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Each week, the innovative leaders of our technology team make adjustments and improvements–both big and small–to our fully customizable SunEngine TM platform. These changes are entirely informed by feedback from our team members, clients, and subscribers who are consistently using and engaging with the platform. This constant in-house iteration process allows us to be nimble as a company when we need to pivot or make changes as we pursue continuous improvement informed by real-time experience.
Our “SunEngine TM Release” is a weekly and typically humor-laden email sent by Scott Ford, VP of Software Development, to our entire team and developer clients as a way to keep everyone in the loop about the latest updates to be expected in the platform.
This week’s SunEngine TM Release celebrated the launch of our integration with Google AI to streamline the enrollment process by improving user experience and increasing the quality of data input through automation. Using AI to automate the processing of utility bills submitted by subscribers reduces errors, saves time, and increases the efficiency of our back-end processing/verification of subscriber utility data. As always with AI, tremendous amounts of quality testing had to happen to make this process seamless and reliable, but it was beyond worth it.
“This latest update was the result of a very deep internal dive as part of a project we called ‘Operating Improvements.’ This project involved all departments to figure out where the most time- and effort-intensive tasks existed for each team member. This helped us to identify bottlenecks and tasks that could be automated to improve efficiency.
Our sales and enrollment teams identified the need to improve the verification and validation of the utility information being provided by the subscriber through their sample utility bill. We needed a fast and reliable way to ensure the accuracy of information like the subscriber’s account number, name, and service address because in many cases, the data was not accurate, leading to delays in the enrollment process and time-consuming corrections carried out by our team members. 
We looked at other solutions on the market, but none could provide the AI processing speed that we needed, and none of these other solutions were cost-effective, so we decided to build it ourselves. While alternative options would have taken 5-20 minutes, our team was able to get the processing speed down to just a few seconds, and for cheaper too. By doing it ourselves, we’ve been able to improve both the speed and accuracy of our sign-up process beyond any of the solutions that were previously available to us.
Before SunEngine TM AI, the subscriber had to input the data needed for enrollment manually (see photo above), which made it time-consuming and error-prone.
Now, SunEngine TM AI pre-fills almost all the data needed for enrollment (see photo below)– often in less than five seconds!
We think this is an industry first, and we are excited to see the multiple benefits in customer satisfaction, cost savings, improved data quality, and higher speed workflow without human intervention. We’d love to show sales teams, project owners, and solar developers this unique new AI technology. Get in touch for a demo and see how SunEngine TM can improve your enrollment process.”
-John Wilson, CTO
-Saving time for our team
-Improving user experience for subscribers
-Reducing data input inaccuracies
-Speeding up and streamlining the enrollment process
–Cost savings
We process enrollments across 7 states for over a dozen utilities, so a big part of the challenge is configuring the sign-up process to identify and adjust variables like nomenclature, layouts, page length, info provided, and many more automatically based on the responses of the subscriber as they enroll. Many of the updates we make to SunEngine TM are geared towards allowing us to be granular in how we identify the subscriber at any point in the sign-up process to provide them with a fully customized experience tailored to their needs and circumstances.
Utility bills being processed in near-real time during enrollment allows us to extract information from the document and identify the degree of confidence that the information is correct so we can tailor the rest of the user experience based on that information. Data with any degree of confidence less than 100% will be flagged for a team member to take a closer look.
Ultimately, automation makes the platform better for our team members, our subscribers, and our solar developer clients. We are very proud of our incredible technology team for making it all possible.
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