else. But, yeah, you, you and you also need to know your customers. In some catchment areas, there's. There's a higher uptake of technology. In other catchment areas, there's not. I mean, the Scandics are a classic example. You look at the stores over there, there' the probably the highest concentration of fully automated stores over there in the world. But then this is a country that you can't spend. You literally cannot spend cash. In Stockholm, the signs up everywhere saying, we do not accept cash. You know, they've been. They've had digital ID cards for, I don't know how long that they carry around with them that have all their details on them, they're very tech switched on. So they're not going to have a problem with an automated store. You go to a market like Italy which is a little bit less tech savvy and they still have x percent of their customers paying in cash and walking in the door and all the rest of it. So you got to understand your market.

Here's a little surprise question for you both. We haven't discussed before but it just made me think about this. We've been talking for years about on staffed self storage facilities. Do you think in three years, four years, five years there's a possibility of an unstaffed self storage business?

Oh yeah, definitely. Well I think. Well actually yes, not only tightly. No, I'll re qualify that. No, because there's always going to be somebody pushing the buttons. But yeah, there will be operators. There are already operators that are investing in technology to try and automate as much as they can. Now there will be all the early adopters in that space and they will have automated call centers, they will have automated move in, who knows, they might have automated cleaners, I don't know. They will automate everything they possibly can. But the early adopters, they're early adopters for a reason. They'll have problems. And not every customer. That will not suit every customer. But no, you're not going to have a fully, you're not going to have a fully staffless business because at some point somebody's still doing the finances, still checking the systems. You know there's always going to be things for people to do.

Well, that's, that's my quit. That's, that's I think the interesting question, what's left for a, for a, you know, if, if these early adopters are pushing the limits for us an on staffed self storage business, what's left in five years for you know that that person that's left or that team of 10, are they doing the accounts? Are they responding to an emergency? What is left do you think?

Yeah, well there's always the prop, there's the problem solvers, that's what's left. It's the people, it's to fix the problems that happen that the machines can't necessarily fix. And there's some things that are just not as easy to automate as others. I mean people are still going to want human interaction. Particularly like Brian said, people that have got problems are still going to want to talk to a person to solve that problem. Much you can do with automation but at Some point it gets to the point where the person can actually do it better and that's what the people will do and the people will still be creative. Like I said before, you'll have people creating really cool marketing campaigns. You'll have people doing customer contact and there are probably jobs that, particularly in terms of security and stuff like that that people will still be doing. Who knows ultimately where it will go. I guess at some point in the future we might have a fully automated self storage business, but it's not going to happen anytime soon. It's, you know, you're talking 20, 30, 40 years away, not four or five years, but in four or five years you will have definitely more into automation now. I mean call centers is a classic example. There's a lot of money being put into call centers to try and say okay, how good can we make a call center so that we. The bulk of that is done by.

Machine I think as well. So maybe even more so in my situation. When you're a certain size, I can't afford to have on site staff. So myself and you know, a lot of new people coming into the industry as well with that first facility. It's probably going to be a smaller facility than the average. You're kind of forced to see where you can automate and where you can smooth those processes and create efficiencies. And I think it's probably there's going to be a lot of change especially in the next few years is the tech is, you know, a lot is changing. So I think we will see a change in what's happening and potentially that will go towards, you know, the big players too. I think, you know, if you have a facility with you know, 700 plus units, you can afford more to have on site staff to have that in place and not be forced to go down that route. But yeah, I think it definitely allowed by having these processes it allows you to focus on other things. Like Rennie said, being creative with, you know, doing different marketing campaigns or like kind of thinking out the box doing things in the, in the community. I mean one thing I did well several months back now was spoke with Starbucks, managed to get a good deal on a lot of vouchers for free coffee, personalized cards, put them under their, their units and it's just one of these things where people remember little instances like that and it's not that expensive really got me a hell of a lot of points in my Starbucks cards. So a lot of free coffees. But it's one of these things that doesn't cost a lot of money but it creates a really good impression for the customer and it leaves them with that thought and I think may stay a little bit longer or they'll refer to a friend and yeah, it's.

