Extra Space Storage Drives Growth and Saves Thousands of Hours with Level AI

The Foundation of Storage Excellence

Extra Space Storage operates one of America’s largest self-storage networks, with over 4,200 locations spanning across 43 states. At the heart of this real estate powerhouse sits a 500-member contact center team, handling inbound sales and customer service for those storing everything from everyday situations - customer moving and needing storage to those that use storage as an extension of their home or business,etc. The sales team helps customers find the right storage solutions, while the service team handles everything from gate access and payments to digital support or any other customer request. The contact center is a core business driver, not merely a support hub, as it accounts for a significant portion of Extra Space's revenue.

The Limitations of Legacy QA

Three years ago, Extra Space Storage’s contact center was experiencing rapid growth, handling thousands of critical customer calls each day. But behind the scenes, the team responsible for ensuring great customer experiences felt trapped in outdated systems that could only detect patterns when agents or customers used the specific pre-programmed words or phrases as is, a limitation known as “syntax coding.” Imagine trying to track every possible way a person might say “Please unlock my unit” or “I need help with payment,” just so the system recognizes what’s actually happening.

“We had six people spending their whole day just searching for different ways people say things, but not really understanding the real reasons behind the calls.” - Terry Porter, Senior Manager, Quality Assurance

Even with hours of work, it was difficult to turn scattered data into insights that managers could leverage to coach their teams. Reports showed numbers, percentages, and scores that lacked context about what was really driving them. And when trends appeared, confirming them meant listening through call after call to separate real issues from outliers or false positives. Additionally, a persistent question remained: “Had they captured every way a customer might ask about a payment or a gate code? Were they truly seeing the complete picture? That uncertainty made it difficult to trust the data.

Their existing dashboards weren’t designed for the people who need them the most, the QA leaders on the front lines. While the data was available, it wasn’t actionable. As a result, managers wasted precious hours each week trying to understand reports that didn’t explain what the numbers really meant. As Terry explained, “You need a user interface that frontline leaders can actually use for coaching. If they can’t grab quick, positive insights, the whole system just gets ignored.”

AI That Listens, Learns, and Actually Coaches

The decision to switch to Level AI was driven by a vision to integrate AI and analytics into their call center operations and move beyond the limits of syntax-based coding to a solution that could understand customer intent. Level AI's commitment to innovation and a strong engineering focus made it a practical fit. As Terry Porter noted, "everybody can do the QM software and stuff pretty well... But the Level AI stands out, even to this day, three years later, you're still innovating."

With Level AI’s conversational intelligence and quality management tools, Extra Space Storage introduced a more structured approach to coaching and QA, utilizing tailored rubrics, instance scoring for different call types, and manual evaluation forms with Level AI's auto-assignment tool. The calibration platform also brought better alignment across teams, enabling frontline agents to see exactly how their calls were reviewed, helping build consistency and shared understanding of quality across the organization.

“Before, it took one to two hours just to replicate a behavior we thought needed correction. Now, with AI coaching and search tools, we move from one example to ten, proving real trends at lightning speed.” - Terry Porter, Senior Manager, Quality Assurance

With Level AI, real-time feedback and continuous improvement became the new normal at Extra Space, anchored by a single unified platform for QA. Porter especially valued the partnership: “The support staff is transparent. When they can’t do something, they tell me—they don’t promise what’s never coming. That transparency goes a long way.”

Tangible Results and Enhanced Efficiency

Since the implementation of Level AI, Extra Space Storage has seen significant improvements across several business-critical metrics, resulting in both quantitative and qualitative gains.

• Contributed to an increase in conversion rates: With Level AI, Extra Space Storage achieved an increase in conversion rates. Terry attributes this to "us being able to provide better coaching to the agents, better insights, more quickly gathering those insights, and being able to interact and be more proactive."
• 13% Efficiency Boost: Terry has observed significant productivity improvements since implementing Level. The platform has saved hours each week for frontline leaders, and Terry estimates that, if they operated with a 1:15 Supervisor to Agent ratio, they could potentially add two more people to the team thanks to Level’s capabilities. In practical terms, this represents nearly a 13% increase in efficiency for their operations.
• Reduced Coaching Prep Time: The average prep time for a coaching session has been drastically reduced from approximately two hours to just 30 minutes, enabling team leads to focus on what matters the most.
• Broader QA Coverage: Level AI has enabled their QA team to manage a significantly larger agent ratio, running "about 110 to 120 agent to one QA analyst," compared to an industry average of 70 to one. This expanded coverage empowers teams to do more with the same resources, without compromising quality.
• Smoother, Stronger QA Operations: Level AI has made the QA department "run a lot smoother," enabling them to work on a "ton of different initiatives" and achieve a "consistent and world-class experience" for customers on the service side by ensuring policy and procedure adherence.
• Agility in Data Analysis: With the virtual worker tool, QA and analytics teams at Extra Storage have become"a little bit more agile" in building charts and dashboards for various stakeholders, including UX, web design, revenue management, and data science teams, by providing quick access to interaction data without needing to create new tags and wait for backdated accuracy testing.

Terry Porter's final thoughts encapsulate the value of the partnership between Level AI and Extra Space Storage:

"If people want a platform or a vendor to work alongside to achieve things for themselves while they're helping Level AI achieve, I think that I have not worked with a better vendor yet. I think that the partnership is definitely there." - Terry Porter, Senior Manager, Quality Assurance