Understand your customers - Boost your Growth!

No matter how good our product, how outstanding the service, and how efficient the automation is, at the end of the day, the success or failure of a self-storage (or any other) business stands and falls with the customers. It is no surprise that since the first business transaction sometime in pre-history, merchants and later businesspeople have tried to find out as much about their customers as possible. Our methods have become more sophisticated with time, but nothing changed about the goal: The better you know about them, the easier you can make them happy and the more likely it is that they will come to you again.

Self-storage as an industry is going through a lot of change. While the fundamental drivers of self-storage demand, the so-called Four-Ds (Death, Divorce, Dislocation, Downsizing) remain major drivers, new demand comes from other industries like online retail or tourism. In some markets, B2B customers make up the majority of the business with SMEs, using self-storage instead of traditional warehousing solutions for their merchandise. Even among B2C customers, there are huge shifts in expectations, especially around the digitalization of the whole experience, self-service, and customer communication through SNS. Not every business, not even every market, experiences these changes in the same way, but they all experience change. In times of uncertainty, the safest course is to rely on data to forecast future developments and draw up appropriate strategies. Customer analysis can provide these answers.

So, what is customer analysis? In short, it is the process of gathering and studying data about self-storage customers to understand their behavior, needs, and preferences.

• Cluster Analysis – groups customers based on similarities to optimize marketing and service offers.
• Demographic Analysis – looks at the socio-demographic data of customers (age, gender, income, location, marital status, etc) to identify the makeup of the customer base and identify potential target markets.
• Behavioral Analysis – Looks at how different customers interact with the business. This includes website behavior, app usage, customer support interactions, and past leases. It helps the company understand preferences along the customer journey.  
• ABC- Analysis helps identify the most valuable customers based on margins and turnover. Alternatively, it is possible to apply RFM-Analysis for Recency, Frequency, and Monetary Value.
• Needs Analysis – What problems are the customers trying to solve, and how can self-storage be of the best help? This analysis especially has the potential to identify up-sell opportunities.

These analyses help us understand who our customers are now and show opportunities for new customer segments that the business is not yet targeting. A better understanding of the customer, paired with a good CRM solution, allows us to have personalized retention and communication strategies.

In the past, we have often highlighted the importance of a good customer experience in customer acquisitions and customer retention. B2C customers especially, but also B2B customers, are increasingly used to personalized marketing and sales experiences from other industries. It is only natural that they also come to expect the same levels in self-storage. In other words, customer data analysis for self-storage is not an optional nice-to-have; it is essential to the future success of the business in a more competitive landscape.