Technology vs human contact

One of my colleagues sent me a link recently regarding human contact in business.

The great thing about this article was it revolved around trust. Now you must be thinking this man has lost the plot of his article in 2 sentences. Fear not as I am about to explain the necessity of human contact and technology in the work place and how having time to give your customer will have a long-term beneficial impact on your business during its life.

When you start your young and budding enterprise you have a lot of one thing that your competitor does not and that is time. Probably motivation too. Being involved in serving people for many years in industries as diverse as waiting on tables, managing shops and restaurant’s to being and Handyman company that did exceptionally well for 10 years. Then I began the journey in self-storage.

Let me get back to the matter at hand as I believe we the older generation who never had computers and software to take mundane functions and complete them at the click of a button. It is our responsibility to take care to train our much younger people about being human.

When we all started in business we would shake hands and complete the job the best we knew how no matter what the job entailed. Alas however today people are employed to sit at a desk and call people selling them stuff they don’t need with money they don’t have. We are told go online and book your seat for the concert and swipe your card on arrival to collect your tickets.

All this without even speaking to one person ever. Then we wonder why people are so aloof or distant when we meet them.

I believe it is time for the human element to be brought back into business in a big way. I know this as I regularly go out and meet the customers in the storage complex and the one common thread I can find is these wonderful people we call tenants. They all compliment out company on having people, people in our offices. It is through this constant communication pipeline that is kept open to each of our clients.

We have also employed the best software we could buy or build ourselves to assist with the daily running of our facilities as I believe that people should not waste valuable time counting doors and looking at spreadsheets. We have taken 70% of the humdrum daily activities and given them to a computer. Yes we have an online booking facility, we also have competent staff in the office to answer queries should the client not find the answer on the website. We have pictures to help people visualize the unit when they are booking it at night. We answer every email or phone request within 24 hours unless it is over the weekend then it could take 48hours. Our home built software even sends you a thank you letter so you know your booking has been loaded properly.

With this simple philosophy we have Kept It Simple Stupid. We aim to assist or speak to every client that comes through our gates. I believe that through these simple methods the company Cedar Storage will keep growing and making inroads to being in the top 10 Storage facilities in Gauteng and hopefully South Africa one day soon. Whilst building our client base we hope to have built a lot of trust with our tenants as they keep coming back again and again to store with us.