Mastering Self Storage Customer Service

We have had some customers ask us to like, answer their phone calls with a specific tagline. You know, it's a beautiful day in Texas. It's store storage.

Hello everybody and welcome to our latest episode of the podcast. Thank you for joining us. We're joined today by James Thurgood and Devon Meinhart from Zion Call management in the U.S. it's great to have you both on. Thank you so much for joining us. Where are you at the moment?

Hey, thanks so much for having us on. We're excited to be here. So I am in Southern Utah, in St. George, Utah. It's just a couple hours away from Las Vegas, so it's kind of fun to be close to there. So I'm, I'm just from home in.

In St. George, Utah right now and I'm joining in. I, I live a couple hours north of St. George in the little town called Delta, Utah. I used to live in St. George with James and the rest of the team. We started having kids, my, me and my wife. So we moved to the, the country and got a bunch of cows and chickens. So we're living the country life up here.

Oh well, yeah, we can, we can talk about cows and chickens. I could probably dig into that. That sounds pret funny because there's quite a lot of, there's quite a presence in St. George. I know a few people actually in different companies who are based there in self storage and you know, with, with a couple of shows a year in Vegas, it's kind of, I suppose it's handy enough to be where you are.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. We, in fact, I, I am from Salt Lake City, Utah and when this whole business got started and you know, we were, a couple of the guys were here in St. George and they kind of said the same thing. It's kind of a hub for storage. And so, you know, we moved the family down here and, and it's been great. Yeah, there's lots. It's exciting.

Very good. So Zion Call Management is a tailored call answering and remote management service company specifically focused on self storage. So just interested to kind of learn a bit more about what, what that means. What, what, what does Zion do? And what's your, like, what's, what's your, what's your role there as well?

Yeah, absolutely. So we, we actually started as part of a, a facility management software company. If you've heard of Easy Storage Solutions. So we were, we were part of Easy Storage in the earlier days and we just started to hear that there was a need from the customer base they didn't want to answer their phone calls anymore. Some of them just didn't want to talk. But some of them, they were busy or they weren't always near a computer where they could help. So we kind of just started to hear some chatter that they wanted some help answering their phones and we kind of saw it as an opportunity to say, well, let us do it for you. So that's kind of where we spun off this call center idea and we just kind of grew from there and became our own, our own thing. And so that, that's kind of where we started. So yeah, our core service is, is call answering, answering the phones for the, the tenants or the customers of the storage facilities. But over the years we've kind of added on to our, our offerings and, and Devin, he's over our sales side of the business so I'll kind of let him go into some of the other things that we offer as well.

Yeah, so my, my position with Easy Storage back in the day, I started with them in 2016. I was over all the ancillary services sales, so all of our products and services that complemented the management software itself. I would, I would discuss those. And at the time we had a, we had our call answering service, the marketing, which focused on digital marketing services and accounting and bookkeeping as well as tenant protection and we had a couple other small ancillary products. So now Zion, we've, we've kind of replicated that model. So we offer digital marketing services now as well. Call answering is our main bread and butter. We have like an answering side of the service. Then we have an automated IVR portion of the service that helps assist customers with payments and collections and things like that. The digital marketing services just focus on all aspects of Google search so we can help somebody from pay per click ads to their reputation management, automating the review gathering process and then everything to do with SEO and like ranking the actual website itself on search platforms. That, that's the offerings right now that we have under the design call management umbrella. And yeah, we're excited to look to continue to expand that as technologies grow in different ways.

So one of the things you mentioned was accounting and bookkeeping. So is that one of the things you're not doing at Zion that used to do it easy or did I just miss that?

Correct. Yeah, we used to offer accounting and bookkeeping services and tax specialization for the self storage industry. One of our partners actually. So it's not under the Zion umbrella, but one of our partners, he similarly to how Zion Branched off. He branched off. And that entity is called Storage Unit Accounting. So he's involved in storage unit accounting and Zion and we're kind of sister companies there.

Okay, who are your typical customers? Is it big operators with lots of sites or is it somebody with one site and they just don't want to answer calls? Or is it every, is it kind of just a big broad range?

