Almost every solar business has some version of a follow-up call baked into its process. Job goes in, someone rings the customer a day or two later, asks if they were happy, asks if the crew cleaned up after themselves. It is a good habit and I am not knocking it.
But here is the thing that took me too long to understand. That call tells you whether the customer is happy. It tells you almost nothing about whether the work is any good.
Those are two completely different questions, and a customer can answer yes to the first while sitting under a problem they cannot see and would never think to look for. The follow-up call catches service quality. It does not catch install quality. I learned the difference the hard way, off the back of a single piece of rubbish left on a job.
The piece of rubbish that wasn’t the problem
My sales flow back then included a same-day or next-day call to every customer. Nothing fancy. “Were you happy with everything? Did the team clean up after themselves?” The point was to surface any niggle while it was still small and fixable, before it hardened into a one-star review or a customer who just quietly never refers you again.
On this particular job the customer was happy enough, but mentioned in passing that the crew had left a small piece of rubbish behind. Minor. The kind of thing most operators would apologise for and move on from. My response was the same one you would give: “No problem, I’ll send someone past to grab it.”
So my install manager went out to clean it up. That was the whole job. Pick up the rubbish, tidy off, done in five minutes.
Except he had a good eye, and while he was there he noticed the inverter was mounted slightly off. Not dramatically. Just a bit wonky. Enough to make him pause. He rang me and said he wanted to get up on the roof and have a proper look before he left.
He rang back a while later. The whole job needed to be redone. The work was substandard, top to bottom.
What I decided to do about it
I want to be honest about this part, because the honest version is the only one worth anything. Nobody takes that well. You’ve signed off on a solar install thinking the job is wrapped up, That is disruption you did not ask for, on a job you thought was behind you.
I made the call anyway. You cannot let substandard work stand, whatever it costs you in money or in an uncomfortable conversation. So the job was completely redone.
The customer ended up satisfied. Not thrilled at the process, but satisfied with where it landed, which is about the best you can hope for once a job has gone sideways. And the subcontractor who did the original install never worked for my business again.
That was the right outcome, but sit with how close it came to never happening. If the customer had not mentioned the rubbish, or if I had just posted out an apology, or if my install manager had grabbed the rubbish and not bothered looking up, that roof stays exactly as it was. The customer lives under a substandard install they have no way of assessing, until maybe one day it fails and the warranty conversation gets ugly. The rubbish was never the issue. The rubbish was the opening that let us find the actual issue.
Why the follow-up call was never going to catch it
This is the bit I want every operator to really take on board. The customer on that job was happy on the phone. The team had been polite, the site was tidy enough that one stray offcut was the only complaint, the panels were on the roof and presumably making power. By every measure a phone call can reach, that was a good job.
A homeowner is not in a position to assess install quality, and you should not expect them to be. They cannot tell you whether the inverter is mounted to spec, whether the array is fixed properly, whether the roof penetrations were flashed and sealed the way they should be. Australian PV installs are governed by real standards covering array safety and mounting (Standards Australia, 2021) and inverter grid connection (Standards Australia, 2024), and accredited installers are meant to work to them (Solar Accreditation Australia, n.d.). The customer has heard of none of that, and nor should they have to.
So the check-in call catches one layer and one layer only: did the customer have a good experience. The physical inspection catches the layer underneath: is the work actually compliant and sound. You need both, because a satisfied customer and a sound install are not the same thing, and the gap between them is exactly where the expensive problems live.
Spot-checks change the standard before you even arrive
When a subcontractor knows that any job might get physically inspected, the standard they hold themselves to shifts. Not because you are standing over them, but because the possibility is live. The crew that knows nobody ever looks will, over time, drift toward whatever is fastest. The crew that knows the install manager might turn up to “grab a piece of rubbish” and end up on the roof keeps their own standard tight, because they cannot predict which job gets the look.
This is not about distrust, and it is important you frame it that way to your subbies too. It is about establishing that your company’s standard applies to every job, not just the ones a customer happens to scrutinise. Most of your subbies are good operators who will welcome it, because it protects their reputation as much as yours.
There is a useful parallel in how the scheme itself is policed. The Clean Energy Regulator runs its own inspection program under the Small-scale Renewable Energy Scheme, sending inspectors to physically check a portion of installations for safety and compliance rather than taking the paperwork on faith (Clean Energy Regulator, n.d.). They do not inspect every system, and they do not need to. The fact that any system could be inspected is what keeps the standard live across the whole industry. Your spot-checks do the same job inside your own business.