Such a brilliant idea. I've never heard of and I wish I thought about it my first sight. I've sold it now there's a coffee shop across the road. I should have given people a, you know, a free coffee voucher for that place. Like what a nice touch that would have been. People move in.

Yeah, I mean it's, we spend so much money acquiring new customers but not much trying to retain the ones we already have even though it's generally cheaper and a lot easier to do that. So it just felt like a no brainer for me.

Tell me you sent out the email asking for a Google review just after they got the Starbucks card.

Well, I actually never. Well I maybe should have done yeah the Google review thing in the email. Now that's only fairly recently recent thing but I used to always just manually do that and yeah it takes a bit of time but it's always worth doing.

You're right. If the industry spends a lot of time trying to get customers sometimes they forget about having customers that are in there, need a little bit of love and, and can be great referral programs. And yeah, you don't get, I guess coming back to the automation side of things, it's very hard for automation to give exceptional service. Like occasionally somebody has a really cool, funky new automation thing where people will talk about it, go oh did you see that? I opened my hotel room with my phone. How cool was that? But it's hard for automation to be exceptional. What people can do is be exceptional and if you do something exceptional people will talk about it. So the fact that the customer got the Starbucks card or something, they're likely to go to their friends and say oh yeah, got a Starbucks card from my storage place.

How cool is that?

Oh storage, what are you doing for storage? I'll use it for this and all the rest of it. You want to be part of the conversation and personal touch is definitely the way to do that.

Yeah, it's interesting. And at the same time that's Starbucks idea. I think a lot of the power of automation is the ability to do the right thing at the right time but do that in an automated way so it's infinitely scalable. So for example your example there are brilliant idea like Starbucks card onto the thing but another way of doing that could be in an email at 6am on the morning of the move, in an automated email with us with the Starbucks coffee.

Yeah.

Which they all get and they kind of like, they're, they're about to arrive in the van, they're like afterwards we'll go get a coffee because we've got that thing that's just another way to do it. But doing it that way can automate the process and make it scalable and take, remove you from it so that.

You know, it can continue.

So I agree with what you're saying. Really. I suppose just point out that there's another way to look at it potentially about how automation can still take these brilliant experiences that are designed by human and trying to automate them better, make it scalable.

Yep.

Okay. I was going to ask you a question, Brian, about email flows, but we've already discussed that. So a question for both of you about data. So how one of the nice things, you know, data in self storage, you can, you can see when was the last person, when was the last time the customer turned up to site, how often have they been a site? You know, these are sort of things you can, you can use data to find out about your customers. You can find out did they, did they hover over the castle button in the customer portal? Potentially you could, you could find that sort of thing out. Are they considering leaving? How, how can automation enhance personalization by leveraging data?

