3 Ways an AI Chatbot Can Help Your Self Storage Business
AI chatbots give your business an “always-on” assistant that can improve the overall experience your customers have with your website.
Many large retail companies already use or are actively developing, AI chatbots on their websites. However, the use of AI chatbots in the self storage space is still mostly concentrated among the larger players in the industry.
Investing in the technology is usually something that’s out of reach for most smaller operators, even though they’re the ones who could see the biggest benefit.
So What Exactly is an AI Chatbot?
You’ve likely seen or had a conversation with one before.
When a website has an AI chatbot, you’ll generally see a chat bubble open up in a corner of your browser when you land on their home page, asking if you need help with something.
Sometimes it’ll appear as if a real person just messaged you, you’ll see a picture of a person and their name within the chat prompt. Other times it’ll be more obvious that it’s a chatbot, and it’ll be a character, like an owl named Hoover, that messages you.
Regardless of the type of chatbot you encounter, they all share the same general goal: to answer any questions customers have to drive them to the desired outcome.
Those desired outcomes vary depending on the industry, but for us, the desired outcome is typically leading more customers to rent storage spaces.
We recently partnered with swivl, creators of the only AI chatbot tailored for the self storage industry, to bring a chatbot feature option to customers on our websites. Our constant goal is to bring tools generally reserved for larger companies to independent operators, and this partnership is another step in that direction.
swivl was the perfect partner because the team behind this chatbot built it specifically for the self storage industry. Their chatbot is powered through a combination of machine learning, natural language self storage model, and actual people.
This means that your customers will be able to speak with the chatbot on your website naturally as if they were speaking with an actual person, and the chatbot will be able to understand them and provide them answers to their self storage questions.
There’s a long list of benefits you’ll see now that you have this tool at your disposal, but to keep things short, let’s look at three.
1. You’ll Now Have an Always Available Manager on Your Website
We briefly mentioned this, but it’s worth noting again. Having an AI chatbot on your website means that your customers will always have a point of contact at any time of the day to assist them with the rental process, or answer questions about things like current special promotions.
2. Your Always Available Manager Will Keep Getting Smarter
As the AI chatbot continues to work with your customers, it’ll continuously get smarter based on the help tickets, emails, and chat transcripts it goes through. As it gets smarter, it’ll get better at answering common questions. The better it gets at answering questions, the more likely it will convert website visitors into customers.
3. It’ll Be Easy for Your Human Managers to Customize Your AI Chatbots
The swivl AI chatbot uses a no-code workflow to make it easy to drag and drop datasets into a visual editor. That way your managers who know your brand well can build the customer experience that’s perfect for you.
