A buyer-oriented approach could help solar installers begin to rebuild trust with wary homeowners.
Despite the benefits of deploying residential solar, many homeowners remain wary and distrustful when installers come knocking, according to Dhanur Grandhi, the CEO of software startup WattBot, which develops trust-based AI insights for consumers considering residential solar.
“Every solar-eligible home has been contacted more than 20 times,” Grandhi told pv magazine USA.
He said homeowners are fatigued by what’s often an onslaught of phone calls, direct mail and door knocks by residential solar companies. Coupled with a seller-forward approach that maximizes profits and offers complicated payment arrangements with long time horizons.
“It goes so deep that it almost doesn’t matter if solar is good for you,” he added. “The act of being contacted by the solar company is just slimy.”
Grandhi chalked up that mistrust, at least in part, to his former employer: Sunrun. He explained that Sunrun pioneered the door-to-door solar sales model that transformed and ultimately took over how residential solar is sold. Though that number-centric arrangement is good for the installer, it doesn’t necessarily hold up to how consumers actually buy solar.
It’s a recipe for misinformation, Grandhi said. While that’s not necessarily through any fault of the seller (who, Grandhi says, has never been shown a better way to reach customers), it’s crucial to reframe the conversation and progress at what he calls the base of human consideration.
That means laying out how installing solar would impact a customer’s life in a real-world context, not just drawing up some numbers.
“If you’re buyer-oriented, you show them this: ‘Did you know your utility raised your prices again last month?’ or ‘Did you know your roof caught 500 hours of sunlight over the last three months?’” Grandhi said, adding that this approach is a better way to build trust than fear mongering over the negative impacts of not installing solar.
“That will help nudge them in the right direction. Right now, most installers aren’t consumer-oriented enough.”
The right metric around long-term residential solar adoption isn’t leads or conversion rates, Grandhi said, but some sort of ongoing conversation.
“The goal really isn’t to get people to make decisions as quickly as possible, but to think about it seriously for a period of time and make an informed decision,” he said. “Even if that answer is no. It’s less about velocity than it is about duration and quality.”
That new approach is drastically needed, he said, and the math backs it up.
If we went from 100,000 to 5 million mostly happy customers, why is the cost of acquisition so high,” Grandhi questioned.” In his view, that expansion was done in “the most egregious way possible.”
“You can dissect it many ways,” he added, “but it comes down to trust. In a low-trust environment, you’re not going to see any results.”