• Montreal Mini-Storage uses a Uniti AI agent, Alex, to handle sales and support across text, web chat, and voice at 24 facilities.

  
  

• Thousands of leads have interacted with Alex, and hundreds of customers have gone on to rent with Montreal Mini-Storage.

  
  

• A very high proportion of support conversations are resolved without being passed to someone else.

  
  

• More customers get an immediate response, without relying on adding more people.

  
  

The gap: the customer wants an answer now

Storage is rarely a leisurely purchase. Someone is moving, or something has suddenly changed, and they need space quickly. They go to the website in the evening, send a message, and wait.

For Harry Court, Marketing & Business Intelligence Director at Montreal Mini-Storage, that wait was the problem to solve. He explains it this way: “The challenge was really about being available when the customer wants to interact with us, not just when we’re available to answer. Storage is a very immediate purchase. When somebody is moving or suddenly in need of space, they want answers now.”

A customer who writes in at night and hears back the next day has had time to look elsewhere, and there’s a very real chance they’ll move on.

Why Uniti: a conversation, not an FAQ

Montreal Mini-Storage wasn’t looking for a tool that answered common questions and stopped there. It wanted a real conversation with the customer, right away, on whichever channel they chose.

Court says, “What interested us about Uniti was the ability to have a real conversation with that customer immediately, whether that’s chat, text, email, or phone, and actually help them move forward. We didn’t want AI just answering FAQs. We wanted to be part of the customer journey, help qualify the opportunity, and ultimately move closer to renting.”

Uniti built Alex to do that, handling sales and support across text, web chat, and voice at Montreal Mini-Storage’s 24 facilities.

A customer doesn’t think in channels

“The real opportunity isn’t simply replacing a chat widget with an AI chat widget,” said Court. “It’s about recreating what a good sales or customer service agent would actually do.”

That matters because customers don’t stick to one channel. Someone might start on web chat, reply later by text, then call, then send an email. The goal is for the experience to stay consistent, with the AI understanding enough context to be useful at each step.

Getting there has been an ongoing process. The company has kept expanding what Alex handles and refining conversations based on what customers actually do and ask. In Court’s words, “AI isn’t something you install once and forget about. You see how real customers interact with it, you identify where the experience could be better, and then you refine it.”

That suits a company that is always changing its own sales process, website, and tech stack. Montreal Mini-Storage looks for partners willing to evolve alongside it, and Court points to Uniti’s willingness to take feedback and experiment as a big part of why the work has kept improving.

The results: more customers, answered immediately

For Court, the scale has been the biggest surprise. “We’re now talking about thousands of leads interacting with Uniti and hundreds of customers ultimately renting with us.”

Alex isn’t only a lead generation tool. Alex also handles a significant amount of customer service, and a very high proportion of those support conversations are resolved without being passed to someone else. In the same day, Alex can be helping a new customer find a unit while answering an existing customer’s service question, across multiple channels and outside the traditional limits of a call center.

As Court puts it, “We’re not necessarily adding more people to handle more conversations. We’re using technology to make sure more customers get an immediate response.”

Harry’s advice to other operators

Asked whether he’d recommend Uniti, Court’s answer was yes, particularly for operators with enough customer volume that being responsive has become a real operational challenge. He also warns against the most common way to think about AI: “I think the mistake would be to look at AI purely as a way of reducing costs. 

The bigger opportunity is being able to serve more customers faster, across more channels. When somebody wants storage, being able to respond immediately matters. And when an existing customer has a question, being able to resolve it without making them wait matters too.”

For Montreal Mini-Storage, that has already changed how the business thinks about AI. In Court’s words: “At that point, AI isn’t really an experiment anymore. It’s how we operate.”