Case Study – North America’s Largest Storage Company (Canadian Operations)

Abilita entered into an engagement with a storage company with 40 locations across Canada. Each location had a single computer and 1-2 employees at the counter. The Canadian division was separating from the US division and as result needed a Canadian based call centre and independent IT operations.

Abilita was asked to present a proposal to build a call center to accept all calls originating from Canada. The client had been receiving customer calls in 2 ways:

through the 800 toll free line (based on national and wall ads) to the call centre in California, and,
directly calling a property based on each property’s published number in the local yellow pages.

The initial call center design was simply answering all 800 calls to either make reservations or re-direct them to a storage property as and when needed. Based on additional analysis, Abilita determined that a large volume of calls at the properties were going unanswered because employees designated to be at the counter were away from the phone taking prospective customers on property tours. As a result of these findings Abilita recommended and implemented a solution to rollover all unanswered calls after a specified number of rings at the local storage property to the central call center. From that point on our client captured 100% of calls directed to both the call center and the property. It was determined, based on the industry and nature of the business, that each call for new business was worth approx. $1,000 and about 70% of all calls initially routed to the storage properties were for new business.

Abilita project managed the build-out of the call center by creating and evaluating RFP’s for the numerous tasks, orchestrating the tasks between vendors to make sure that the integration and hand-off efforts were seamless between the numerous vendors. In addition Abilita monitored the budget and minimized change orders at the end of the project.

Once the project had been implemented, the client realized an overall increase in sales of 35% considered to be largely due to the capture of all phone calls and the ability for skilled call center agents to cross sell and up-sell on each call. Cross selling and up-selling was previously not typically being done by salaried employees at the property. Using a call center provided the agents with a national view of all properties and the unused capacity at each property allowing them to provide prospective customers with more choices if a preferred property had no availability. In the past, the property manager had informed the potential customer that the property had no availability sending the customer to the competition.