Why great service is the real driver of solar reviews

▶ 0:00Good evening. It is quite a late one this evening. It's already five past eleven. I've got to be up at five. A bit of a silly one to be honest. I left it way too late. But an important topic that I want to discuss tonight. So you struggle to get reviews. You struggle to get those five star Google reviews that really push the business forward, that help you rank online, that help customers trust you and your business, that you can show on your Google business profile, that you can show in the snippet of the search results.

▶ 0:28So when people see certain pages of your website, they're going to see that review summary. You're struggling to get them. And we encourage all of our clients to get video reviews, which, trust me, takes a whole lot more input and buy-in and commitment from the customer than a simple Google review ever does, right? A video review, someone has to go away, kind of make sure they look presentable and they have to bring their phone out. It's a very simple process, but they still need to do this stuff.

▶ 0:56Bring their phone up or their laptop and record it to the camera and think a little bit about what they're going to say. Google review, they can just type it out, right? And if you're still struggling to get the Google reviews, then you're going to really struggle when you come to get the video reviews, which are worth 10,000 more.

▶ 1:09So how do you actually get them? And the key thing that I've noticed from all of our clients and our clients are becoming, our entire client portfolio is becoming known to deliver the best quality service that is possibly available in the industry. We are very proud to say that every single client has a 100%, right now, a 100% five-star Google rating on average.

▶ 1:37So every single client is average five stars. And in fact, aside from one, I'm not going to say who, but they are 4.9 stars and they've got 55 reviews. I think one of them was the fact that they didn't send a quote, right? It wasn't a bad service. It was just that they didn't send a quote. Okay. So those are some incredible stats. And we've, from working with these clients, we've noticed a few things about how they do business, how they provide a service that allows them to get that volume of reviews, but also that quality of reviews.

▶ 2:11And the one thing that always stands out is that doing great service is not enough. You have to do exemplary service. You have to go above and beyond and do something that really stands out to the customer and makes them almost feel indebted beyond the work you've done just as providing the service for them. So I'll give you some examples. A lot of our customers will lay down floor protection when they enter the home. And even if they're doing work on the roof, if they're walking in and out, getting cups of tea, et cetera, et cetera, then it's really nice that they've considered that and they're not going to ruin a carpet or they're going to take their shoes off the door, et cetera.

▶ 2:54And it's simple human decency, a lot of it, but it goes along the way. It is noticed. Another client, I think that he's had two reviews that specifically call out the fact that he brought a skip bag with him to keep all of the rubbish organized and to take it away with him at the end of the installation. And it might seem like a really simple task. You could just leave it in the van. But the fact that you've thought about that and how the rubbish being laid everywhere in the customer's garden would be perceived and how that would make them feel as a customer goes such a long way.

▶ 3:30It really does. Of course, there are plenty of other things like no obligation surveys and an approach to installing and selling solar that is very much a consultative approach where someone has the time to go away and think about the quote and compare different options and you speak to them about other things. And this is another one, actually, probably the best that I've mentioned. So one person was talking about how they actually asked the customer, look, you're going to have the scaffolding up.

▶ 3:58Would you like me to ask for them to keep the scaffolding up a little bit longer if you've got any work you'd like to do in the house? So, for example, you could have your windows cleaned. Maybe they're in areas that are really hard to reach. Or, for example, you could repaint the window frames, right? And you could do so safely without needing to do it on top of a ladder and things like that, right?

▶ 4:18And you could time that in with the solar panel install. So not only are you going to get fantastic gleaming new panels generating new energy on your roof, but you're also going to have gleaming new windows with new frames and nice clean lenses, right? Or glass, sorry. So it's all about trying to find a way that you can really go the extra mile and get that feeling of reciprocity that the customer will start to feel almost indebted to you.

▶ 4:49Even though they've paid a very large sum for the service, they feel as though you've gone above and beyond. And this is probably, you know, there's not been any presentation or slides for this video, but I'm not doing it at 10 past 11, so I'm quite tired. But it's probably one of the most important points of the tool.