Yeah, good question. And, and that's kind of exactly where we were not too long ago when we started this, this company. Operators weren't really used to call center and they were kind of scared to turn over their phone calls to someone else. So where we started was, was really just the mom and pop shops, the, the small, you know, small facilities, you know, 10 units, 20 units, 100 units. That's where that's, was the bulk of our initial customers. And over the last, I don't know, eight or nine years, I think at least where we are, people have gotten more used to that idea. And so, you know, now we're starting to get some of the bigger clients. But, but still our, our kind of sweet spot is the, the smaller to medium size operators where they maybe don't want to pay for a full time employee, where we'll be a little bit cheaper than that or you know, or they, they have some help, they just want a little bit of extra help. And so we, we do service, you know, some, some of the bigger enterprise operations as well. Probably our average number of rentable, rentable doors or spaces is like 200, 251 location, but you know, 200 rentable spaces.

Yeah, and that makes sense because the people with 100 locations, you know, they, they'll have a, they've got the skill to kind of have a lot of this themselves. But you know, not that they wouldn't, they wouldn't, wouldn't be a customer at some point, but it's the 1, 200 units. And we see that with our customers a lot as well, where people with one site, two sites, you know, the, the cost of somebody answer the phone is just kind of prohibitive really for a business of that size.

So.

Yeah, right, exactly.

How do you make sure that customer experience is right, you know, for all these different brands, all these different kind of operations?

Yeah, absolutely. That, that's really important to us. And, and the first way that we do that, the first thing that we do is we make sure that we can see the, the phone number that was dialed by the customer. So, so we can see when it's coming in that this call is For Store a Storage.

Yeah.

And so we make sure that our agents will answer with that name. You know, thanks for calling Store Storage. This is James. How can I help you? And so that the caller knows, okay, I called the right place at least so that, that, that's a big one. And actually that's, that's where we, we had a hard time finding a software that could do that would allow us to see the, the phone number of the caller and then also the phone number that was dialed in. So we worked really hard to make that happen. So that's the first bit. And then from there we work with any new client that comes on. We work with them to build out a note page for specifics on their site. Where are they located? Are they by the convenience store? How do you like to handle this and that? And with that we create this note page that, that our agents use on. Pull up on their screen while they're talking to the tenant so we can have the specifics, how the, how the business owner wants us to handle their different items. And between those two, we're able to really be flexible and cater our answering to that specific client.

And in an industry that's kind of becoming more, I don't know if it's the same and I'm sure it's the same in the US like more on staffed, you know, there's, there's certainly a push, you know, to grow sites and use modern technology to minimize the need for staff whenever it's, you know, for smaller sites particularly. Do you find it harder to provide high levels of customer service?

Being in the industry as long as we have like it's kind of cool to see the trends change as far as like how customers interact with us and just their acceptance of use of different technologies. I'm sure you guys have seen the same thing on your side. Yeah, I would say eight or nine years ago is really difficult. Covid was kind of a big catalyst as far as a lot of acceptance around unmanned type of facilities because everybody was kind of pushed into this. Like facilities were losing their manage in 2020, facilities were losing their managers left and right. And there was a big boom for a demand for unmanned facilities. And so that worked really well with call answering and remote management. So I think that opened a lot of operators eyes to the ability to scale their business. Not having on site staff, not having a manager at 100 Door Facility playing solitaire most of the day and then answering an occasional question as customers came by.

Is it a problem that occasionally some people arrive at A site expecting somebody to greet them and hand them a cup of coffee and give them a nice tour of the facility. I mean, is the fact that that isn't an option, does it hurt those businesses or. I think people are just accepting it now as the way business works.

I think there's a lot more acceptance. Um, if. If Covid. I feel like if Covid didn't happen, it would probably be a lot slower of a transition into unmanned properties. But we. We just saw it was. It was seriously like an overnight thing where a lot of facility owners went from being like, I don't know if I. I don't know if my customers would put up with that kind of thing. They really like this personal touch to, like, heck no. I don't want to risk having somebody on site and people getting sick. And the customers, like, the tenants appreciate that a lot as well. Obviously, a lot of it comes down to demographics. Like, I. I would say that that's a big thing because it's trying to balance this younger generation that's kind of grown up, like, having the Internet at their disposal. They're really good at navigating it, and they can just do everything at the click of a button. But there's still a large segment of the population that they do expect, like a handshake and a warm voice on the other end of the phone. And so we're trying to balance that with the technologies that we offer. Having a human element to it, but also implementing technologies that will automate for those that want to go that route.

What sort of trends are you seeing in what customers expect in self storage? I mean, you've touched on one there, but, like, what else are you seeing in the US market? Because if anyone listening in the uk, there's a lot to learn from, you know, a market that is much bigger than us and much more used. Like, how are people expecting to interact with self storage and how is that changing?

