Amongst the growth there is a challenge, one as old as the company.  The underlying software that manages the customer relationships was showing its age. The CRM was a solution built in-house with the specific needs and workflow of a small self storage company in the 90s. Renting units, maintaining tenant records, and account maintenance (i.e. payments, address changes, and unit transfers). What it lacked was the data collected from each customer interaction in aggregate company wide, its analysis, and the insight into the business that can inform the expansion strategy.  In addition to that, files were mostly physical paper or backed up on local storage at each location which made adhering to various federal, state, and local retention periods for landlord/tenant records a potential liability. Finally creating a company wide standard of customer interactions including sales, service, and conflict resolution also became impossible with no way to monitor these interactions or the on boarding process. These seemingly small isolated pain points collectively slowed growth and expansion down to a crawl, and created inconsistent sales and occupancy rates from facility to facility.

Replacing the aging CRM with something new was the obvious path forward.  Salesforce was chosen due to its flexibility and ancillary services offered (service cloud, Trailhead).  However retaining key functionality from the legacy CRM and integrating that with new capabilities from a modern CRM was key. After a number of collaborative brainstorming sessions with the learning and development department, administrative teams, and facility managers, the solution eventually took the shape of several customized apps that provided the basic functionality of the previous system (leasing, doc generation, custom UI for tenant data entry and maintenance) while also aggregating data from all user actions and providing stats and analytics.  With this solution the company was better able to locate strategic areas of expansion in various locals with the help of KPI metrics reporting. Create and monitor a unified sales process during customer interactions with the help of new onboarding and auditing tools. And finally—easily maintain storage and data integrity with enterprise level cloud storage and backup also allowing the company to stay compliant with all federal and local retention requirements automatically. Within 12 months the company’s footprint rate of growth was up and revenue from rentals were at a 5 year high.