Montreal power outages (3/6): Solar battery OEMs should design their innovations based on customer ‘Jobs to be Done’

Recommendations

Solar battery OEMs should commit to developing great products, providing great service (to both installers and end customers) and provide ongoing upgrades to their offerings. They need to ensure trust in their critical support to end customers. They should understand that their end customers rely on them to stay in business for the long term.

Detailed Commentary

Selecting our solar battery system using a ‘Jobs to be Done’ framework

Much of my work is to guide the pricing of medical innovations using value-based pricing principles. I have conducted many interviews with decision-makers who would be potential customers! In planning these interviews, I find extremely useful the insight by Harvard Business School marketing professor Theodore Levitt that “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!”.

But it is only a starting point! If you present a 'new drill' to customers, they will tend to focus on aspects of this 'new drill' rather than their 'hole' – especially as the value of the 'hole' is usually not immediately obvious.? The challenge for me, as the pricing researcher, is to get the respondents to think through the value of their 'hole' in detail.

With a Jobs to be Done framework in mind, let me share our thinking about how we chose our Enphase system. I initially hesitated about mentioning the Enphase brand name but could NOT think how I could write these series of articles effectively without doing so. If I were to interview myself, I would say that the main ‘jobs to be done’ of the solar battery system would be ‘to have a secure home over the next 15 years’. Setting a time frame is useful for both practical reasons of setting the requirements of the system and for making financial calculations. I have a rule of thumb to evaluate the value/price of cars over 10 years and for major house projects (roof, geothermal, solar PV) over 15 years.

With this ‘Jobs to be Done’ in mind, I developed these value criteria for what is important in a solar battery solution:

1.???? Product Specification - the product specification in terms of the quality of the hardware and software (especially the app). This is the most evident way of comparing offer specifications.

2.???? Service Support - the level of service support offered and likelihood this support would still be available through to (at least) 2038. One thing I always look out for in considering a new renewable energy solution for my home is with regard to service arrangements. In this case, solar battery systems are designed to be low maintenance and I am not paying for, nor expect, Quebec Solar to provide active support. Rather, I am looking to get that support directly from Enphase taking advantage of their remote monitoring, digital infrastructure, 24/7 support and training. This is all provided free with the product installation. I would want to make sure I get the most out of the system and to be able to call someone in case of a service query or emergency (such as during an outage). I would want to choose a market leading manufacturer who would likely still be in business in 2038 – both to offer ongoing support and recognizing that the value of our system is somewhat dependent on the manufacturer still being in business.

3.???? Upgrades - the upgrade potential of the system through to (at least) 2038 as technology continues to evolve. Will the manufacturer be at the forefront of technical innovation? Will we be able to upgrade our system during this time? Will they likely be able to offer us bidirectional charging in the (near) future?

4.???? Trust in Critical Support – the trust in provider to provide instant support during any downtime given criticality of our home electricity system. For a period of time we could live without our phone, wi-fi, our car in a way that we could NOT without our electricity. How much do we trust the solar battery vendor to support us during any downtime? To illustrate this point, in March 2024 when we could not reconnect to the grid after I had manually disconnected for a Peak Event. Calling Enphase support, they were able to solve the problem over the phone by rebooting the Gateway.

In terms of importance, I would probably give 30 points out of a 100 to each of Product Specification, Service Support and Upgrades. With the three-legged stool idea in mind, I would want a vendor to score strongly on each of these three features. The final 10 points would be for Trust in Critical Support, which could be deciding factor if two vendors were otherwise equally matched.

Based on online reviews, and discussions with our installer, I evaluated Enphase, SolarEdge, Tesla Powerwall, Sol-Ark with these types of criteria in mind (or at least an earlier version of these criteria).

In these evaluations, I realize I have been quite influenced by our experience of Tesla cars in considering how this kind of technology could work. We bought our Tesla Model 3 SR+ in 2019 and it feels quite a different car now. At no effort on our part, the software is periodically changed to upgrade functionality, update maps and take care of any software recalls. In my opinion, the term ‘recall’ is quite misleading given the technology involved. The car is NOT physically recalled anywhere – it is a software fix. In December 2023 there was an announcement about a major recall of Tesla cars to correct an aspect of autopilot. In February 2024 I got an email from Tesla about this recall and that it had been fixed on our car with the latest software update.

In summary, customers planning to install a solar battery system should think about their expectations around it – their ‘Jobs to be Done’. What would make the installation successful? Given this goal, what would be the value criteria of the solar battery systems under consideration? Personally, I would urge customers to consider including ‘service support’ and ‘upgrades’. You would then rate each solar battery system against your value criteria to get a total value score. You would then review the price of each system to be able to determine the system which offers the best price/value for your needs.

Solar battery OEMs should use research to understand customer 'Jobs to be Done'. The research could include this value criteria exercise to enable the creation of Perceived Value Maps. This is a powerful tool for understanding customer value and setting prices.

Link back to Montreal Power Outages summary.