The Hows & Whys of Tracking Customer Satisfaction

Pop quiz: What is the most cost-effective way to acquire new solar customers?

If you said referrals, you’re right!

Anyone who has sold solar knows this intuitively. It is easier and cheaper to build a sales pipeline through customers who are delighted by their experience going solar and spread the word to friends and family. And the data backs it up: According to Greentech Media, customer acquisition costs typically run at $3,000 or more; referrals drop that cost to $500 or less.

Because financing is such an integral part of the solar sale, your loan partners and their ability to deliver a seamless and efficient financing experience directly reflects upon your business and brand. To all of us at Sungage, this reality means one thing: It’s critical that homeowners have an excellent experience financing their solar system. You trust us with your customers, and we are committed to delivering a level of service that matches the service they receive from you.

In recognition of this important responsibility, we survey every single homeowner who finances a solar project with us in two different ways. When the project is funded, we ask the homeowner to complete a short, one-to-five star rating of their experience with Sungage Financial. We are proud of our 4.8 out of 5.0 Trustpilot score. 

The other method we employ is called net promoter score (NPS), which helps us continually evaluate our performance relative to the industry and gather feedback to improve our products and service. There is a lot of science behind the NPS, so let’s take a closer look. 

Here’s how NPS works At the completion of every project, we ask customers the following question: “On a scale of 1 to 10, how likely is it that you would recommend Sungage to a friend or family?” Responses are broken up into three groups:

• Promoters: Anyone who gives a score of 9 or 10 is considered a “Promoter.” These are enthusiasts who will recommend their experience to others, fueling business growth.
• Passives: Scores of 7 and 8 are considered “Passives.” These are customers who are satisfied with their experience but won’t actively evangelize about your product.
• Detractors: Anyone giving a score of 6 or below is considered a “Detractor.” These  customers were unhappy with their experience. Detractors can damage your brand and impede growth through negative word of mouth.

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Net promoter score is then calculated by subtracting the total percentage of Detractors from the percentage of Promoters, yielding a score that falls between -100 and 100. According to Satmetrix, which co-developed the NPS methodology, any score above 50 is considered excellent. The average NPS of companies in the financial services industry is 44.

So, what is Sungage’s NPS? Since we started measuring NPS in 2015, our NPS scores range between 68 and 83. This puts us in a category with other outstanding companies respected for the world-class customer experience like Apple, Nordstrom, and USAA. In other words, our NPS score is pretty darn good.

We think our high customer satisfaction scores reflect some of the things we do to create memorable customer experiences. It’s why we always make sure we have a human on the line to answer the phone instead of phone menus, hold music, and endless conversations with robots. It’s why we offer our entire customer experience team NABCEP training. It’s why we’re available until midnight ET. It’s why we’ve built consumer protections into our process so that customers are never surprised by their financing and always satisfied with their purchase.

But don’t get us wrong—we pay attention to the bad stuff, too. When customers fail to receive a financing experience that matches their expectations, we use the feedback from our survey to help our tech, sales, operations, and customer experience teams improve. 

Now that you know all about gathering customer feedback, I bet you’re wondering how your business is doing. We also ask each customer the same question related to their experience with their installer. We make a point to share every single positive score and piece of feedback with our partners so they can engage happy customers for referrals. We want our partners to know when we’ve knocked it out of the park together so that they can use that momentum to fuel growth.

You should always ask your finance partners for their customer satisfaction and promoter scores because a poor financing experience could silently be hurting your cheapest source of leads. We’re proud of our Trustpilot and NPS scores because it means we’re helping our partners grow their businesses.  We’re in it together, and our happy customers are your happy customers. Great customer experiences equal more referrals. It’s that simple. Just another way that Sungage helps you shine.

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