PhoneSmart Shifts Some of its Blog Focus to its Total Quality Assurance Services Web Site

Tron Jordheim, the PhoneSmart Director, announces that the PhoneSmart Off-Site Sales Force is moving its Property Management Blog and Secret Shopping Blog to its Total Quality Assurance Services web site in order to better serve current readers and attract a broader audience. PhoneSmart will continue publishing its self storage blog as a stand alone web publication.

Columbia, MO (PRWEB) August 5, 2006 -- PhoneSmart , a sales support provider in Columbia, Missouri, has developed a suite of services through its experience in property management to help companies improve sales and customer service performance. Over the last year, PhoneSmart has been actively posting to its property management blog and its secret shopping blog .

These two blogs have helped readers get a better picture of how PhoneSmart works to help property management companies bring in and keep more renters and how companies can use secret shopping and sales training to improve performance across the board.

This is a great way to bring in new readers and give a better experience to our regular readers. We hope the new and improved format will be successful.

In order to broaden the scope of PhoneSmart’s potential customer reach and to reflect PhoneSmart’s focus on quality assurance, the property management blog and the secret shopping blog will be merged into the blog area on the Total Quality assurance Services web site .

If you are interested in secret shopping, sales and customer service training and how this would impact your property management business or any business for that matter, browse over to www.qualityassuranceservices.com and see what the entries can offer.

PhoneSmart also publishes the Self Storage Blog for its many clients in the self storage industry. self storage business .

The Total Quality Assurance Services web site and selfstorageblog.com were developed by World Consulting Group .

Tron Jordheim, PhoneSmart Director said, "This is a great way to bring in new readers and give a better experience to our regular readers. We hope the new and improved format will be successful."

PhoneSmart is a wholly owned subsidiary of StorageMart. StorageMart is a company with assets of 600 million dollars that currently operates 52 storage facilities. The owners of StorageMart, the Burnam family, formerly operated Storage Trust. One of the larger storage businesses in the country, Storage Trust contracted with a third party call center to handle its incoming calls and received many thousands of calls a month. PhoneSmart was created based on the experiences and successes at Storage Trust.

PhoneSmart is a solution for two of the most perplexing problems in the self-storage industry.

1.    Facility managers can’t answer all the phone calls their facilities receive. Managers are often out on the site showing units or doing facility maintenance. When they are in the office, they may be walking a new tenant through a lease, visiting with a current tenant or making past-due calls. Mangers can miss calls; and potential renters call before and after hours, too.

2.    One of the primary ways people find out about a storage facility is through the telephone. One can imagine how large a chunk of revenue a facility’s yellow page advertising eats up. Internet advertising is creating many phone calls and can rival the yellow pages in cost. What does it actually cost to get someone to call a facility? Some facilities estimate it is $50 to $75. If a manager can’t get to the phone for one reason or another, is the caller going to call back… or move on to the next ad in the directory? How much money do facility owners spend to help their competitors fill units? Even if many renters rent at a location without calling first, most people call first before coming in to a storage center.

At PhoneSmart, we turn those missed calls into profit. PhoneSmart is a roll-over call center. Any time the manager can’t get to the phone, or is already talking on the phone, the new caller is forwarded on to sales reps who typically talk to more than 1,000 self storage callers a month each..

PhoneSmart sales representatives walk the callers through a consultative sales process. The caller makes a reservation or if the caller is unsure of a move-in date, the information is automatically faxed or emailed to the manager for timely follow-up. PhoneSmart has developed several excellent ways to drive callers to a particular store. PhoneSmart can help storage centers integrate systems and procedures that will convert as many of the leads into rentals as possible.

PhoneSmart is not an answering service. PhoneSmart has many advantages over an answering service type or customer service type call center. Because the focus is on the rental calls, PhoneSmart can reduce the total cost of call center services to its clients. Forwarding tenant calls to the manager means the manager can deal directly with people she or he is on a first name basis with. When PhoneSmart does talk to current renters, it can give them a great customer service experience, by answering basic questions for them or referring them on to the store manager.

Because PhoneSmart bases some of its billing on bonuses for performance, the motivation is to maximize every call. It also means PhoneSmart can offer performance incentives to reps. Other call centers hire lower wage “operators” or “customer service reps”. PhoneSmart hires sales people and invests in their training and tenure. Therefore, PhoneSmart not only gives a professional presentation of a facility, but can also "sell" it. PhoneSmart's job is not to clear calls, but to send people to the storage center.

Another benefit of dealing with PhoneSmart, is knowing it is a part of a successful storage business. PhoneSmart knows about self-storage.

Because of this selling experience, PhoneSmart has developed sales and customer service training and quality assurance methods that apply well to all property management business and any business that seeks to maximize its leads management and customer acquisition strategies. Sine good selling and good customer retention tactics translate across all business lines, PhoneSmart is in a unique position to help any business prosper. This is a good enough reason to expand its blog presence by moving some of its blogs to the Total Quality Assurance web site.

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