Use Data to Increase Your Bottom Line

Data. Important stuff for a business. By using data, a self storage facility can make effective decisions that will help move their business forward. I want to briefly share the results of a study done by a professor at MIT and a white paper about analytics that can be extracted from phone calls.

Professor James Oldroyd from MIT conducted the research. The study revealed two dramatic conclusions. First, companies don’t respond fast enough to web-generated leads and they didn’t respond persistently enough.

To explain, they gave the example of a person going into a shoe store to look at shoes only to be pushed out the door and told that someone would contact them in 24 to 48 hours. If that truly happened to a person in real life, they would never go back to that shoe store ever again. They would take their business elsewhere.

However, that length of time is typical for a response when a prospective customer sends in a request via a webpage.

Think about that for a moment. Companies spend a lot of money building their sales and marketing teams. They develop web sites, campaigns, and strategies in an effort to get a potential customer to contact the company. Despite all of the money and time spent, many companies do not immediately follow-up to online requests for information. The bottom line is this: response times to new leads should be measured in minutes and seconds instead of hours or days.

How is does your self storage company stack up in response time to potential customers’ inquiries?

There is another type of new analytics available. It is conversation analytics. This goes beyond the response time to a phone call. It gathers data from the words that are said during the phone conversation between a potential customer and a self storage employee.

Conversation analytics can analyze things such as agitation level, cancellation, complaints, compliments, dissatisfaction, agent empathy, phone etiquette, and reservations made. The conversation analytics can evaluation things such as agitation level, cancellation language, complaints,compliments, dissatisfaction, and escalation requests.

Over 420 billion words are spoken in phone calls between a customer and business every day. When your self storage company analyzes those words, you can make better informed decisions.

When your decisions are based on data, your outcomes will be better. The result will be targeted on exactly what you want. You’ll understand your customers’ needs and wants – and will respond to them immediately. And, the bottom line is that you will convert their calls into a rented self storage unit!

Sources Used:

“White Paper: 45 Cool Analytics We Can Extract from Phone Calls.” LogMyCalls; The Smarter Call.

“A 2012 Retrospective: Five Years After The Original Lead Response Management Research Paper.” Inside Sales.com.