Self Storage Meets Mobile Access

Storeganise x Tapkey – Success Story

Managing access and self storage: Name a better duo. That’s why it’s no wonder that Storeganise, a modern SaaS solution for self storage companies, integrated Tapkey’s access control. Hence, they help businesses to automate and modernize their operations, but also engage and improve their customer experience. In an interview with Miles Davison, one of the founders of Storeganise, we talked about the trends in self storage, what role mobile access plays in it and why it’s crucial for the future of the business. 

1. Can you tell us a bit about yourself and your business?

Storeganise is a modern SaaS solution for self storage companies. We want to empower companies to exactly do this—to self-manage bookings and accounts and run automated facilities from where they want. Our focus is to bring companies into a more modern set-up and understand how they can better service their customers. Hence, single login is a necessity, meaning there is no need to have multiple payment methods for different facilities or different records and so on. Customers should be able to do it all from one place and automate that process.

2. Please go into detail about self-storage. How has the storage business changed over the last few years?

In my opinion, the self-storage industry is a bit behind other industries—due to the motto: ”What ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. But actually, if you are not looking at how you can improve this on an ongoing basis, then eventually you will find that you are left behind as customers’ expectations and different technologies advance.

COVID-19 has actually been really helpful to businesses that were reluctant to make a switch. The pandemic helped some businesses that were on the fence, to suddenly realize that they had to manage everything remotely. And as they didn’t have the infrastructure to do that, it became a much bigger challenge. So again, it comes down to providing the tools and options to those different requirements. 

3. What do you think are key features that self-storage companies must implement in order to remain future-proof?

Short and crisp: Having systems talk well with each other is a prerequisite. It’s about identifying technologies and solutions that the customers engage with. For example, providing a mobile access control solution that comes with many benefits. It can elevate your customer experience and significantly improve facility efficiency and profitability.  

The sign-up should be easy and simple. Getting into the facility should also show the same kind of simplicity. This includes having a handover without too much paperwork and intervention. Hence, unlocking doors with the Tapkey app, for example, is a very customer-centric solution.

From a technology perspective, it is always about identifying the new technologies that might initially be considered to be gimmicks. 

4. How does Storeganise benefit from a Tapkey Integration?

For us, the most important thing is being able to provide options to our clients. We like to work with companies that share a similar vision that Storeganise has. If you are focusing on the customer experience online, you need to focus on the offline experience as well. And we think that Tapkey is thinking about all the access scenarios, whether it’s on- or offline. And obviously, the integration was super easy to do. 

5. How does the Storeganise x Tapkey Integration work? 

When somebody signs up, we automatically register them at Tapkey and automatically send over that credential request. Tapkey then creates the customer and gives access to that client. Equally, in the case of the customer being late on payment, we can immediately remove access and re-enable access when payment has been made. So it is really a real time interaction between sign up, payments and move out. 

6. What trends should the self-storage sector be looking out for?

One of the big things that we see—from a technological point of view— is having platforms that can integrate easily with each other. This is a shift, not unique to self-storage, by any means. 

If you look back 20+ years ago, software companies tended to try to build everything into one platform. This often resulted in software programs doing a mediocre job at lots of things. Instead, we feel it is better to focus on what you are good at and easily integrate with other platforms. This mindset changed drastically. At least for us, having an open platform and API allows easy integration and building out integrations, like with Tapkey. That is a natural fit and gives clients the opportunity to use platforms that are not so common and to work with those.