Before now, warehousing and self-storage have been seen as an establishment that doesn’t require more than storage spaces, locks, and electricity due to technological innovations. With the everyday evolution of technology, a good number of facility owners and managers have completely different mindsets now.
In the current business landscape, there is a need for business owners and operators to embrace advanced technologies to effectively streamline daily operations like accounting, management, marketing, leasing, and many other challenging tasks, which would also save loads of time and money.
These highly influential extensions employ some high-tech innovations like biometric security, HVAC units, self-serve kiosks, online reservations, etc., to reduce the risk of individuals or companies losing valuable materials or data to theft, climatic damage, and many more.
More so, many people encountered difficulties like security concerns, access issues, etc., with the use of traditional self-storage facilities. With these technological innovations, these problems were solved in no time, while also providing the needed, secure spaces at a modest cost.
What is Self-Storage?
A self-storage is an offsite storage option for manufacturers, distributors, and consumers to securely store their belongings or excess properties for as long as they want. In other words, self-storage can be perceived as an extension of any clean, dry, and secure space in your homes, business organization, or anywhere to store your belongings.
Benefits of Self-Storage Management to Business Owners
Self-storage has fast grown into a prominent facility among people. It allows business organizations to temporarily move the items and goods into a storage facility to free up some space in their office environment. At the same time, they are also assured of the utmost security over these properties.
This management serves benefits to both homeowners and business organizations. Still, business owners can benefit a lot from self-storage management because they will be able to lock some office essentials, items, and goods away for a short time, which may take months or a few years. The following are a few benefits:
1. Helps to Store Office Essentials
Business organizations cannot afford to lose their valuables, which are mostly data. Therefore, considering the significant effect of the possible loss of these data on the organization, there might be genuine reasons to lock these essentials away in a storage box in someplace safe, at least safer than the business environment.
2. Protects Important Things from Fire and Water
Many businesses have seen sensitive and confidential documents gutted by fire, and some may be soaked and washed away by water. Yes, this might be an accident, which is a convincing reason to lock these essentials away to prevent the business organization from being undone by mishaps like these.
Therefore, businesses can invest in self-storage companies to protect their valuables as their lockers, storage boxes, and containers are always airtight and sealed adequately that they are hardly affected by anything. This is one of the investments that may be much-needed for a business organization to not run at risk.
3. Store Seasonal Goods
Some business organizations that major in seasonal goods like Christmas decorations, calendars, summer beauty products can find the use of lockers, boxes, and containers useful for securely storing their extra goods for a short time until the next season when sales arrive. This way, the organization can minimize the risk of losing some goods to accidents, or even climatic hazards, before the sales season comes.
Benefits of Self-Storage Management to Home Owners
1. Makes Home Cluster-Free
In most cases, house owners tend to employ self-storage managers’ services to avoid their homes from being clustered up by extra furniture, antique items, and garden or mechanical tools. To prevent these stored items from being unattended to, it would be better to lock away in a self-storage facility that grants you full security and access anytime.
2. Change of Residence
More often than not, people change their place of residence due to a plethora of reasons. In this case, there may be a need to store some household items in one of the four types of self-storage units for a short time.
This storage gives you room to settle in your new home, decorate, plan your new settings, and picture what you want the new home to look like when the locked items come in. More so, people who work a transferrable job will find storage units much-needed when the need to swap a place of residence for another when duty calls.
What Is a Self-Storage Facility Management System?
Self-storage facility management system is a high-performance, cloud-based management solution, used by both single and multi-facility storage managers to create and generate management reports, automate the collection of crucial information like occupancy rates, clients’ contact information, etc., oversee operations from the convenience of their user-friendly interface and intuitive dashboard, which so allows them to make gain knowledge about things they should be aware of, and as well react quickly to the market conditions.
In this article, we will give a succinct description of these important high-tech innovations used in a self-storage to save money and time for the operators and satisfy the critical needs of customers.
4 Best Technologies Used in Self-Storage
1. Self-Serve Kiosks
Most storage facilities always look to afford their rentals or customers the optimum convenience, since they are a big part of the establishment, and just be taken seriously at all times. This self-storage storage technology helps facility owners and managers boost the customer experience and streamline workloads like routine customer interactions.
Self-serve kiosks are used by tenants to give access to the storage facility at all times, owing to an embedded software that makes it easier to be integrated with a sound property management system.
These kiosks are specially designed to effectively store and report any action taken by the customers in the databases for property managers to keep track of all operations, whether or not he’s away.
Self-storage facilities make convenience a top priority, and storage companies that have invested in self-serve kiosks can speak highly of how much of a value the tool is in effectively managing a self-storage facility. More interestingly, working with mobile applications makes it almost possible to run all operations without a property manager’s intervention.
2. Mobile Applications
It is almost right that there is a mobile application for nearly everything, and self-storage has its own applications. These applications are used by most self-storage facilities to manage and control access to several units.
This technological innovation relieves the tenants/clients from keeping track of designated key cards to gain access to their respective units. Therefore, from anywhere and time, clients can gain access to their properties by making use of the designated application.
As technology advances as each day passes, more self-storage facilities want to spark an ever-present interaction between facility operators and tenants, which can be presented by responsive websites, smartphones and applications, and many more.
With mobile applications integrated with the property management system, facilities can make payments, start and renew leases, update access codes whenever they wish to, and generally effectively manage their self-storage units.
3. Biometrics
Security is one of the critical features that make self-storage facilities a remarkable one in their customers’ eyes and potential ones. Rentals and clients are paying offsite storage to store their belongings securely. Biometric technology is just one of the technological innovations employed to make sure these belongings are safely stored within the facility.
Since the innovation of biometric technology, businesses have been able to provide unlimited access that is impossible for an external user to breach. This technology uses people’s unique characteristics, including a pattern in retinas, fingerprints, and voice, to maximize security.
Self-storage facility operators and tenants can only gain access by scanning one of these unique characteristics to match the one in the database. The kind of biometric pattern used varies from a storage facility to a storage facility.
4. Robotics
As Millennials are growing in number in the self-storage world, they employ many measures to ensure the storage facility is run as effectively as possible. Robots were first innovated and developed by a French company to help facility owners remotely interact with their tenants.
Since the inception of robots in France, it has subsequently been adopted by a number of European countries. Robotics is more interactive than the previously mentioned technological innovations.
This measure helps operators connect their customers to live advisors, who do well to attend to their questions and allows them to attest their signature to lease agreements and retrieve locks digitally.
Final Thoughts
Self-storages vary in sophistication from facility to facility. This is one of the reasons why we prepared this article to guide business facility operators through the new, core technological innovations, and how they add values to the tenants/clients and their management enterprise. If you have any questions or inquiries at all, feel free to contact us for immediate response.
Why You Should Choose Booking Ninjas
Booking Ninjas serves as a middleman between you and your customers. We eschew the need to build an online booking system from scratch and let you concentrate on giving your clients the utmost satisfaction they deserve.
With our advanced booking engine which allows you to manage reservations, update your rates, and tailor customer experience according to your whims, among other powerful features, Booking Ninjas is leagues ahead of our competitors in the game.
We also efficiently keep track of and handle all your transactions so you don’t have to stress yourself over them.
With us, your clients will always be left feeling secured, satisfied and smiling.
For more information, check out Booking Ninjas solutions.
Contact us today through our ever responsive website to get answers to any questions you may have to ask us. We are always available 24/7 to attend to you; your satisfaction is our top priority.