A self-storage company deployed AI agents to handle customer calls. Building the system in-house instead of buying off-the-shelf taught them more and revealed extra automation opportunities. They use a written charter with guardrails to keep AI projects tied to business goals, like automating Google Review collection while staying focused on customer service.
Is there any other advice you would give to people in the room about getting started with just AI in general or agents specifically?
I would say it depends. So if you want to, there are different finished products on the market. So it depends if you want to spend the time, let's say 6 months, to get to the same level like different products are at the moment, or you just get a finished product actually. But I always recommend actually to do it yourself because you can learn so many things. And by the way you're doing it, you're finding out that you can automate other things what you haven't thought about it.
So for me, it's a bit of a kid in a sweet shop moment really when I look at all of these shiny new things, things you can automate, different areas you can tackle in your business. Probably 6 months ago, conscious of how I like to experiment with stuff, I actually wrote myself I wrote to myself a charter of automation. These are my rules and guardrails around the things I will automate and why. And even today, there was a piece, Google Reviews, we're automating how we collect reviews. We've written a paper about how we're going to do it. I've now compared it to my charter of 6 months ago. Am I sticking to the rules I set myself? Are the objectives of what we're doing consistent with improving customer service, being a more competitive offer? Just those simple things means that actually you won't Arrive with a range of automations that actually don't talk to each other and aren't consistent with really those, those key goals.
I think go and do it even if you think you're going to mess it up. I think go and plug it in because I think even at its worst, it's going to be better than a phone ringing. The amount of times I call operators when I'm trying to buy them or go into an area and open a site and the phone doesn't get picked up, I don't understand it. We spend £3 million on a building and then we let a phone ring. That just blows my mind. So plug something in, mess it up, but at least you know that it's going to capture their name, their email.
