How to Overcome the Challenges in Solar Service Business?

With the rising solar energy awareness, people realise that solar is the solution to a greener and brighter future. India’s growing population has started adopting solar panels and devices for their homes and offices to conserve energy and reduce electricity bills.

These solar systems will last long only with regular servicing and maintenance. As the older solar systems need upgradation with new inverters and wiring, storm damage repairs, etc., it opens up huge scope for solar panel maintenance businesses.

Yet, people being ignorant about preventative maintenance of solar modules, miscommunication between solar service teams, lack of proper follow-up systems, etc., are a few challenges in solar service business that hamper the growth of solar energy companies in India.

Here are a few tips to help solar maintenance and repair companies overcome the challenges in solar service business. 

Tips to Overcome Challenges in Solar Service Business

1. Be Discoverable Online to Drive More Leads

Challenge: Not able to Expand Your Customer Base

Even though you’re providing excellent service and doing an outstanding job, you may still struggle to grow your customer base. People don’t always hear about your company. Only when people know about your company, they can come for their solar equipment repair.

Solution: Build an Online Presence for Your Solar Repair Business

People search for local solar repair businesses for preventative maintenance or repair of solar modules. And in this digital world, people look for these solutions online.

According to a report, 97% of search engine users search online to find a local business.

Without an online presence, people won’t be able to learn about your solar service business unless you reach out to them. Build your online visibility with Google business listing. Google listing drives more visibility to your local business and brings more footfall.       

People in your city quickly find your business when they search “solar panel repair shop near me” or something relevant to your service. Once people find your online listing, your profile must convince them to contact you.

Ensure your solar energy company’s online portal includes everything from its name to address, phone number, email address, and social media handles. On the Google business profile, there is a dedicated section for review. If you assume it to be trivial, it’s time you change your notion.

According to a survey by Oberlo, 79% of consumers say they trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations, and 59% of consumers read reviews on Google.

Approach your existing customers to leave a review about your solar maintenance service on your Google profile. The positive reviews about your business encourage search visitors to avail of your solar services. It gains you a competitive edge over the solar product repair companies yet to leverage Google business listing.

Make the best use of social media, build a website for your solar service business and expand your online presence to drive more visitors and get more leads.

2. Maintain an Efficient Lead Management System

Challenge: Missing out on Leads

With good online presence and customer referrals, your solar maintenance and repair company gets a good amount of leads. But maintaining the prospects’ data in paper-based systems or Excel spreadsheets hampers effective tracking of those leads and converting them.

Without a proper CRM (Customer Relationship Manager) tool, you cannot track where your leads stand in the sales funnel and whether they’re ready for conversion. You may not be able to follow up with them if you don’t know who they are. You sometimes fail to follow up with leads and miss out on potential customers.

Solution: Use Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software

A well-maintained database of customer contacts helps you track the progress of your sales pipeline and convert prospects into real customers.

Adopt CRM software for your solar panel maintenance business. A CRM collects customer data from all your marketing channels, including email, social media, online forms and so on. It helps you organize the data to get a better understanding of the buying behaviour of your consumers.

You can quickly identify which stage of the buying cycle your lead is in and then send them more personalised messages to increase their engagement and drive more conversions.

Conversion rates may increase up to 300% using a CRM.

3. Optimize Your Service Scheduling

Challenge: Scheduling Conflicts

With manual scheduling methods, you call solar technicians to see if they’re available for jobs. Miscommunication may occur; you might schedule two solar technicians at once or double book a technician.

When the solar service technician stays busy doing one thing and doesn’t get to another customer’s appointment at the agreed-upon time, it causes chaos. This results in a bad customer experience, which could result in lost business. With manual scheduling, these issues may escalate, and you begin losing business from the queue.

Lack of proper scheduling results in a situation where the field engineers get overworked at times while they stay idle at other times.

Solution: Use a Service Scheduling Software

When you use CRM-based service scheduling software, the dashboard displays the schedule of all your field employees. It gives you a clear view of the solar technician’s availability. You can optimize your workflow by assigning technicians to specific service projects in the pipeline.

It prevents challenges in solar service business scheduling like double booking and ensures enough buffer time between consequent jobs for every solar service professional so that they do not face burnout. Even if a particular job takes more than the estimated time, the buffer time prevents subsequent service delays.

Scheduling smartly means distributing the workload through the entire calendar rather than randomly overly booked and underbooked days.

4. Provide Easy Data Access to Everyone in the Organization

Challenge: Service jobs take too much time and travel

The in-office service manager places a phone call to the solar engineer to assign him the job. He informs the service instructions and customer details on phone or via text. This poses challenges in solar service business like miscommunication due to faulty data entry.

Sometimes, the address mentioned is ambiguous and not quickly traceable. The solar engineer keeps searching for the customer’s location and calls the customer to guide him. After a couple of calls and a few kilometres of wandering, he reaches the customer’s location.

