BY ALBERT ALLEN AND ANDREW BONNIS

hen people hear that a self-storage facility has gone fully remote, they tend to reach for the same conclusion: We must be saving a fortune on payroll. It’s a fair guess. Labor is one of the largest controllable expenses in this business, and the tools now available for access control, identity verification, payments, and customer communication have made it genuinely possible to run a property without a manager sitting behind a desk all day. But the payroll story, as real as it is, turned out to be the least interesting thing that happened to us.

Going fully remote wasn’t only an operational change. It became an unplanned exercise in customer research. Like most operators, we walked into the process carrying a stack of assumptions about what tenants wanted. Some came from industry norms, others from the way storage has been run for decades, and nearly all of them felt reasonable at the time. Then we took the office out of the equation. Within weeks it became clear that several things we were sure customers valued mattered far less than we believed, while a few factors we had quietly underrated turned out to be the ones holding the experience together.

What began as a change in operating model ended as a lesson in the difference between what operators assume tenants want and what tenants genuinely care about. That distinction matters more now than it ever has.

For years, the industry has built its experience around a familiar sequence: A customer drives onto the property, walks into an office, talks with a manager, fills out paperwork, gets a key and/or a gate code, and leaves with a unit. The office sits at the center of it all. It’s usually the first thing a prospect sees and the place where operators believe trust gets established. Because the office has always been there, it’s easy to assume customers value it.

When we actually looked at how tenants used our facilities, a different picture came into focus. Most people weren’t coming into the office unless they had no choice. They rented online, called instead of visiting, and finished transactions long after business hours. Plenty of them never met a staff member in person. The harder we looked, the harder it became to argue that the office was creating value. What it was creating was familiarity, but familiarity and value aren’t the same thing.

There’s a habit in business of mistaking tradition for necessity. The fact that something has always been done one way doesn’t mean customers still expect it. Banking learned this when the people who once stood in line to deposit a check started doing it from their phones. Travel agents gave way to booking sites. Retailers found that convenience often mattered more to customers than personal interaction.

Storage is moving through the same shift, and what tenants increasingly want is control. They want to rent on their schedule rather than the office’s, get answers immediately, move through simple processes quickly, and feel the friction pulled out of the experience. Once we started looking at our operation through that lens, a lot of long-held assumptions got difficult to defend.

The biggest surprise was how little anyone seemed to miss the on-site staff. What tenants cared about was whether they could do what they came to do. Could they reach their belongings? Could they get help when something went wrong? Could they trust the place to be secure? Whether the person helping them happened to be sitting in an office on the property was usually beside the point. In hindsight that makes sense.

People don’t buy storage because they want a relationship with a facility manager. They buy it because they have a problem to solve. They’re moving, downsizing, settling an estate, running out of room at home, or launching a business, working through one of the countless transitions life throws at them. The unit is the solution. Everything around it is delivery.

That isn’t to say customer service stopped mattering. We found the opposite. What changed was our understanding of what good service looks like. Operators have long equated service with physical presence: a manager in an office standing in for availability and someone to talk to if a tenant needed something.

Remote operations forced us to redraw that definition. A customer who gets a clear answer in five minutes is often happier than one who has access to an office but must wait until tomorrow morning for help.

Response time started to outweigh location, clear communication outweighed visibility, and a straight answer outweighed proximity. Those sound like small shifts, but they change how you approach the whole experience. The question stops being whether someone is available on site and becomes whether the customer can solve their problem quickly; the answer usually has less to do with staffing than with systems.

Going remote also exposed weaknesses that had always been there, hidden behind human intervention. If customers routinely needed help finishing a rental, the rental process probably wasn’t intuitive enough. If tenants kept calling with billing questions, the invoices and payment flow weren’t clear enough. If new renters constantly got stuck on access procedures, the onboarding communication needed work.

Removing the office didn’t create these problems. It removed the safety net that had let them go unnoticed. The result was useful self-reflection. We started asking questions we should have been asking all along.

Why does this step need a human? Why is this part confusing? Why does this generate support requests? Why do customers keep getting stuck here? The exercise pushed us to redesign experiences instead of just managing them.

That’s a lesson plenty of industries already absorbed. The best customer experiences aren’t organized around having someone on hand to fix problems. They’re organized around removing the problems before they happen. The irony is that remote operations tend to demand more thinking about customer experience, not less.

With no face-to-face interaction to paper over the rough spots, every friction point becomes visible. A confusing instruction gets noticed. A slow response gets noticed. A broken process becomes impossible to ignore. In that environment, customer-centric thinking stops being a line in a marketing deck and becomes an operational requirement.

The deeper lesson was that tenants rarely judge a facility the way operators do. Operators tend to think in features, while customers think in outcomes. We talk about offices, whereas they talk about convenience. We talk about staffing models, but they talk about whether anyone got back to them. We talk about how the operation is structured, yet they talk about whether the whole thing was easy.

That gap between operator thinking and customer thinking isn’t unique to storage, and the danger shows up the moment operators start optimizing for things customers don’t actually value. Every business collects habits over time. Some of them create value. Others just persist because no one has bothered to challenge them. Going fully remote forced us to challenge ours. A few held up. A fair number didn’t.

What came out the other side was a much clearer view of what tenants care about: security, reliability, transparency, speed, convenience, and above all, simplicity. The industry’s future will hold a mix of operating models. Some facilities will stay heavily staffed, others will keep moving toward automation, and most will settle somewhere in between.

The more useful question isn’t which model wins. It’s whether operators are paying attention to the right things in the first place. Technology will keep evolving, expectations will keep shifting, new tools will arrive, and old assumptions will keep getting tested. The operators who come out ahead won’t necessarily be the ones with the most advanced systems or the lowest labor costs. They’ll be the ones who understand what customers value and build around delivering it.

For us, going fully remote ended up being less about cutting payroll and more about uncovering that truth, and the realization still shapes nearly every operational decision we make. Once you see it, it’s hard to look at the traditional storage experience the same way again.