Absent forethought and care, giving your solar customer a merely adequate experience will be the default. The status quo in the solar industry leaves millions of customers in the lurch about their projects post-sale and pre-PTO, and they’re often left in the dark even after the system is online. This says nothing of the confusion and obfuscation that can occur before the sale is even made.

Here’s an easy 5-step recipe for creating a totally adequate customer experience, along with advice on how to do better, based on our experience building, growing, and selling a solar business:

1. Don’t educate the customer, use pressure and ambiguity to sell a solar system.

It’s hard to know what percentage of solar systems have been sold without genuine customer education—using instead pressure tactics and ambiguity around what the system will actually do and how much it will save.

Millions of solar systems have been sold via door knocking, which doesn’t lend itself to consultative selling (to put it gently) or through other aggressive tactics that require the salesperson to close on the spot, rather than encouraging the customer to be fully informed and comfortable.

The solution: If you’re truly a great installer, encourage customers to get multiple quotes and show them why you’re different.

Great installers have a long backlog of work and excellent reviews, so they are the ones who get to choose who they work with as much or more than the customers get to choose.

Educate homeowners on exactly what the costs and benefits are for their solar system and then stand behind your work by offering active monitoring and a performance guarantee, to build trust that the solar system will do what you say it’s going to do. Show how your entire fleet is performing relative to expectations, so that you can confidently say “I’m not just promising you 12,000 kilowatt-hours, our fleet is performing at or above our expectations day-in-day-out”.

Finally, don’t be afraid to provide references, ideally of other customers who you have installed for on the same block or neighborhood. That’s what will be certain to increase the odds of getting a good sale and a customer who will themselves want to provide reviews and referrals.

2. Once someone signs up for solar, give them no updates for 6 months.

Have you ever signed up for a big home improvement project, only to receive no updates for weeks or months at a time? Most of us have, and it’s not fun. You feel hoodwinked, and like you put a deposit down on something with no timelines or clear expectations.

Well, if you want to create a totally adequate solar customer experience, then that’s exactly what you should do. Provide no automated customer communication, no clear timeline on the process or what comes next, and how long it will take to get to construction completion and PTO.

Most importantly, when the project gets stuck in a stage (e.g. permitting/interconnection), then you shouldn’t update the customer - just let them suffer in silence and confusion.

The solution: Before the sale is even made, walk customers through the timeline, not just verbally, but also with a “pizza tracker” that shows the entirety of process from beginning to end with all the various steps and stages.

Provide automated communication via push notifications, texts, and emails every time the project progresses to the next stage, so they literally have the same information that your internal project manages have. This will bring your “update” emails and phone calls from hundreds or thousands to nearly zero. Write clear, “dummy proof” descriptions of all your steps and stages (in layman’s terms) within your pizza tracker, so that your customers know what it all means, and what to actually expect every step of the way.

Give them a single point of truth (like a customer portal) so that they can interact with your company in a clear and unambiguous way. This includes documents, so they can easily find their contract, change orders, engineering docs, SREC registration forms, HOA docs, and anything else that might be necessary.

3. Rush the install.

“When you’re putting a power plant on your property, you’d better make the right choice.”

This is something we used to say in our solar installation business over and over, and boy oh boy, is it true.

If you want to provide a totally adequate customer experience, then ignore it. Try to get through the install as fast as possible so you’re done in a single day, even if it means cutting corners, moving too quickly on the squirrel guard (or ignoring it altogether), not taking pictures of all the points of attachment, leaving loose ends and unnecessary punch list items, and doing the absolute path-of-least-resistance minimum to pass inspection.

The solution: Take your time and do it right the first time. That doesn’t mean “going slow,” but rather being deliberate about every attachment and penetration, since your company probably has a 10+ year warranty on this installation.

It also means prioritizing safety, so that your team doesn’t risk injury, which of course jeopardizes not only their own health, but the chances of a quality installation and good company reputation. Take pictures of everything, and I mean everything. You’ll want this for the inspection, to upload the pretty pictures in your customer portal, for marketing purposes and also for quality control and training purposes, with the goal of providing continuous improvement for the company.

Finally, do a little extra - more than what is expected.

Show and tell the customer what you are doing and why, give them pictures showing the quality of installation before the end of the day, and ask for their sign-off on the work before you close it out. If you’re marketing team is feeling extra generous, you could even give them a gift bag to show your appreciation before driving away.

4. Give them 5 or more apps at PTO.

Imagine getting solar, consumption monitoring, a battery, load control device, and an EV charger - and your solar installer providing you with an app for each of them. That’s what you should do if you want to provide a totally adequate solar customer experience. They will be confused by all the array of apps, data, controls, and lack of any relationship to your company.

Eventually your customer will give up and stop using any of them, and in a few years they will even forget who installed the system after being so confused by the manufacturer’s apps.

The solution: Give your customer one app, that is branded with your logo, colors, and aesthetic, which is a one-stop shop for their interaction with your company. It will have consolidated energy monitoring, in addition to all of their docs, and the ability to submit service tickets. 99% of people want to view their energy data at a glance, so you’ll want that consolidated energy data to be easy to understand and digest in a few seconds, with easy to understand graphics that let them know how they’re using and producing energy.

By giving your customers a clear way to submit service tickets, it also enables you to upsell them on additional services like storage (if they don’t already have it) or an active monitoring/service plan (the HVAC industry gets much of its margins from this, so why not us?).

The customer portal and branded app should also show them how much they are saving, and provide an eShop for them to purchase (or inquire about) additional products on their own (a feature coming soon to Sunvoy!) Here's a sneak peek:

5. Give them exactly 0 tools to provide reviews and referrals.

If you’ve invested all your time and energy into educating a solar customer, selling them on solar, developing and installing the project, then turning it on - why not follow that up with exactly 0 tools for them to tell the world about their experience? Well you might actually want that if you’re goal is really to provide a totally adequate customer experience.

The solution: You have to give your solar customers a clear and easy way to submit reviews and referrals. Just wishing and hoping and praying ain’t gonna cut it.

Give them a unique landing page to submit referrals directly to your company, and encourage them to share it on social media! As long as that link is floating around, anytime that someone in their network goes solar, they will earn a referral bonus. That gives your customers an extraordinary incentive to share that referral landing page. That’s how you turn your entire fleet of customers into your marketing department.

Finally, give them a way to write not just one review on a single site, but to copy and paste that review onto as many sites as possible. Sunvoy allows you to do this with a page that shows as many (or as few) review sites as your heart desires. That way, when someone writes a review on Google (or Yelp, etc), they can copy and paste the review onto 10 or more sites in just a few clicks. That’s increasing your visibility by 10x over time and giving your community so many more opportunities to hear your name.

Conclusion

Adequate experiences are lame, and will not help you grow.

Consciously putting yourself in the shoes of your customer and providing them with a clear, and excellent customer experience, will benefit both them and your company’s reputation and growth.

There’s no better way to provide a superior customer experience than arming yourself with a branded customer portal that can do all of that above and a whole lot more.