▶ 5:07And we, it's funny actually, we have in our proposals some qualifying questions as, you know, or even kind of stipulations that you must meet in order to work with us. And one of them is very simply, you must deliver an absolutely stellar quality of service for every customer every time. Because marketing is great and, you know, we're marketers, we know that marketing works, we know that it has the power to grow a business, to scale a business fast, to scale a business profitably, to deliver value to more people, and to really build someone's livelihood and their business and to create jobs, et cetera, et cetera.

▶ 5:49A lot of that stems from marketing done well. However, every single part of that fails. And we're not naive to think that we can just pass straight through it just because our marketing is good. Every single part falls apart like a block of Jenga blocks, right? And you continuously fail to deliver exemplary service to every customer every time.

▶ 6:12Because you won't get, because you won't get the referrals off the back of it, which means you're going to have to continuously pay for the most expensive acquisition channel, which is paid advertising. You won't get the reviews, which means no one's going to trust you going forward. If you do get the reviews, they won't be very good ones, which means that basically every, the way you should kind of look at it, beyond just being a good person is that every bad review you get, you may as well add 50 quid to your cost per acquisition every time.

▶ 6:46Because someone that's got 105 star reviews versus someone that's got 104 star reviews is going to have a far easier time selling and continuing to make more money, which allows them to continue to invest in their team, which allows them to continue to invest in the quality of the service they deliver, than the person that's got four stars.

▶ 7:07Because people are going to go with the person they trust the most. So it all stems from that. And we'd be fighting an uphill battle if we take on an installer. And I'll say it outright, like they could be, for all intents and purposes, other than their reputation, they could be a fantastic prospect out there, but they got 3.5 stars on Google.

▶ 7:27Sorry, we won't work with you. Like, unless, you know, you've got only a very few reviews, and one of them, and it's been massively skewed by one that is quite clearly not a real actual customer experience, it's just someone that, I don't know, didn't get a phone call back or something, right? Then, in that scenario, maybe we'd make an exception, right?

▶ 7:48But for someone that's got high volume of reviews, 100 reviews, an average 3.5 star, no chance. No, not doing it. Because we, our efforts aren't going to go rewarded, because we're never going to reach the cost per acquisition that we want to get you to to prove that the campaigns are successful because we're constantly fighting this uphill battle against your reputation when any other client that we take on board, we wouldn't have to fight that battle at all.

▶ 8:17In fact, we'd just help them leverage their reputation, and that's why our clients get such great results because they already have fantastic stellar reputations, and we basically just help them show them better through video reviews, through new websites, through their ads. To a wider audience, to further increase the gap between you, you missed the 3.5 star, and you missed the 5 star, who's now up here in the perceived, in the customer's mind, because they've got the video reviews and the website and everything else.

▶ 8:46That's how we do it. So, if there's one thing to focus on, and we love it when we have prospects that come to us that say, you know, I've been running the business for a year, two years, didn't want to scale too fast, just wanted to make sure that I gave the best quality service and really built up the reputation and built up how I'm perceived in the local community, built relationships, delivered really great solutions to customers, started getting some referrals in, and only now am I willing to start considering marketing and start considering scaling the business up because I'm now confident I can deliver that same level of service to more people at once.

▶ 9:26They're the best kind of prospects because they get it. They get that if you just come out of the woodworks with a brand new solar company, and you decide, yeah, yeah, yeah, let's go, let's do 20 installs a month, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, you're going to fall flat on your face. You might get the work, but you're not going to get the reputation or build the brand, at least in the positive way.

▶ 9:45So, you're going to end up fighting uphill for the rest of your business lifetime, essentially. And we don't want to have to do that with you and fight that battle with you when there are plenty of clients out there that do always deliver the best quality service to their clients, to their customers, sorry. So, there's a bit of a little chat, a little, not a rant, I wouldn't say that, I wouldn't call that a rant, but for newer installers out there that are potentially concerned about they're not doing as much volume as the guy next door, they're not, you know, they can't quite break through four installations per month, for example, don't worry, like, stick with it and keep focusing on the things that bring customers to you

▶ 10:27and that actually allow customers to have a great customer experience because it will pay dividends. It might not pay dividends next week, but it will pay dividends next month, next quarter, next year, next decade, right? And don't let anyone tell you that you need to decrease the quality of your service in order to scale because our clients certainly haven't and many of them have scaled very significantly.

▶ 10:52So, there's my two cents. I hope you enjoyed and I will catch you in the next one.