It's really interesting. Right now there's a. At least in the US there is a huge buzz around AI, you know, having computers do everybody's job for them. There's this huge buzz. And so we'll go to some of these self storage shows, like in the. Some of the bigger ones in Las Vegas that, that we've. That you've probably been to, and, and all of the. The vendors there, they want to, you know, kind of push this, this AI agenda. But then when we sit down and talk to the customers, you know, the business owners, and then even the people that are renting the Storage units, they're not so sure about it. They still, they still want the personal touch, they still want the human element. And so I think finding this middle ground of, yeah, there's some really cool technologies coming out there that can help us be more efficient and streamline things. I do think that that exists and we have started to use some of that in some of our offerings, but I don't think that the customer base is as accepting of it quite yet. They don't want to leave it all up to some artificial intelligence computer.

Interesting you bring that up because I was thinking about one of our customers here in the UK has been testing an AI based telephone answering service. So, you know, like an AI agent actually talking to people on the phone. Now, I don't, I don't know how it's gone. So, you know, he might, he might actually be like, no, it didn't work at all.

Yeah.

But have you any experience of, of seeing or hearing about that in the U.S. like, is that at a point where it's acceptable, do you think, yet, or, or how do you, how do you think about that?

I think that it's probably maybe close, Maybe kind of close. We've done a lot of research, demos, you know, we want to stay up on all that. And so, you know, we have done a lot of work trying to see if it's ready and we just haven't felt comfortable like it's ready enough for us, for our customers. I think it can be helpful. Like, we, like, we've used it for like automated outbound calls or maybe to help a business owner, you know, reply to their online reviews, help them what with what to say, things like that. But at least up until now, we haven't found a automated agent that can handle all of the types of questions that our agents get.

Yeah.

And so I think it will probably, maybe get there almost one day. But we actually, personally, I don't think that it could ever replace, totally replace a real person.

It's interesting because I think in a world where so many things are moving kind of digital and no communication, I think, you know, there's, there's an argument that, you know, actually having a human connection could become so much more valuable potentially in future because people actually probably crave a bit of that as well. Not just about efficiency all the time. It can often be, actually, I want to talk to them.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

And Devon, you mentioned something earlier about, you talked about your marketing service and Google and Google Ads and how you provide services around that. I've noticed recently, whenever I'm doing a Google search, how the results are now dominated by an AI result at the top. Is that something do you have much of many thoughts on kind of where search is moving to with some of those changes?

Yeah, it's really interesting. One of the cool things that we've recently been discussing on our end is just how to leverage that, because AI opens up a lot of different possibilities and it's just trying to figure out what avenue of those possibilities are going to be more helpful or which ones are actually going to hurt the process. We've noticed that a lot of the optimizations that Google will ask for on the back end, like building out some of the structured data with the meta titles and your meta tags, like it will play right into what AI is doing when it goes to read through the data that's out there. So if, if websites are doing that successfully on the search engine optimization side and they're implementing best practices, then a lot of times you can win win the snippets that get pulled into those AI overview summaries. So we've noticed success just from that part. And it's kind of a plug for SEO, I guess, in one form or another. Like, I think all businesses could benefit from organic search. But that plays right into like what AI is doing when it's reading and trying to decipher which data it wants to answer the customer's question with. Even if you're using platforms like Chat GPT and you ask it a question, what's the best storage facility in my area, when it goes out there and it tries to summarize the data of storage facilities, it's going to read the content that's most structured to answer that question. And so a lot of times it'll pull those snippets directly from your website and then if you click into it, you can see a little link that will direct them to that traffic to your website. So that's one for instance. But I think it's going to continue to play a bigger part as people become more familiar with how to use those resources. And us as marketers, we figure out how to play into that to assist them.

Do you have any specific advice for operators who are running a site without staff about how they can kind of get the right balance between automation and that kind of need for a bit of a human connection at times.

One thing that we ask is as long as we have somebody that we can reach out to that is close enough nearby on site where if there is a physical issue, the Gate is broken or somebody's door won't unlock or whatever it is. As long as we have someone that we can call that can go take a look at it, go help. We can do most of the day to day stuff for them over the phone. You know, the websites and technologies are so good now that we can do a lot over a computer. But at least still we haven't found anyone be successful that, that doesn't at least have a way for someone to go check something out on site. And so that's our biggest recommendation to owners. Obviously we, we will do whatever the customer wants. Right. But that's our biggest recommendation is just, you know, sometimes it's a neighbor that's nearby. A lot of times it's just the business owner that might be somewhat close and maybe they'll go drive by the facility once a once a week or once a month or whatever it is, you know. But that's kind of our recommendation that might change. But for now, at least on the operations side, it's really helpful as long as there's someone that can have physical eyes on the facility every once in a while.