That's what, that's what automation does really, really well, let's be honest. It's, it crunches that it creates. And that's why I say that it's going to be important for every business because, because people are going to expect a personalized experience. People are going to expect a response that meets their exact needs. They're not going to want a generic email reply that's says, you know, thanks for coming to Renicell Storage. You know, we value you and all this kind of stuff. You know, they, they want to be able to, they want a personalized experience and, and the data can do that. And it's not just whether they, I mean the stuff you talked about is more backend stuff, that's more about kind of managing pricing and all this kind of stuff because you can say, well, this customer accesses it all the time unit all the time, so therefore I can push their prices up a bit more. This customer we haven't seen for 12 months. Yeah, maybe that, you know, maybe that's a bit of a problem. But, but also what do you know about the customer? You often Know the life changing moment they came through, you know about their business, you know a lot about your customers. This again can help you create a more personalized experience. It can create value for the customer. And, and that's what I think you're going to see automation doing a lot more of moving forward is the fact that, yeah, already I get emails from some businesses and I'm looking at them going, I'm fairly sure that was automatically generated. But you know what, I'm not 100% sure because it's really, really well written and I'm probably only sure it was automatically generated because covers the speed I got it. It probably couldn't have been written by a person that quickly but, but, but the content is spot on and what I want anything else from the response? No, I wouldn't because they, they've, they've gone through the data, they've seen what I've purchased, they matched it. You know, Charles Twerd is a classic example of that. I mean their automated systems are amazing. They'll know exactly what you bought, they know exactly your size and all the rest of it and, and they'll respond back to it straight away. And so there's that automation, automation in terms of personalization is no doubt the future. It's how you harness that. And it's only as good as the data you give it. Rubbish in, rubbish out. So if your data is rubbish, then your personalization will be rubbish and you will upset your customers. The better your data, the better that that system will work. And you are going to see that grow. I think you're going to see that grow exponentially over the next couple of years. Already the AI generators are just getting so much better at that kind of stuff.

Absolutely. I've received so many emails about people in the US asking me questions about some show that's on at a, at a theater in Belfast. As if like the, talk about it, as if like, oh, did you go to that, the show with. I got an email about, I can't remember who it was like did you go to see that show? I'd love to have gone. This is some guy living in the middle of America and I know it's, it's just so well written. I get back to him, we started, we started chatting.

Yeah, I think as well.

Yeah, that's what, that's what, that's what.

That'S what automation and personalization does. And it will reset the bar of customer expectations. That's what customers will just expect that if they don't get that they'll be kind of going, you know, it's a bit like yeah, so if you sent somebody something in the post these days they'd go why did you mail that to me when you could have emailed it to me? I could have got that two days ago. You know the personalization will be the same. They will want a personalized experience.

I think it's one of these arguments as well that kind of roots back to you know, gating prices, having the information wall because having data on potential customers is so important and I think more so you will see probably going forward using their data more than what we're currently doing and we're, we already have you know, the calculator to help them see what unit size they need but could be more in terms of for sites that maybe do climate control as well. Trying to figure out do you need that? Or learning what type of customer how, how many times they'll access the facility. They're more likely going to pay more for a unit that's downstairs closer to the door. It's more convenient for them and you can get more value from them from doing that for having their data. Or students for example. Students don't want to, they hate spending money so they'll probably take your, your least desirable unit. So if you can steer students towards that and keep other units that people probably see as being preferential, that will help. One of the things I do in doing remotely guided tours for the facility and I like to keep the best units for when people actually go to the site because you don't want to say oh I've only got this one and it's way at the back of the facility far away from a door for example you want to be able to leave that best unit for those walk ins so it's a lot easier to convert to a customer I found anyway. But then again and back to emails as well. The more personalized you can get in your emails with the more data you have you can really tailor those emails to those leads. You're not sending the same email to every customer because they're not going to react the same. They're not looking for the same thing.

Something I've been thinking about recently is my site. So we've similar size site brand like I had 100 and my first site I had 149 units. I think you've roughly the same.

Not yet but I'm just like just about to get up quite a few more units with an extension.

But yes, I remember doing the remote, remote viewings and stuff before and being frustrated. Like some people, whenever I just opened, I hadn't, I hadn't thought like that. So just giving people units by the front door. And then I was, I was just frustrated because I was doing tours and was like kind of go around, you know, around the back and down the star corridor and that's a 50 square foot unit. It wasn't a good experience. But I've also been thinking recently about how, when's the right time to offer somebody an upgrade? For example, so let's say you've booked a 50 square foot unit three weeks ago, you're moving in tomorrow. Is, is somebody more likely to like tonight upgrade to a unit by the front door? Because they're, they're thinking I'm about to load the van or I've loaded the van, I don't have to carry that too far. I will now pay more to upgrade to a unit by the front door than they would have been three weeks ago. Whenever the move in was, was a long way away. Have you, have you any experience, I know this, we haven't discussed this before but like have you any experience of upgrading people to any units like that or, and, and when, when the best time is to do it? Rennie, you look like you've got something to contribute there, but I think if.

