Helen owns a national storage solutions business that provides both personal and commercial storage services, including units for long-term storage, business inventory, and even small items like documents. Her business has developed a steady stream of clients across the country, each with unique storage needs, but Helen realises that understanding her clients’ patterns and preferences could help her better serve them. To make sense of her data and identify potential growth areas, Helen decides to leverage data visualisation.
Helen’s goal is to see clear, simple patterns in her data, so she can make informed decisions about services, pricing, and marketing.
Discovering Seasonal Demand Trends
Helen starts by using a basic line graph to track storage bookings throughout the year. Almost immediately, she notices a pattern: demand spikes in the summer months, especially for personal storage, likely due to people moving or storing seasonal items. Winter also shows an increase, as businesses store surplus stock in the lead-up to Christmas, only to reduce storage after the holiday season.
One of her regular clients, a small retailer, shares that they rely on Helen’s service for storage in winter, when they need extra space for holiday inventory. This feedback confirms Helen’s observations and helps her anticipate her clients’ needs, allowing her to plan promotions and staff accordingly during peak periods.
Understanding Client Types for Targeted Services
Next, Helen uses pie charts to visualise her customer segments, separating them into personal and commercial clients. This breakdown helps her quickly identify that while personal clients make up the bulk of her bookings, commercial clients rent larger units and tend to stay longer.
Helen realises this presents an opportunity to create tailored packages for each segment. For personal clients, she begins offering flexible, short-term options that include special rates for students and families needing temporary storage. For commercial clients, she designs long-term packages with value-added benefits like priority access during busy seasons.
One of her commercial clients, a furniture retailer, mentions that having a dedicated storage package that suits their long-term needs simplifies their business logistics. By offering these targeted solutions, Helen sees her clients engaging with her service in ways that better meet their specific needs.
Identifying High-Demand Services
Using bar charts, Helen maps out the popularity of her different storage unit types—small, medium, and large. She finds that small units are most popular with personal clients, who often only need to store household items or seasonal goods, whereas large units are more frequently rented by commercial clients with bulk inventory.
With this insight, Helen adjusts her marketing strategy, highlighting small units to personal clients and large units to businesses. She also considers rearranging her facility layout, allocating more small units in areas with high personal demand and focusing larger units in commercial zones. One client who stores household items comments that it’s helpful to find an option that fits her smaller, more frequent needs.
Using Visual Data for Long-Term Planning
Over time, Helen’s use of data visualisation helps her align her services with customer demand, guiding her marketing efforts and improving client satisfaction. By identifying seasonal trends, understanding her client segments, and optimising her storage options, she is able to create a seamless experience that resonates with her clients and strengthens her brand.
Helen’s story shows that even for small service-based businesses, visualising data can provide valuable insights that lead to smarter decision-making and, ultimately, customer growth.
Looking to understand your customers through data visualisation? Mark A Preston, a Customer Growth Coach & Speaker, can help you turn data into actionable insights for growth. Contact Mark today to start transforming your customer experience and drive sustainable growth.