Yeah, even I have a site of my own here in Northern Ireland and I haven't been for quite a long time now. But I do have one of my members of staff, he's available and the gate breaks from time to time and you know, there's really nothing, you cannot fix that remotely. Right. You know, yeah, there's, there's other things. I don't even want to talk about them. Like the dead animals.

Right, yeah.

You know, you're not going to get, you can't get software to remove that.

So.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, get that. What about, you know, if you're, if you're operating a soft storage business, you know, and you want to kind of stand out from the crowd, you want to create kind of a whoa moment or just something that's going to really deliver the customer just a different experience to a competitor. What can an operator do to create that kind of experience? And is that something you think about as part of your service?

I think one of the things, at least in our business model that we have to recognize is that we have two customers that we're serving. We're servicing the operators, which is our main clientele. But then we work directly with their customers who are the tenants. So I think success for us and standing out from other options for management, it just comes from working well with the storage operator and dialing in their notes, making sure that all of the Processes that they currently have in place that make their facility what they are like. They communicate that well to us so that we can detail it out in a way that our agents would understand and then be able to offer that same level of customer service when we're speaking to their tenants on the phone. So we recently had a customer call in and say it was somebody that rented a unit from one of our agents. And he was. So he could tell that they were a call center just because in his previous employment, he had set up call centers. But he was blown away with the experience that he had. He's like, I threw him curveball questions. And like, they were able to answer the. I even asked if I could buy his facility. And the agent had a really good answer.

And what's the most unique or strange thing that a customer has requested from you?

So we. I don't know that we've had any strange requests, but we have had some customers ask us to, like, answer their phone calls with a specific tagline. You know, like, it's a. It's a sunny morning here in Utah or, you know, whatever it is, you know, it's a beautiful day in Texas. It's store storage. And so, you know, kind of just funny things like that, that. That we get requests for.

And what's your answer to that? Is that the answer? Yeah, of course. No problem.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, you know, we try to be as flexible as we can with. With these owners with how we. How we manage their business. And then, you know, I think Devin's experienced a few, maybe where people want us to, you know, they still want to shake their hands. You know, Devin, if you kind of want to explain that piece.

The crazy thing that we try to juggle is, is we want to be as customizable as we can to each individual location and operators. They have wildly different management perspectives as far as how they want to do their rental policies and move in procedures and move out procedures. And we have some operators that they ask us, they say, we only want you to take the reservations. We don't want you to complete any rentals. But then I want you to coordinate with me a time to meet that prospective renter at the facility so that I can look them in the eye. And I'm a good judge of character, so I can usually see if they're going to be a good tenant for my facility kind of thing. So they'll shake their hands and have the final say of whether or not they can sign the lease agreement and move in. Other operators, they're the opposite. They, they say, hey, I don't want you to bug me unless it's an absolute natural disaster. Like don't, don't tell me what's going on. I don't want to hear from you. I just want you guys to take the reins and run things. So yeah, it's, it's just a matter of again, the communication, but just balancing what those management perspectives are and then we try to deliver on our end and execute how they tell us to.

Excellent. Well, look, it sounds like a great service and you know, I think it's a, it's a shame we don't have something similar in the uk. Maybe it, maybe it'll come at some point. Maybe you'll decide to come over here at some point and answer the phone if it's a sunny day here. Well, no, it wouldn't be a Sunday. It's a rainy day here in Northern Ireland. If anyone's listening and wants to find out more about your services, where should they go?

So we have our website, it's www.ZION call and then management is abbreviated mgmt okay.com so on there you can, you can find our, our sales number. It has a product overview of all of our services. You can fill out a form if you want to request more information and get in touch with us that way.

Great. Well, thank you very much. It's been really great to meet you both. Thank you, James. Thank you Devon. And I'm sure we'll see you in Vegas. Maybe you'll be there in September.

Yeah, yeah, we'll be there.

I'll see you there. I'll see you there.

Yeah, absolutely. Hey, thank you so much for having us on. We really appreciate it.

Thanks very much. See you soon. At Stora, our mission is to help our customers build the best self storage businesses. Self Storage Explained is here to try and bring you the best from inside and outside dentistry to help you grow your business. If you want to find out a bit more resources, go to Stora Co to sign up for a demo or find out more. Or you can go to Stora Co Academy for lots more resources including our financial model and other in depth guides to setting up and growing your business.