You had, if you had good data on your store, you'd know that. That's the point. If, if you run these kind of promotions, you would measure it and say, okay, I've run this, I've run, I've made this offer, I've made it here, I've made it here. What was the result? Go, Brian?

Yeah, so I tend to, this is, well, it's not automated, but especially when I have business inquiries, I like to look up, you know, who it is, what business, what kind of business they're doing, is it local and getting to know the customer more, but when you know there, if they're going to be wanting to go in quite often again, back to what I'm saying, like you could, they will probably pay more for a unit that gives them that convenience, convenience of doing that less so with my store is fairly small in comparison with a lot of stores, but if you're a store that has multiple floors, that's definitely something I think would be worth doing.

I think Rennie and Brandon, one of the things we've touched on a bit is like there's so much data available and that's increasing and putting that into practice to make the right decisions to Automate in the right way to use, to leverage automation. I think one of the key things we're going to see over the next few years I believe is the increasing importance of being able to work out a way to interpret that data it in the right way and actually use it correctly. Because it's lots of data. It's, it's, it's very, very difficult sometimes to figure out what do I do with the data and how do I really use that, that data correctly. It's one of the things I think we think a lot about at Stora and one of the things I think, you know the software that you're using to run your business, whether it's your property management software or whether it's Klaviyo or WhatsApp or whatever it might be that the, the more these tools are helping you use the data correctly to benefit your business, I think that's going to become more and more important over time as well.

Yeah, I mean you get, you get, there's a lot of diminishing returns with data. I mean like if you look at, if you look at, if you look at dynamic pricing, obviously if you start pricing based on unit availability, you're going to get a big, you're going to get a big, big income. If you then start pricing based on time of inquiry and stuff like that, you'll get another bit of an increase but not as much increase yet. It's probably a lot more data to kind of crunch of find that out. But yeah, if, if, but if you want to maximize the value of your business, you've got to find that balance between, you know, what data can I get, what data's reliable and like you said, how easy it is to work it because you don't want to spend, you know, you don't want to spend hours working to crunch data to save yourself a pound a month on a, on a customer. It's, it's not efficient.

I just thinking back to when, well I don't do it as much but when I started as well I would so use their address for customers who signed up, pin it on Google Maps and then see where are these customers coming from and then you can tailor your, your marketing strategy. If you're doing leaflet drops for example, where do I focus on that and where are most of my customers coming from? Yeah, just so you're not wasting, it's very easy to waste money in the like marketing and everyone's trying to sell you something.

So you have to be.

Very smart with how you, how you allocate your money. So it's just another one of these things that it would be good if that was actually automated just so you could, you know, really see the data of where your customers are coming from.

We've actually thought about doing that and we haven't released it just because we didn't just actually didn't think about what, what's the use case for this. But we have thought about mapping our customers for you when in, in your account you can just kind of just take the postcode and just put them on the map for you and you can see where they all are. And, and that is a great use case for that. It's kind of. Well, this must be an area where, I don't know, there's probably more customers in that area. Let's leave the drop there. That's, that's really interesting. Okay, well, sorry Rennie, we're going to say something.

To the chat. I don't know if you want to answer a couple of questions to the chat or you want to save them until the end.

I was just going to move that actually. So I think we've, we've more or less gone through the stuff we want to talk about. I think unless there's anything finally you want to say. Otherwise I was going to just switch to some of the questions we have here. Okay, so we've got William Notcott who's who said with the move to more automation, Pure man stores, etc, do you think that more white label third party storage operators will become established to operate sales call centers or different store operators? I suppose this is something and this is massive in the US and other large. What do you think about that?

