Voice became Smartlock's number one booking channel
Smartlock Self Storage put AI on the two jobs that scale the worst: answering every call and chasing every past-due balance. Voice went from one channel among several to become the engine behind most of their new rentals, while collections kept running quietly in the background. Same team, no new hires.
Andy Maisch on running 13 facilities across three states
The problem most growing operators miss
01Every unanswered call is a lost lease
Smartlock was scaling fast, and the phone was the steepest curve. Inbound sales calls ramped from a near standstill at launch to 252 in May, the busiest the phones have ever been. The math is unforgiving: across the industry about 40% of storage calls go unanswered, and 60% of renters rent from the first facility that answers.
02AI carries volume, people carry judgment
Voice runs as the front line for every inbound call, across every location, every hour. It answers, captures intent, and moves qualified renters straight into the booking flow. Service and account questions are handled or routed, and anything outside its lane goes to a person, so the team spends its time where judgment matters.
The three jobs Andy stopped doing manually
The 1% that stays human
Delinquency is about 99% automated. Taking payment is the one step Andy will never hand to a bot.
1,000+ automated move-outs
A photo of the swept unit and a text from the number on file, and the unit is rentable the next millisecond.
Smarter support, fewer escalations
Voice escalations fell from 20 to 30 a day to two or three, with the AI trained on their FAQ, knowledge base, and troubleshooting steps.
Not every call is a sales call, so measure the ones that are
Counting every touchpoint makes conversion look like ~4%. Measured against actual sales calls, roughly 1 in 7 became a rental in May.
- Sales calls handled in May252
- Rentals booked from them38
- Sales-call conversion, May~15%
- Peak conversions in one week (early May)15
Voice went from a channel they answered to one that sells
| Month | Voice rentals | Share |
|---|---|---|
| March | 20 | 91% |
| April | 20 | 83% |
| May | 38 | 88% |
| Quarter | 78 | ≈$5,550 |
Past-due balances that get worked without a collections team
Smartlock has no dedicated collections staff, so the AI does the chasing: outbound voice and SMS on past-due balances, with an auto receipt the moment a tenant commits to pay. In the first month it was on, delinquent accounts fell from 167 to 125, about a 25% drop, and roughly $6,000 in past-due balances was recovered.
- Past-due balances recovered~$6,000
- Fewer delinquent accounts in a month-25%
- AI calls ending in a payment plan15-23%
- Answered calls transferred to a person7.6%
Skipping auction ads for tenants who will pay
Auctions require a paid newspaper ad, about $700 a clip. When a tenant tells the agent they plan to pay, their name is pushed daily to a "swivl Notes" tab in Andy's sheet, so he can skip the ad spend on people who were going to pay in a couple of days.
The same platform, closing the smaller gaps too
Review auto-replies
swivl auto-replies to 4- and 5-star Google reviews. Average response time collapsed from days to near-instant across the spring.
spot.is QR codes
Self-serve spot.is QR codes rolled out across all 13 locations, giving walk-up prospects an instant path to rent and pay without a phone call at all.
Part of closing the FMS gaps for Smartlock even without spot.is payments active, alongside the auction-tracking sheet.
Voice books rentals around the clock and handles the calls our team used to chase. The collections agent keeps after the past-due balances we were never going to chase ourselves, and flags who plans to pay so I'm not buying auction ads I don't need. We step in only when it actually matters.
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