Sayeed Mohammed – our new Support manager in New Zealand, has completed 2 weeks of site visits to some of our New Zealand customers and we would like to share his experiences with you.
From the diary of Sayeed:
I visited Westgate Safe Store and met Rick (Storage Consultant) and Maria (Branch Manager – Safe Store).
We did lock checks together which was a very long walk (I realised wearing formal shoes was a mistake after doing 7000 + steps on day 1), sold some units and carparks and updated them online in Storman Cloud, created leads, reservations and agreements, updated payment receipts, assisted a managed account customer with his courier. I even took storage content photos of one of their overdue units and put it on trademe™ for auction as the customer was long overdue and unreachable.
After visiting Westgate Safe Store, I visited Pakuranga Safe Store. The Pakuranga site is a bit different to Westgate. Westgate is a newly built facility, mostly serving residential customers with small to medium units. Pakuranga is an older facility but quite busy with commercial clients as they have larger units with roller doors. I learned a lot from Shaheem and Scott (Storage Consultants) and Maria.
I also met Aaron (the general manager at Safe Store) on day 4 of my visit, while he was there on a short visit. I assisted the facility with some phone calls, sales paperwork, updating entries on Storman Cloud, doing lock checks with Shaheem, helped the boys assemble a new office desk and drove the mean six seater golf cart.
I started week 2 at the Westgate Safe Store office. I helped to make customer move in packs, which usually includes helpful information like a site map, a pen, contact numbers and a list of do’s and don’ts for a new storer.
Maria introduced me to many other sites this week and I received most helpful feedback around our software and how it is used.
We went to the brand new site of National Mini Storage in Hobsonville and we did a tour of the site with their store manager Michelle. They are a sizable internal self storage facility.
We then visited Michael from National Mini at Henderson. Their site is built in a ranch style, mostly outdoor roller doors with drive up access.
Next visit was Swanson Storage which is a small (170 units) but a very busy site with very high occupancy. Their Manager Paula had a unit coming available but she had a big waiting list to go through and decide who to give it to.
The last visit was at Storage King Henderson and Kris (manager) said that she loved Storman Cloud and how simple it makes things for them. We always love hearing how our product helps facilities to simplify things!
Wednesday I spent time assisting Scott at Safe Store Pakuranga as we were one man short. I also spend some time working on their facility maps and showing the facility map how to video on our Storman website. I did ride the six seater golf cart for a quick lock check.
Thursday I visited the Safe Store Papatoetoe branch, they are almost complete with their build work which will increase the units tally to 800 approx. It is the biggest Safe Store site currently and a busy one! I met Tracey and her team and answered a couple of their queries. I took some time to share knowledge with the team of Storman’s inner workings, like the difference between a bug (needs code fix), normal support incident (can be fixed by support team/ configuration/ permissions or restarts etc) and a product improvement (nice to have feature). Below pic with Papatoetoe team.
I later tried my hand at the Forklift and lifted some pallets which was fun.
At the end of the day I was handed over a Training Completion Certificate and a SafeStore Goodie bag from Maria and the team at Safestore which was a pleasant surprise. I must say they really looked after me during these 2 weeks and I learned a lot about self storage from them.
Special mention to Maria for being an absolute gem! She planned my days to cover all variety of tasks, took me around different sites and played a perfect combined role of a good host and a Manager.
Finally, on Friday I spent some time with Maria, I did a full lock check myself and even called Storman to report a brief site down. (Thanks Nga for answering the call immediately and good job Musa for calling back to report when the site was back up.)
I believe this was a great learning curve and I hope I will be able to bring the clients perspective to the team when dealing with their support tickets.
PS: Did I mention I tried my hand at the giant floor sweeper/vacuum. Rick really got me on that one, he asked me to press the brake and that was actually to accelerate it and I kept running with it for a few yards until I realised how it worked. We had a good laugh!
More photos of the visits below:
Westgate office – doing some admin tasks and calling a sales lead.
Westgate demo unit with marked lines to show customers different sizes of unit. This is pretty helpful I think. There also some combo welcome packs in display.
If you would like more information about our products, support or any other area of business, please contact us.
