The Place 4 Self Storage operates self-storage and office space facilities across the South East, with sites in Petersfield, Alton and Swindon. With each branch managing its own enquiries, quick and accurate responses to customer questions matter as much as the storage itself.
The team at The Place were busy, and were not always able to respond to customer enquiries immediately. To help with this, the business had trialled a deterministic, rule-based chatbot on the website. It worked well for straightforward, predictable questions, but it relied on fixed scripts, so anything outside that script, a more specific query about which unit size would suit a particular set of belongings, for example, went unanswered or led to a frustrating back and forth.
The Place already had HubSpot Breeze credits included in their existing plan, sitting unused. That gave us a clear opportunity, to put that capability to work and give customers a genuinely helpful, self-service experience across every branch, whether they were asking about self-storage or office space.
Rather than starting from nothing, we took the guidelines and properties that already powered the rule-based chatbot and used them as the foundation for the new build, translating what The Place already knew about their customers into the structure a HubSpot Customer Agent needs. That meant a faster build, and one that kept everything the original chatbot had already got right.
We recommended HubSpot’s AI Customer Agent over sticking with a script based approach because it works in a fundamentally different way. Rather than following a fixed decision tree, it works out the intent behind a question and draws on real information, from the website and from HubSpot’s CRM, to answer it.
Configured properly, that same technology can also hand a conversation to a person with the full context already attached the moment it hits a question it cannot answer confidently, and it surfaces exactly where those gaps are so the guidelines behind it can be improved over time.
For a business with a lean team, that combination of always being available, staying accurate and getting better on its own is what made it the right choice.
The Customer Agent now sits on The Place’s website around the clock, handling two jobs at once. It answers detailed questions across every branch, self-storage and office space alike, and it identifies when someone wants to take the next step, whether that is filling in a quote form or getting in touch with the sales team. Because it is connected to HubSpot’s CRM, it also recognises whether it is talking to an existing customer or a new enquiry, and personalises its responses using that history rather than treating every conversation the same.
Because it references the website directly rather than a fixed set of scripted answers, the information it gives customers updates automatically as the site changes, so it stays accurate without anyone needing to maintain it by hand. That also means the team spend far less time answering the same routine questions themselves, freeing them up for the enquiries that genuinely need a person’s judgement.
Alongside the Customer Agent itself, we built reporting that tracks the date of a customer’s first chatbot message against the date their storage agreement was signed, giving The Place a way to see whether the chatbot is playing a part in turning enquiries into paying customers, alongside simple conversation volume tracking across every branch.
The earliest signs are encouraging. The customer agent has answered questions well beyond what a scripted chatbot could handle, working out, for example, the right unit size for a customer storing a wardrobe and a bed, and doing so accurately without any input from the team. That is the kind of nuanced, specific question that used to need a person to answer.
Volumes are still building and it is early days for drawing firm conclusions on revenue impact, but the reporting we have put in place means The Place will be able to see that picture clearly as more data comes in. The same technology also supports channels beyond the website, and we are already scoping an extension to WhatsApp, so the Customer Agent can pick up enquiries outside office hours on a channel that is already proving valuable for the business, without The Place needing a second system to manage it.
"We went into this not expecting much, and it has honestly surprised us. Customers ask it some pretty specific questions, working out unit sizes and things like that, and it gets them right without anyone here needing to step in. It has taken a genuine chunk of the day to day questions off our team, and it feels like it is only going to get better from here."
The Place 4 Self Storage