Safestore and Our Customers

Target		Perfomance 2020/21
4.5 Maintain 4.5%+ satisfaction scores in each market		UK: 4.7 Feefo / 4.8 Trustpilot France: 4.6 Trustpilot Spain: 4.7 Google Belgium: 4.7 Google The Netherlands: 4.9 Google

Listening to and engaging with our customers

As a Group, we serve many customers across the UK and Europe through face-to-face communication in store, directly through our Customer Support Centre, and online via our website, email, and social media channels, as well as through our LiveChat service. By offering these different channels, our customers can get in touch with us through their preferred mode of communication.

We believe in providing a great customer service, and responding positively to our customers’ ever-changing needs, expectations and behaviours. We are always keen to hear from our customers to maintain the high standards of service that we pride ourselves on. We invest in customer service training, tools, coaching and evaluation to provide a service that is professional, efficient, and helpful.

Our aim is to exceed our customers’ expectations from initial enquiry through to move-in, and this is evident through the way our colleagues handle customer enquiries, claims, and issues. For this reason, we collect, monitor, review, and respond to customer feedback collected on our website, third party platforms, and social media, to gauge customer satisfaction, raise service standards, and manage our brand reputation online.

We aim to communicate with customers and prospects in a creative and consistent way across the various communication channels. We see our social media channels on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn as a ‘shop window’ to our brand that can help to reach new audiences, both in the UK and Europe. These channels are also helpful to gauge customer feedback and public sentiment, and thus we regularly monitor them, responding to any comments and enquiries. We frequently post content to our social media channels such as tips and advice for homeowners and businesses, profiles of charity organisations we support, recruitment opportunities within the Group, any sustainable or green business initiatives, and links to our blog pages as well as regular Facebook advertising across the Group.
 

Delivering a great customer experience

Our core business is to provide well-located, accessible, safe, and secure storage sites operated by colleagues who are experts in the self storage business. We endeavour to make each customer touchpoint as stress-free as possible, for example by:

• the use of SafePay links giving customers the ability to pay by direct debit or to pay invoices online
• accepting deliveries on our customers’ behalf where delivery drivers can take items direct to store saving indirectly on customer travel time, cost, and associated carbon emissions
• offering our customers three types of contracts giving them the opportunity to choose the one which best suits their needs

Our website – a user-centric re-structure
Our industry-leading multilingual and dynamic website continues to play an important part of the enquiry mix with enhanced search engine performance, optimisation for mobile devices, and bespoke management of rich website content.
Website technical performance
60% of our web visitors start their journey with a storage related search on Google so we’ve also focused our rebuild of the 129 Safestore UK pages with specific guidance from Google. For example, we have technically improved the pages to ensure they are quicker to load on slower internet and mobile connections. This is following ongoing recommendations from Google as to improve user experience and strengthen positions in Google search results. We also aim to continue making pages simpler to read and easily accessible by users on the whole range of mobile devices.

The new store pages are in a test phase and will be released to non-UK markets early in 2023.

Helping our customers to live and grow sustainably
We also remain focused on delivering against our sustainability agenda by encouraging our customers to make more sustainable choices. This is in addition to making a positive social and economic contribution to our communities, and reducing the environmental impact of our operations. We want to support our customers with products and solutions that help improve their lives such as:

• digital contracts, offering both convenience and a 16% reduction in the number of pages printed this year versus last (equal to a reduction of 528,236 pages or over 1,000 reams of paper)
• Refill, a scheme available in 122 Safestore stores across the UK offering free tap water to make it easy for the public to refill reusable water bottles instead of buying new plastic ones
• provision of sustainably packaged merchandise and eco-friendly box products
• cardboard recycling for some customers 

Customer reviews

We have retained Feefo, an independent review and insight platform, to collect real-time and 100% genuine feedback from our customers. Our stores in the UK receive regular feedback allowing customers to view reviews and ratings. In 2022, Safestore UK achieved a customer service rating of 4.7 with 94% rating their experience as ‘Excellent’ or ‘Good’.

Safestore UK also won the Feefo Platinum Trusted Service award for the fourth year running – an award that is given to businesses that have achieved Gold standard for three consecutive years. This independent mark of excellence recognises businesses for delivering exceptional experiences, as rated by real customers. It is a highly valued award and as all reviews are verified as genuine, the accreditation is a true reflection of Safestore’s commitment to delivering the best service possible.

In addition to using Feefo, our customers are able to leave reviews on a number of other platforms, including Google and Trustpilot. As a result, wherever customers look for trust and reputational signals about Safestore, they will see an impartial view of our excellent customer satisfaction.

Trustpilot is a well-recognised and authoritative third party review platform and this year, Safestore has maintained a TrustScore of 4.8 out of 5 in the UK from 2,349 reviews, illustrating our experience in delivering a high level of customer service.
We are pleased that our colleagues across all markets continue to be recognised for their hard work in delivering a consistently high level of customer service.