Yeah, I think the answer to that is yes. I mean not necessarily white label storage stores but customer like call centers, probably automated, but call centers and all the rest. I think definitely. I think that as Brian touched on the smaller operators, this is where there is a difference between the big operators and smaller operators. Big operators can invest a lot of time and effort into this. Small operators can only do so much. So I think there will definitely be, you know, we're already seeing a growth in management groups and third party management. I think we are definitely going to see people that offer a solution that says okay, hey, we can handle all your inbound calls and it might all be done through a data center, but we're going to do it for you. And when the customer comes through, it just goes to some digital data center somewhere which answers the calls and all the rest of it. If it all gets too hard and the customer wants to talk to somebody, they eventually end up back with you again. That kind of stuff. I can't see why that wouldn't happen. And not just. And for that matter, it doesn't have to be located in the UK either. I mean there's nothing to say that some of these American firms, you know, or wherever they may be could potentially kind of offer that service. That's the, the beauty of the technology. How far we are away from that remains to be seen. How good the technology is and, and all the rest of it. But it means you can scale this stuff a lot quicker than you could when you had to literally fill us. Fill a call center with people.

Yeah, it'll be interesting to see what, what is the third party management company of the future in three or five years, it's probably not the same as it is today in terms of, but.

It'S going to be adapting. I mean managing a store is managing a store. You talked about how long before you get a fully automated store. There's still a lot to be done about managing a business and about maximizing its value and about interacting with customers, interacting with the investors and the clients and all the rest of it. There's a lot to be done in managing a store. It's, it's an operational real estate. It's not, it's not a set and forget. So it's always going to need someone in there to kind of run it. And I think as the technology improves, the strength of a good management team is going to be even more vital because they're going to be the ones that are running the technology and they're going, gathering the data, inputting the data. All the things we've talked about, they're going to be doing that and they're going to be doing it on scale.

I think. Yeah, it's very hard to see where it will go because whenever we have new tech come out, it creates new opportunities for these types of businesses to come about and flourish. But then again, like how many businesses are going to be impacted by AI? We don't, it's, it's hard to tell the full extent of where that would go. And there could be a lot of businesses that there's just no need for them in the future and they'll just have to shift into something else or help in a, help in a different way.

For example.

Yeah.

We have a question then from Louise at Canovas. When I was running sites, I found most people love being able to book, move in and pay themselves. She agrees with you, Brian. Regardless of age. But if they hit a snag, they wanted a real person straight away.

Yeah.

So we touched on this a bit, the WhatsApps we mentioned a few times. Have you found or seen success with using WhatsApp as a comms channel? Maybe Bran, that's something you've been doing it. I find a lot of people misinformation.

That'S in an email, huge. I would almost put WhatsApp. Well, I would put WhatsApp as being more important than email. Yeah, it's. You're talking to someone through their phone, which most people have their phone on them for the majority of the day when they're not. When they're not sleeping. So. And emails, it can get caught up in all other thing. It's very easy to lose an email if you get lots of emails coming in, but it almost feels more personal as well. And it's just a. It's a way to get things done quickly. A lot of times people have a question and it just takes a few words to fix their problem and you don't want to do an email. And it just. I found, Yeah, I found WhatsApp to be so much better and I use it all the time.

Yeah, I agree. I think, I think WhatsApp's a really valuable tool and you can have a WhatsApp link on your website, which basically says, just watch, you know, Click here to WhatsApp and you can WhatsApp it through the computer or your phone or wherever you're on you're accessing the website for. And yeah, you have that. You don't necessarily have to respond to it straight away because people don't always expect a WhatsApp straight away, but you can start that conversation. But I do think that WhatsApp messages can be lost as well, just as well as email messages, I mean, depending on how much you use WhatsApp. I, I use WhatsApp a lot and, you know, I think I can have 50 WhatsApp conversations in a day. And I know myself that sometimes the downside of a WhatsApp message is hard to kind of tag it and action it and put it somewhere to make sure you follow up on it. So you can lose messages in WhatsApp. So it is something you probably. You need that Follow up through WhatsApp as well, basically to kind of say, hey, yeah, just touching base to see where you thought, how did that happen? How'd you go with that? Any further progress? Stuff like that. Move yourself to the top. Of the WhatsApp trade basically so that. Yeah, you don't always kind of left at the bottom.

