You spend money every month finding strangers. The people who already trust you have not heard from you since the scaffold came down.
Part of the series Managing solar enquiries: from first contact to a signed quote.
The only time they hear from you is when it breaks
A call comes in on a Tuesday. A name you half remember, a system you fitted years ago, and the inverter has a red light. Someone goes looking for the job file. The paperwork is in a cabinet, the panel model is in an old email, and the electrician who did the install has left. You fix it, and on the doorstep the customer mentions that the neighbour had a battery put in last spring by another firm. They would have asked you. They did not know you did batteries.
Multiply that by every job you have done. Hundreds of households with a paid-off system, an ageing inverter, no battery, and a good opinion of you that nobody has asked them to pass on. They are the cheapest work you will ever win, and they only hear from you when something breaks.
Installing fills the week. Aftercare has no deadline and no customer chasing for it, so it waits, and the waiting has no end.
Nobody decided to forget them. Four things went missing instead.
Ring a past customer and the conversation is easy. What stops it is organisation, not nerve.
- There is no list. The completed jobs are spread across a folder of folders, the accounts package and the MCS database. Nobody can put every system you have fitted on one page.
- Nobody owns it. Sales moved to the next enquiry the day the deposit cleared. The crew moved to the next roof. Aftercare belongs to whoever is free, and nobody is free.
- Nothing reminds anyone. A service is due a year after the install. A battery makes sense once the customer has seen a winter of bills. Neither has a date in anyone's diary.
- The last conversation was never written down. "You said last year you were thinking about a battery when the car changed" is a warm call. "Hello, we fitted your panels a while back" is a cold one, to a customer who feels forgotten.
One call a year to every system you have fitted
This is the routine. It needs a list, a diary and one person. It can start on paper, from a printout of every completed job, and you will want it somewhere shared by the second month.
1. Build the list once
Every system you have installed goes on one list: name, address, phone, the commissioning date, the panels and the inverter, whether there is a battery, an EV charger or a diverter, and how the customer found you. Fill in what the job files give you. A blank is a question for the first call. The list does not have to be complete. It has to exist.
2. Give each system a month
Spread the list across the year by install anniversary, so each month has a number of calls one person can make. The aim is a steady handful every week, not a blitz that stops when the next big job lands.
3. Give every call a reason
Nobody likes a call with no purpose, least of all the person making it. Pick one before dialling.
- The check-in. Is it generating what it should? Is the monitoring app still working? For a new install this is the call after the first month.
- The service. A visual inspection, the inverter, the isolators, the bird proofing, generation against the estimate. Paid or goodwill, offer it every year.
- The review and the referral. A happy customer will say so if asked, and pass your name on if asked. Ask once the system has proved itself, not the day the scaffold comes down.
- The battery conversation. For a system with no battery, once the customer has lived with a year of export. The EV charger and the diverter belong here too. It is not a pitch, it is a question: has anything changed at the house?
Whatever the reason, keep the inverter in mind. It does not last as long as the panels, and the customer would rather hear that in a planned call than from a red light in December.
4. One person makes the calls
Aftercare needs a name against it and a fixed slot: the same morning every week, working through this month's list. It does not have to be the owner. It has to be somebody with that slot in their week, and a stand-in for holidays.
5. Write down what was said, where the next caller will see it
Every call ends with a line on the customer's record: what they said, what you offered, what happens next and when. "Thinking about a battery once the mortgage is renewed, ring in the autumn" is a next step with a date. Next year's call starts there.
6. Log where the work came from
When a referral rings in, record who sent them, and thank the sender. When a past customer comes back for a battery, record that the aftercare call brought it. Within a year you will know what the routine is worth.
The first month is easy. The tenth is the one that matters.
The routine fails when a big job takes the caller for a fortnight and the month's calls slip. Two things stop it. Keep the weekly number small enough to survive a busy week. And put each missed call back in the diary with a new date. A call moved to next week is still a call. A call with no date is gone.
Installa keeps the aftercare diary for you
- Stop working out when to ring. New accounts come with aftercare tasks added to a job when it is marked complete: a check-in call after the first month, a review and referral ask soon after, a battery, EV charger or diverter conversation later in the year, and an annual service reminder. Each is dated from the install and assigned by role. Change the wording and timing to suit how you work.
- Stop rebuilding the list every year. A task repeats every so many days, weeks or months, so a service reminder set to every twelve months comes back on its own when this year's is done. Snooze one in a bad week and it returns.
- Stop digging for the job file. Every job you have done for a customer sits on their record with its install date. A job on an existing system records what the system is and whether the work is a repair, an upgrade, added capacity or a replacement.
- Stop starting cold. Notes, calls and every change stay on the customer's record, in order, so the next call opens with what was said last time.
- Stop guessing what referrals are worth. Referral is a lead source on every enquiry, and the lead sources report shows what each source brought in.
- Stop treating a lost enquiry as gone. The reason it was lost stays on the record, and it is reopened from there when the customer is ready.
Every system you have fitted on a list, a reason to ring each one every year, a name against the calls, and a note of what was said. That is the whole routine, and it is what tasks and customer records are for. See how enquiry and customer management in Installa works.