As we move into 2012, the Neighbor to Neighbor team decided it was time to shift our focus more towards achieving upgrades. Upgrades include new insulations, heating and cooling systems, hot water heaters, and renewables. In order to accomplish this,the lighting team knew that we had some major changes to implement.
As I have probably mentioned, my specialty in the Neighbor to Neighbor Energy Challenge is to help run our free in-home lighting program! It is one of my favorite things about this job, and a lot of my time this month was spent re-vamping the lighting program.
Change number one included: beginning to schedule lighting visits on Saturdays in order to be available for more residents in town. In addition to this new Saturday addition, we also added double nights once a week, so we can visit more homes.
After months and months of hard work, I am finally happy to say that the ipad app for the lighting program is completed and has been put into production! Every corps member will now be able to use this app on each visit, and once we make the complete switch off of using hard copies of Savings Estimate Worksheets, we will be saving valuable time.
The biggest change for this program is now that we are trying to get people to really think about completing upgrades, we decided to add a whole follow up section to the lighting program. Every lighting visit will now have one corps member as the primary contact. This corps member will be responsible for making reminder calls, prepping for the lighting visit, and most importantly following up with the homeowner after the visit is over. This consists of making a week after phone call providing a resident with customer service and information about the next steps they can take. If a homeowner decides to take the next step that primary contact also follows up with them after they have had HES to see what else we can assist them with
Although these changes may seem small, behind the scenes they take a lot of work to accomplish. We must write call scripts, synchronize everything with salesforce ( our data system), and monitor all of these changes. I can’t wait to see what the next few months will be like.
-Katelyn Hope