THE EXTRA SPACE STORAGE STORY

How to Enable 7,500 Store Associates Across 4,000 Locations

Extra Space Storage is the largest publicly traded self-storage operator in the United States, serving customers across 4,000+ locations. Its frontline associates rely on Breeze, the company’s rental management system, to manage rentals, move-ins, move-outs, sales, unit availability, customer transactions, and day-to-day operations.

Breeze supports a large and distributed user base, including district managers, store managers, store associates, and call center employees. Each location has only one or two associates, making it difficult to maintain process consistency and policy adherence. Store traffic also varies significantly, meaning associates may go long periods without performing certain workflows, only to need fast, accurate guidance when a customer is waiting or a situation arises.

Extra Space Storage originally invested in a DAP to create a more standardized customer experience across locations. The company wanted every associate, regardless of tenure, experience, or store volume, to have access to the same approved guidance in its rental management system, ultimately delivering a consistent, streamlined customer experience.

Kate Stapleton connected that goal to Extra Space Storage’s broader digital mindset: “If we don’t embrace the newest technology, if we don’t meet our customers where they want to do business, we’re not gonna be successful.”

THE CHALLENGE

Corporate Needed to Reach Frontline Store Teams in the Flow of Work to Streamline Operations & Maximize Its Rental System ROI

A legacy DAP provider held the team back

Extra Space Storage had used a previous DAP solution for approximately three years, but maintainability became a major barrier to success. Its L&D team owned content creation and updates, but the platform often required technical work, coding elements, and developer support. That created delays, made content harder to scale, and pulled teams away from higher-value enablement work.

Kate described the issue: “Our learning and development team members are not software engineers. They found themselves having to use jQuery and other technical elements to repair existing flows and create content, and it was a very tough building process.”

Fragmented knowledge discovery caused workflow disruptions

The knowledge discovery experience was also fragmented. In-app walkthroughs lived in its legacy DAP solution, while deeper process guidance lived across more than 600 SharePoint articles and PDFs. Store associates needed answers to insurance policies, move-out procedures, fees, rental processes, and other customer-facing questions, but finding those answers required employees to leave Breeze, break their workflows, and search long external articles in SharePoint to find the correct documentation.

That created frontline friction. Store associates were trying to serve customers while navigating policies and procedures spread across fragmented systems. In a retail environment with high turnover and inconsistent task repetition, that knowledge gap slowed service, increased reliance on support, and made it harder to deliver a winning customer experience.

Frequent change releases complicated workflows and created a communication problem

To complicate things further, its rental management system undergoes frequent release updates and process changes. Feature launches, outages, and workflow tweaks were previously communicated through email and newsletters, which were easy to miss and often delayed. When employees missed a critical update, support tickets spiked, team member productivity dropped, and store teams lacked the support they needed to be confident during live customer interactions.

THE SOLUTION

Extra Space Storage Transformed Enablement for Its Store Associates With an AI-Powered Digital Adoption Platform

In early 2026, Extra Space Storage made the decision to switch to Whatfix to support two major goals:

• Accelerating content creation (like creating new flows), eliminating friction involved with maintaining existing content, and scaling in-app guidance across its frequently updated rental management system.
• Investing in AI to transform its team member enablement with frictionless knowledge discovery, self-service process help, and intelligent workflow guidance.

Migration made easy with Whatfix FastTrack

Through Whatfix’s FastTrack migration program, the Whatfix team moved 160+ pieces of content (like Flows, Smart Tips, and Self Help entries) over from its previous DAP vendor to Whatfix in 45 days, helping Extra Space Storage reduce migration drag, maintain historical content without disrupting users, and helping to accelerate its underlying goals that drove the decision to switch to Whatfix.

Kate described the migration experience: “Whatfix made migration a great experience for us with its FastTrack program. We moved hundreds of content pieces in just over a month, which helped us accelerate adoption and drive value much faster.”

Scaling content creation and management with Whatfix AI

Whatfix Authoring Agent addressed one of the company’s largest pain points: content creation speed.

Instead of spending upwards of 3 days manually building each new Flow, subject matter experts could perform a workflow within the Breeze rental system, while the Authoring Agent documented each step of the process. Its AI then generated the entire end-to-end Flow, allowing content creators to review, edit, and fine-tune the walkthrough before pushing live.

Content that previously took days to create could now be created and pushed live to users within hours, supporting Extra Space Storage’s goal of same-day content deployment.

Enabling frontline store associates with intelligent support at the moment of need

Whatfix Guidance Agent transformed the way store associates found answers to rental policy and process-related questions.

Associates could type a question directly into Whatfix Self Help, which was embedded in its rental management system. AI parsed each user query, identified relevant documentation from its external knowledge repositories, summarized key answers, and surfaced the right next steps to resolve problems independently, as they occur.

Store associates can now find answers in the flow of work, eliminating a major pain point: having to leave the rental system, search external support docs, or ask a store manager for help. It directly achieved a core goal of its Whatfix investment: to resolve a major store associate pain point of finding the right SOP or policy answer without leaving Breeze.

Guided workflows improved new-hire execution and accelerated customer transactions

Extra Space Storage deployed 87 guided Flows on core store associate workflows and friction points, generating 19,043 engagements across its store associates in the first 6 months of deployment. This helped reduce rental transaction times by 50% (from 30 minutes to 15 minutes), empowering new frontline associates to become productive faster, while improving the customer experience.

Communicating with employees in real-time, where they work

Extra Space Storage also used Whatfix for real-time communication inside its rental management system. Instead of relying on email for urgent updates, it can now deploy pop-up messages directly within its rental system used across its 4,000+ stores. This helps associates understand system outages, payment issues, policy changes, and other time-sensitive operational changes in real-time.

Whatfix Pop-Ups helped deflect 400 high-priority tickets, saving 100 help desk hours and restoring agent confidence during critical downtime windows. In one high-impact example of a real-time payment issue, Extra Space Storage’s corporate product team reached all actively working store associates (over 6,000) with a pop-up on the default screen of its rental management system, alerting them to the issue. This was paired with a Flow that guided users on how to resolve the issue, preventing a spike in payment issue-related support tickets across its 4,000 stores and eliminating frontline team member panic.

THE RESULTS

$288K in ROI Across Its AI-Powered Digital Adoption Vision

Extra Space Storage used Whatfix to drive measurable business impact across store operations, including eliminating process-related support tickets, improving store associate productivity through faster knowledge discovery, and accelerating DAP content creation.

Whatfix AI was deployed across Breeze for all 4,000 locations and the 7,500+ employees using the platform. Over the first four months of implementing Whatfix, the company was already well on its way to achieving its vision of using AI to accelerate content operations and improve knowledge discovery.

The value extended across the entire Breeze experience, delivering $288k in total ROI across improved team member productivity, reduced burden on support teams, faster customer transaction times, and simplified content creation. This included 107k+ store associate engagements across Self Help searches, Flow starts, and Smart Tip acknowledgments.

Its Whatfix value realization drove measurable outcomes across the company, highlighted by:

• 95% self-service resolution rate with Self Help for all process-related questions without manager or help desk intervention, directly within its rental management system, deflecting 2,500+ support tickets.
• $39,140 ROI from improved store associates’ productivity alone, by providing over 11k AI answers to policy and process queries in Self Help, eliminating the need for frontline teams to search SharePoint for answers or ask for help from their store manager or their help desk.
• 23 hours of employee time saved daily by empowering associates to find answers independently, allowing managers and SMEs to focus on more important on-site tasks instead of answering simple system queries.
• 50% reduction in complex rental transactions for new associates, improving customer satisfaction by simplifying the rental application and transaction process.