A website chatbot for solar installation companies

A solar enquiry is worth a lot and costs a lot to chase. Most of what makes one worth a surveyor's morning is knowable before anyone drives anywhere: who owns the roof, which way it faces, roughly what the household spends on electricity, and whether they are ready this quarter or reading. An Allinaa assistant on your website asks those questions and answers the process questions from information you have approved.

The four things that decide whether a site visit is worth the trip

1. Ownership. Owner, joint owner, landlord or tenant. A tenant enquiry is not a bad enquiry, but it is a different conversation and your knowledge should say what you can do with it.
2. The roof. Which way the main roof faces, roughly how old it is, and what it is covered with. An old roof that needs replacing first changes the whole project.
3. Consumption. Roughly what they pay for electricity, and whether anyone is home during the day. Both change the case for a battery.
4. Timing. This quarter, this year, or researching. Say it is fine to be researching, and offer the information rather than the visit.

The assistant asks up to three of these at a time, one question per turn, and only the ones still missing - nobody fills in a four-field form at the top of a conversation. See capturing contacts and inquiries.

The payback figure it must never invent

Every solar visitor wants one number: what will I save. No honest answer exists before a site visit, and an invented one is both a bad sale and a liability. Configure the assistant so that it does not produce a saving, a payback period, a system size, a generation figure or a price for an unsurveyed property, and write the sentence it uses instead:

If your own published material contains a figure that you stand behind, with the source and the year in it, the assistant can quote that material - it quotes what is written, and only that.

Process questions, answered the same way every time

These are the questions that make a visitor choose you over the next installer, and they have fixed answers:

• "How long does an installation take, start to finish?"
• "Do you handle the paperwork with the grid operator?"
• "Do you scaffold, and is that included?"
• "What warranty is on the panels, the inverter and your workmanship?"
• "What happens if the roof needs work first?"
• "Can I add a battery later, or does it have to be now?"

Write each into the knowledge in the words you would use on the phone. Warranties especially: state the lengths and what they cover, exactly as your paperwork does, because the assistant will be asked and should not approximate.

Grants, tariffs and rules that change

Incentives, export tariffs and planning rules change with the season and differ by country and sometimes by town. This is the one area where a stale answer does real damage, so treat it as a dated block: write what is true today, say in the text when it was last checked, and update it when it changes. The assistant does not know the date and will not reason about deadlines, so do not ask it to - if a scheme has a closing date, the honest wording is the date itself and an offer to have somebody confirm the current position. Your knowledge is versioned, so an update is a deliberate change you can see; see what to put in the knowledge.

What a site visit request should carry

Then it offers the inquiry form: the visitor confirms their own contact details and agrees to be contacted, your office gets an e-mail, and the request waits in your inbox with a status, private notes and CSV export - with the four qualifying answers attached, so whoever books the surveyor can see at a glance which enquiries are worth this week. On Premium a photo of the roof from the garden, and one of the fuse board and meter, save a second visit surprisingly often.

Existing customers asking about a system you installed - a monitoring app, an inverter fault, an export reading - are a different thread. The assistant has no access to your records or to anybody's monitoring, and should say so and offer a person rather than guess. See existing-customer questions.