Yeah. Okay, thanks. Thanks very much, Julian. So I made a comment, you answered the point I was trying to make earlier about mapping your customers. So if you, if you drop your list of postcodes into something online it'll, it'll create that map for you which is probably what you've done. Brian, I presume.

I didn't actually know about that. I, I did it all manually and put my best into Google and you just put a label and then you can zoom out and then just see across the city where your customers are. That's sounds like you just, just drop.

You drop your, drop your spreadsheet GPT and ask it to map it for you. It'll map it for you, give you a link and you can save it as a Google map.

We've got Bender Binder's asking a question about Store integrating with SMS or WhatsApp for automated messages. Absolutely. So our actually our APIs public API has been released in about a week and a half have we're announcing it at the at Fidessa. So if you're at Fidesa, come along to the store summit I mentioned at the start and we'll, you'll, we'll, you'll hear more about it and you can get access to it. But that's going to be integrating with lots of third party tools for, for this. One of one of the main benefits of that will be making this work. And then of course we've talked about building it directly into the system as well and that's also on the cards. So actually having it right inside store because I agree with the point Brian made here, you know, WhatsApp or Brian and Rennie. WhatsApp is probably the place where for now you know it's, it's probably the best place to get people. It maybe used to be email because we didn't get a thousand emails a day five years ago or 10 years ago. But you know that gets kind of ruined. So yeah, WhatsApp's good. Ricky Williams is asking, asking how would you suggest integrating WhatsApp into a multi site operation where all sites are manned? And then there's a sort of a, maybe a connected question from Mike Fox about does anyone here have a business WhatsApp integration?

Oh that's the answer to the first question basically yeah, business. Business WhatsApp allows you to do that. So business WhatsApp is a, is. It's, there's different levels of payment on and all the rest of it. But business WhatsApp allows you to basically integrate that WhatsApp message onto your website, and that allows it to go to multiple staff members. And a bit like WhatsApp groups, they can see if somebody's responded to it or not. You could potentially have different staff people responding, and it still comes out as if it's coming from the same person. So, you know, if somebody, if I start a conversation but the person doesn't respond, and then, you know, I go off and someone else comes back and then they respond, it goes back to the staff. So if you want to get. If you want to get Serious about using WhatsApp in your website and for your business, then WhatsApp for businesses is the way to do it. It's. It's subtly different to the personal WhatsApp that you're probably using now. But those subtleties make a big difference. And it's not super expensive, but you have to pay for it, but it's not super expensive. Well worth the investment if that's the way you want to go.

I think as well, the one thing to note with it is I wouldn't forget this professionalism. When you're speaking to customers, though, using WhatsApp, it's easy to just treat it as, you know, you're just texting. But yeah, I think keep it professional. Still the business WhatsApp allows you, you can have your logo there. They can see it's from the business, not just some random number, which I've seen a lot of businesses when I've contacted them. It's like there's no, there's no picture, there's no logo, and it's just a random number and it just looks a little bit sketchy. One of the other things you can do through the business, WhatsApp, it has a catalog. And so if you get good photos of different unit sizes. So I have every different unit size, a picture of that and put it in the catalog. And when I do, the quick reply at the start, if they've been looking for a certain size unit can quickly go into the catalog and it just sends the picture of that unit size. So they can see that. So it's just another easy way just get them to see what it's like, because a lot of people still, they don't know what certain sizes look like.