He starts examining the solar panel, but due to the lack of appropriate information about service history or spares, the work gets delayed. He travels to the office to fetch the necessary data and inventory. This consumes so much time, and the subsequent service tasks get delayed.

Solution: Use a CRM and GPS-tracker integrated Solar Field Service Management Software

Unoservice simplifies work order management by integrating CRM and GPS tracking into one platform. With Unoservice CRM all the customer data is well organized. The service manager can assign a solar service professional on the FSM app, and the concerned solar service technician gets notified on his Unoservice FSM app.

Along with the job notification, the field worker receives access to customer data and job instructions. With access to data, he can assess inventory requirements in advance and fetches them beforehand.

The in-app map integration lets him navigate easily to the customer’s location. He can quickly complete the task and upload the service report along with work-site photos on the Unoservice app for the in-office manager to view.

The Unoservice app generates an invoice based on the service report uploaded. The field engineer collects the payment and uploads the customer’s signature on the app to mark the completion of the job. The in-office service manager receives real-time job status updates.

With on-site data access, the first-time fix rates of your solar services increase, boosting customer satisfaction.

5. Consistent Communication with Customers

Challenge: No Consistency in the Business and Low Customer Retention

It’s difficult to acquire new customers and the existing customers also forget your company or switch to a competitor business. Customers are not aware that their solar equipment needs recurrent solar panel cleaning services for a longer lifetime of the solar modules. Being ignorant, they do not return for the preventative maintenance service of solar modules.

Solution: Use a CRM and service reminder software

“It is not your customers’ job to remember you. It is your obligation and responsibility to make sure that they don’t have the chance to forget you.” – Patricia Fripp

Solar panel maintenance service is not a one-time affair but a long-term relationship with customers. Use solar service reminder software that alerts you about the upcoming service due dates for customers. It helps you to timely follow up with the customers and stay on top of their minds.

When you maintain consistent communication, your customers do not sway away from your business. If you see that your customers are not interested in recurring maintenance services, educate them about the importance of regular servicing for a longer lifetime of solar modules.

You can also incentivize your customer’s interest with customized discounts and seasonal offers. Unoservice enables you to send personalized messages to your customers.

6. Invest in Employee Development

Challenge: Higher attrition & Average Employee Performance

The solar service technicians in solar maintenance and repair companies tend to quit their job after serving for a shorter span. The performance of the field service professionals is not up to the mark that delivers below-satisfactory customer experiences. This is one of the major challenges in solar service business.

Solution: Upskill Your Employees & Incentivize them to Perform Better

The solar industry is continuously growing with new devices coming up. To keep up with the changing industry trends, you must train and upskill your field service professionals. Leveraging industry training, you can ensure that the quality of your company’s work and team’s competency stays high even as you scale.

Provide your service team access to the knowledge database where they can find all information about solar products, how to service them and how to interact with the customers. This will help them answer customer queries well and deliver better customer experiences.

Unoservice dashboard gives you a quick view of individual employees’ performance like the number of jobs completed per day, the first-time fix rates, mileage covered, income generated, etc. With these insights, you can monitor your field workforce, leaving no room for trickery. Based on the reports, award the best-performing employees to encourage your solar service professionals to give their best.

7. Deploy Scalable Software to Save Time & Expenses

Challenge: Higher Expenses of Solar Products Repair Services and Time-consuming process

Rising customer acquisition costs, fuel costs, multiple software subscription costs, losses due to service delays and so on increase the expenses of solar equipment service companies. Manual business workflow management is time-consuming, requiring additional human resources to keep the business data updated. 

Solution: Use Scalable Solar Software Stack Solutions

Solar is one of the industries that highly benefit from software technology. Unoservice solar field service management software ensures precise coordination between sales reps, field workforce, and financing departments.

Relying on outdated methods or software waste your business time and money, and you lose to your competitors. Instead of using multiple standalone tools, invest in solar software stack solutions like the Unoservice FSM tool that is scalable with your growing business.

The multiple features of Unoservice save enough business time. GPS tracker helps the in-office service manager to track field teams’ travel history, live location, field service time tracking and automated attendance management.

CRM enables quick scheduling and automated data entry; the service reminder tool sends automated reminders. The real-time communication via the Unoservice app saves enough time for the back-office team and managers to focus on growing the business.

With the in-application map feature and customer and inventory data accessibility, these systems eliminate the need for multiple trips to the office, saving the solar services industry time and fuel costs. Additionally, eliminating paper cuts down on paper costs and eliminating delays eliminates potential loss.

Conclusion

Using solar field service management software not only eliminates the challenges in solar service business but also reduces your solar maintenance service business expenses, saves enough labour time, increases the productivity of your solar service professionals, enhances customer satisfaction and increases your business efficiency.

Delivering better customer experiences not only retains your existing customers but drives new customers via referrals and word of mouth, expanding your customer base.

Try Unoservice FSM software to grow your solar product repair business. Reach out to us to book a free demo of the solar service software.

Frequently Asked Questions on Solar Service Business