How to actually do this at volume
The obvious objection is that you cannot inspect every job, especially once you are running real volume. Correct. You cannot, and you should not try. The pragmatic version looks like this.
Every new subcontractor gets a first-job inspection as standard. No exceptions. Before you trust someone with unsupervised jobs, you put eyes on their actual work once, on the roof, against the standard. That single inspection tells you more than any amount of references will.
Established subbies get random spot-checks at a frequency that keeps the standard live. Not every job, not on a predictable schedule, just often enough that nobody can assume they will never be looked at. The unpredictability is the whole point. A check the crew can time around is not a check.
And any customer complaint about anything triggers a physical inspection of the work, not just a phone apology. This is the lesson from my story distilled to a rule. The complaint does not have to be about the install. It can be about rubbish, about a delay, about a crew member’s attitude. You go and look anyway, because the complaint is the opening, and you have no idea what else you will find once you are standing there.
When you cannot get on-site, document instead
You will not always be able to send someone out, and that is where documentation earns its keep. Photos and a sign-off captured at the time of install, the panel array, the inverter mount, the penetration points, the cleaned-up site, are a meaningful partial substitute for an inspection you cannot physically make.
It is not as good as eyes on the roof, and I would not pretend otherwise. But it shifts the documentation burden onto the installer at the moment they are doing the work, which itself nudges the standard up, and it leaves you a record you can review later if a customer raises something. A photo taken at handover settles an argument that memory never will.
This is one of the gaps I kept hitting as an operator, and it is part of why I am building CurrentFlow. The idea is that the post-install workflow, the photo capture against the job, and the follow-up prompts all live in one place, so the check-in call and the install record are not scattered across a notebook, three phones, and someone’s memory. It is pre-launch and I am building it because I needed it myself, not because I am claiming any of it works today.
The deeper principle here is the same one I keep coming back to: process beats performance. A business that looks brilliant on its good jobs but has no way of knowing about its bad ones is one quiet roof away from a problem it cannot see coming. How you respond when something is wrong is the whole game, which is something I have written about separately in how a company handles things going wrong is everything about that company. Spot-checking is just that same instinct applied before the customer ever has to complain.
Pick up the rubbish. Then look up.
References
Solar Accreditation Australia. (n.d.). About accreditation. Solar Accreditation Australia. https://saaustralia.com.au/about-accreditation/
Clean Energy Regulator. (n.d.). Small-scale Renewable Energy Scheme. Australian Government. https://www.cleanenergyregulator.gov.au
Standards Australia. (2024). AS/NZS 4777.1:2024 Grid connection of energy systems via inverters, Part 1: Installation requirements. Standards Australia.
Standards Australia. (2021). AS/NZS 5033:2021 Installation and safety requirements for photovoltaic (PV) arrays. Standards Australia.
FAQ
How often should I spot-check my solar installers?
There is no single right number, because the value is in the unpredictability rather than the frequency. The workable approach is to inspect every new subcontractor’s first job without exception, then run random checks on established subbies often enough that no one can assume they will never be looked at. Any customer complaint, about anything, should also trigger a physical look at the work rather than just a phone apology.
Isn’t a post-install follow-up call enough to catch problems?
No, and this is the trap. A follow-up call catches service quality: was the customer happy, did the crew clean up, was everyone polite. It cannot catch install quality, because a homeowner has no way of assessing whether the inverter is mounted to spec or the roof penetrations were sealed correctly. You need the call and the physical check, because a satisfied customer and a compliant install are two different things.
What should I look at during a spot-check?
Focus on the things a customer cannot assess and that carry real safety or compliance weight: how the array is fixed and whether it meets array safety requirements, how the inverter is mounted, the quality of the roof penetrations and flashing, and the overall tidiness of the finished site. Australian installs are governed by recognised standards for PV arrays and inverter connection, so the check is essentially confirming the work matches what an accredited install is meant to deliver.
What if I genuinely cannot get on-site to inspect?
Use documentation as a partial substitute. Require photos and a sign-off captured at the time of install: the array, the inverter mount, the penetration points, and the cleaned-up site. It is not as good as eyes on the roof, but it shifts the documentation burden onto the installer at the moment of work and leaves you a record you can review if a customer raises something later.
Will spot-checking damage my relationship with good subcontractors?
Not if you frame it correctly. Spot-checking is not about distrust, it is about establishing that your company’s standard applies to every job rather than only the ones a customer happens to scrutinise. Good subbies generally welcome it, because a visible, even standard protects their reputation as much as yours, and it stops them being tarred by the one crew on your books who cuts corners.