And there was another question there about one business app number per site or one for each business. And I think that there's probably advantages in having one per site just to kind of, to get that Personal touch and all the rest of it. But it comes down to resources and how many people are managing your WhatsApp number groups and all the rest of it. And with WhatsApp for Business, you can have multiple numbers under the one account, but you've just got to be careful that if you've got one person managing it, it's probably actually better just have a single WhatsApp number. But because you don't want the person sending it from the wrong store or whatever, that's just going to confuse people. But if you've got enough people, you've got enough stores and enough staff to say, okay, well this is actually going to go to the store manager or this is going to go to one person who's looking after one or two stores. And I think you could do one number per store. But if you've got one person looking after it, it may, it may as well just have one single number for the whole business because it's. Yeah, it's more efficient, easier to use.

Y.

Thank you, Rennie. Thank you. And thank you, Brian. Really, I think, really helpful to have, have you both on here to answer these questions. I. You have a lot more experience of WhatsApping, certainly using this. Great to have you. I. Plenty of experience, just not WhatsApp business. Okay, well, I thought. Have you any, any final thoughts, Rennie, or, or Brian, anything that we, you. You wanted to talk about that we haven't touched on? I've skipped a few of the things we talked about before and instead threw a few other things out there.

I think, I just think people should just kind of start the automation journey, see what works for you. It's not, not for everybody, but, but you know, there are certain things that most businesses would benefit from from automating and if you don't start the journey, you'll never finish it.

Yeah, I think trial things, there's no harm in just trying it even on a few customers, see how it goes. There's some things I've implemented and then taken away, like the HubSpot integration, partly because I kept forgetting to actually turn it off. So then I get messages from people and it doesn't even say who it is as well. And I didn't see them until the next day. And I just find it's been better without it. But also just not to treat automation and, you know, the human touch separately. I think it's definitely something you, you can combine. It's not a binary choice between the two. Yeah, I think that's, that's.

I should have said that, Brian. That's. That's the best closing statement. It's not binary. Exactly right. It's. It's not one or the other, it's both together.

Yeah.

Yeah. Well, thanks very much. I think. I hope it's been useful because, you know, I think these are the sort of issues as I think for operators, you know, getting on top of this stuff, getting ahead of it, learning as quickly as you can, and especially brand in your position, you know, you've first sight, you've got the freedom to kind of think about things from a new point of view and testing stuff out. That's the way, I think, to kind of. To learn and get advantage. And ultimately, we all want to build better businesses here and grow our business. And, you know, I think that's. I think it's been. I've learned a lot. And so thank you very much to both of you for. For your time.

Thank you for having us.

Thanks, Felix. Exactly right.

Thank you.

Hope everybody gets something out of it and starts a new journey.

And we'll hopefully see you all in a couple of weeks. So, final pitch for the. For the Fidesta conference. Rennie. Yeah, just. Yeah. Tickets still available.

Please book now. Don't wait another three days. You know, we like to kind of plan these things. The dinners are actually filling up, to be perfectly honest. So if you want to come to one of the dinners, then you better get in pretty quick because we're almost closing up the dinners because they're always full. But, yeah, we. We're well over 600 people. Getting close to 700 now, in fact. So looking at it now, we're over 700 now as well. So. Yeah, so it's. It's ticking along. It's gonna be a great event and a great place to network with everybody. So. Yeah, yeah, as Simon has said, hashtag book early. I'm not sure you still can book early. Just book now. Basically catch up with the store summit on the Tuesday morning or Tuesday midday as well. Yep.

Thank you, Rennie.

Yep.

Come along. We're starting about half 11, 12, so just pop in before the facility tours. I've always found facility tours better with a couple of beers first. So, you know, that's why we've got.

The personal experience.

In Portugal. I think we end up in a winery and a couple of glasses.

Yeah, we had the. We had the winery in Portugal. That was pretty fun.

Yeah, that. That the rest of the tour was. Was great.

All right, thanks, everyone.

Okay, thank you.

Bye, everybody. Speak soon. Cheers.