More quote requests reached first
Speak to the homeowner while they are still comparing, not after another installer has surveyed.
Solar Energy · AI Receptionist
AI Receptionist for Solar Energy Companies
Be the installer who calls back first.
Every quote request answered the moment it arrives, 24 hours a day—qualified against your own criteria and booked into a surveyor’s diary before a competitor has opened the email.
A voice AI agent calls the moment an enquiry lands, checks the things that decide whether a survey is worth making, books the appointment and writes the record back to your CRM. Enquiries that do not qualify are held rather than sent to a van.
Solar, battery storage and EV charger enquiries, qualified and booked 24 hours a day.
- Answered within minutes
- Qualified before the van moves
- Booked into live diaries
- Recorded in your CRM
Two ways solar enquiries are currently lost
The quote request that went to four installers.
Solar is a comparison purchase. Almost nobody asks one company.
A homeowner reads about energy costs, decides to look into it and submits their details to several installers in one sitting—often through a comparison site, often in the evening. The installer who calls back while they are still sitting there gets to frame the entire conversation. The ones who call on Tuesday are quoting against a decision that has already started forming.
Workflow: Enquiry arrives → instant callback → qualification → survey booked → CRM updated
- Call back within minutes of the form being submitted
- Confirm the property address and postcode
- Establish what prompted the enquiry
- Ask what they are actually looking for—panels, battery, EV charger
- Find out whether they have requested other quotes
- Establish their timescale and decision process
- Book the survey directly into a live diary
- Send an immediate confirmation with what happens next
Two ways solar enquiries are currently lost
Surveys that should never have been booked.
Speed alone is not the win. A fast response that fills the diary with unsuitable properties costs more than a slow one.
A solar survey is an expensive thing to get wrong: a surveyor, a van, fuel and most of a morning, spent on a north-facing roof, a rented property or a homeowner who was only curious. Consistent qualification at the first contact is what protects the diary—and it is the part that gets skipped when the office is busy.
Workflow: Enquiry → qualification against your criteria → qualified booked, rest held → nothing wasted
- Confirm the caller owns the property
- Establish the roof orientation, pitch and rough age
- Ask about shading from trees or neighbouring buildings
- Check for listed status or a conservation area
- Establish current electricity spend and usage pattern
- Identify the property type and whether it is tenanted
- Understand budget expectations and finance interest
- Hold anything that does not meet your criteria for review
What you are actually buying
What does an AI receptionist do for a solar company?
Less answering than you would expect, and a great deal more calling back.
Most enquiries in solar energy do not arrive as a ringing phone. They arrive as a web form at nine in the evening, or as a lead bought from a comparison site that has sold the same householder to three other solar installers within the hour. A traditional answering service is built for the opposite problem and cannot help with either.
So the work runs outward. The agent calls the enquiry back within minutes of it landing, establishes the things that decide whether a survey is worth a van — ownership, roof orientation, shading, current electricity spend — and books the appointment while the householder is still at the laptop they submitted the form on. Anything failing the criteria is held for a person rather than sent to a surveyor.
Enquiry lands → called back in minutes → property qualified → survey booked → CRM updated.
- Calls back web enquiries and comparison-site leads within minutes
- Answers inbound calls in and out of hours
- Confirms the enquirer actually owns the property
- Establishes roof orientation, shading and any conservation restriction
- Captures current electricity spend and usage pattern
- Routes panel, battery and EV charger enquiries to the right diary
- Books only what meets your criteria, and holds the rest
A homeowner requests solar quotes from four installers on a Sunday evening. One calls back within ten minutes, asks sensible questions about the roof and books a survey for Thursday. The other three make contact on Monday afternoon and Tuesday.
Who is quoting, and who is now quoting against someone else’s survey?
The research on this is widely misquoted. We set out what it actually establishes, and what it does not.
In a comparison purchase the first credible response does more than arrive early. It sets the terms the other quotes are then judged against.
The enquiry journey
From quote request to a survey worth making.
The same workflow behind the Megabite AI receptionist, applied to solar enquiries rather than generic web forms.
Each stage is only built where it earns its place. An installer losing evening comparison leads needs something different from one whose surveyors are driving to unsuitable properties.
- Enquiry arrivesWebsite quote form, telephone call, comparison or lead-generation platform, WhatsApp or messaging, and campaign landing pages.
- Immediate responseOutbound AI callback within minutes, or inbound voice AI, with SMS, WhatsApp or email acknowledgement and human escalation where required.
- QualificationOwnership; property and roof characteristics; shading; conservation or listed status; electricity usage; interest in battery or EV charging; budget, finance and timescale.
- Booking and routingSurvey or technical assessment, routed by geography, system type, job value and who is genuinely available—with unqualified enquiries held rather than booked.
- Record and follow-upCRM updated, call summary and transcript stored, confirmation sent, and enquiries that were not ready nurtured rather than dropped.
Commercial outcomes
A fuller diary and fewer wasted journeys.
What changes when every enquiry is answered quickly and qualified consistently.
Fewer unsuitable surveys
Stop committing a surveyor and half a day to properties that were never going to proceed.
Better data before the visit
Give surveyors the roof, usage and expectation details before they arrive, not on the doorstep.
Nothing lost to evenings and weekends
Answer the enquiries that arrive when people actually think about their energy bills.
Integrate before replacing
Built around the systems you already use.
