Rooftop Revolution by Danny Kennedy

Author:Danny Kennedy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.
Published: 2012-06-13T16:00:00+00:00

Sungevity as a Case in Point

To get a solid quote, Sungevity’s customers fill out a simple online form, which includes identifying their home on a map interface for us. We then use a combination of satellite and aerial photography of the home to build a three-dimensional model and virtualize the deployment of solar panels on the roof. We do this to calculate the electricity production from the panels and thereby generate a firm quote, including the economics, for the installation of the solar panels in real life. Unlike with solar’s mom-and-pop-shop experience of the past, we never have to climb up on your roof to tell you what it will involve to go solar.

With the magic of software combined with satellite and aerial imagery, we can do in a snap what it took human processes hours to complete. Then, as in so many other industries, from the replacement services for travel agencies (think Expedia) to those for video stores (Netflix), we serve up our core product, which is our solar proposal—or, as we call it, the iQuote—over the Internet. We e-mail it to you. Not only does this save us great cost in serving our customers but it’s a scalable model, whereas driving trucks in traffic to serve millions of homes that should go solar is not. In 2011 we started a partnership with a company in the Netherlands, and we’re now providing remote solar-design services for homes in that country, as well, which is a great development for the US solar industry.

I say it’s a great development not just because the company I work for is doing this but because it’s bringing easy and affordable solar to more people. Aside from cost savings and scalability, our online sunshine model, as we call it, creates a better customer experience. Perhaps my favorite story about this comes from our early prospecting in 2008, shortly after we had invented the remote solar-design process. We delivered fully engineered but paper-based iQuotes to homes in the San Francisco Bay Area that were appropriate for solar systems. On the mailer we provided a login and a password for our website that allowed people to learn more or to sign up for a solar system.

We were not expecting much response the week after we delivered these paper-based proposals, but suddenly our customer relationship management database told us that a customer had paid the deposit for a cash purchase. We hadn’t had a phone call or even an e-mail from this person to ask us any questions about our proposal—just an order placed in our system. I was so excited that I had to find out who had just ordered the world’s first online solar solution for his home. I was sure the customer was a savvy digital Gen X-er. When we phoned him, we discovered he was an octogenarian US Air Force veteran who wanted to do the right thing by his kids by going solar. He was happy to pay for it with cash because he felt the benefits were in his legacy.

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