Megabite improves what happens around your current systems. We do not recommend replacing a capable CRM or design tool simply to add immediate response, qualification and booking. Where the connections themselves are the work, that becomes a systems integration question.
- Telephone number or telephone system
- Website and quote-request forms
- Live surveyor calendars
- CRM or lead management platform
- Comparison and lead-generation feeds
- Email and SMS
- WhatsApp Business
- Proposal and design tools
- Internal notifications
Integration depends on the access, APIs and restrictions of each provider. Megabite checks feasibility before promising a connection.
Beyond the first workflow
More ways Megabite can improve solar operations.
Once the enquiry workflow is connected, the same foundations support the rest of the operation. These are expansion opportunities, not prerequisites.
Around the front of the business
- Lead source tracking. Attribute enquiries to the campaign, platform or comparison feed that produced them, and see which ones produce installations rather than calls.
- Structured survey capture. Collect roof measurements, orientation, shading, consumer-unit details and photographs on site in a consistent format.
- Proposal preparation. Turn survey data into a consistent quotation and system design pack for review rather than rebuilding each one.
- Nurture for the not-yet-ready. Keep contact with enquiries that were genuine but early, instead of losing them to the follow-up list.
Around the rest of the operation
- Installation scheduling. Coordinate surveyors, installers, scaffolding and equipment availability against one view of the job.
- Documentation and compliance. Assemble the certification, notification and handover paperwork each installation requires, with the missing items visible.
- Customer progress updates. Keep customers informed between deposit and commissioning without someone writing each message.
- Reporting dashboards. Show enquiry sources, response times, survey-to-install conversion, wasted visits and installation throughput.
Cost and implementation
What does an AI receptionist cost a solar company?
Worth setting against what a slow callback already costs you. A comparison-site lead is paid for whether or not anybody rings it back in time, so the enquiry that goes cold at nine in the evening has been bought twice over — once from the platform, and again in the survey that went to a competitor. Beyond that, every installer connects a different combination of telephone system, forms, calendars, lead feeds and CRM, so the figures below are starting points rather than fixed quotations.
Lead Recovery Review
Free. The starting conversation: a short commercial review of how enquiries currently arrive, how quickly they are answered, and how many surveys are being made that should not have been.
Solar Lead Recovery Setup
From £495. Covers the selected callback, voice AI, qualification, survey booking and CRM workflow. Training the agent on your own content, style, limitations and escalation rules is part of it, in 25 languages. A straightforward agent with one integration starts at £495; CRM and calendar work with more involved conversation design runs £695 to £995; multiple systems and bespoke automation are quoted individually.
Managed service
From £195 per month. Covers hosting, monitoring, uptime, prompt tuning, refining answers and ongoing testing — no technical knowledge needed at your end. Includes 200 connected minutes a month, then £0.80 per minute, falling to £0.40 on the largest plan. Full plans and prices.
These are starting points rather than fixed prices, and vary with the level of integration involved. Additional usage is charged according to connected call minutes and agreed messaging usage. Multi-region and complex CRM implementations are scoped separately. You receive a firm figure after the review, not before. Prices exclude VAT or IVA where applicable.
Straight answers
What installers ask before starting.
The workflow draws on workflow automation and controlled AI automation. Neither is the point—the qualified survey is.
Does every enquiry have to speak to AI?
No. The journey can use a person, an automated callback, SMS, WhatsApp, a smart form or direct booking. Voice AI is one option, chosen where it suits the enquiry type and the hours involved.
Can you integrate with our CRM and lead feeds?
Often, but it depends on the product, your licence and the access available. Megabite checks the API, permissions and record structure before recommending an implementation, and will say when a reliable connection is not possible.
Will it book surveys on unsuitable properties?
That is the specific thing the qualification stage exists to prevent. Booking is restricted by the criteria you define—ownership, roof, shading, usage, area or value—and anything outside them is held for a person rather than sent to a surveyor.
Can it call back leads from comparison sites?
Yes, where the platform delivers the lead in a form that can be received automatically. How quickly depends on how that feed reaches you, which is checked during the review.
Will an instant callback feel too aggressive?
It should not, if it is framed as a response to what they just asked for. The homeowner submitted an enquiry minutes earlier and expects contact; the alternative is that a competitor makes the same call first.
Can it handle battery and EV charger enquiries too?
Yes. The qualification script covers whichever products you install, and can route different system types to different teams or diaries.
Does this guarantee more installations?
No. It improves response speed, qualification consistency and recovery opportunities; it cannot guarantee customer behaviour or sales outcomes. The review uses your own enquiry volumes and figures to establish whether the opportunity is worth pursuing.
Can it cover evenings and weekends only?
Yes. Many installers start with out-of-hours cover and busy-period overflow, then extend once the workflow is proven.
Can we begin with lead response and add the rest later?
Yes, and that is usually the sensible order. Prove the enquiry workflow first, then extend into survey capture, proposal preparation or installation scheduling.
Experience what your customers would experience
See a demo built around your installation business.
It happens in three steps. First a short call, so we understand how enquiries reach you now and can tell you honestly whether this is worth doing. If it is, we build a lightweight demonstration around your business. Then we call it together—you test it as a homeowner comparing four quotes would, ask realistic questions and see how the qualification and booking actually work.
The call and the demonstration are both free, and the demo call takes about ten minutes. If the fit is not there, we will say so at step one rather than build something you do not need.