Ten photos, three phones, no meter
The enquiry came in on Tuesday. Someone in the office sent the usual message asking for pictures of the consumer unit, the meter, the main fuse and the wall where the charger should go. By Thursday you have four photos on the sales phone, two more in the shared inbox from the customer's partner, a video of the driveway on Facebook Messenger and nothing at all of the meter tails.
Your surveyor opens the job the night before the install and realises nobody has seen the cut-out. The fitter arrives, finds something that needs a conversation with the network operator, and drives away with the charger still in the van. The customer is annoyed, and fairly so, because they sent you photos.
The request is the weak point, not the customer
Most homeowners have never looked at their meter cupboard with a purpose. When you ask for a picture of the consumer unit, some send the cover closed, some send the whole cupboard from two metres away, and some send the gas meter. The customer is not being careless. The request is vague, it arrives as a paragraph of text, and it gives them no way of knowing whether what they sent is good enough.
- The photo list lives in a template message that people edit and trim.
- Photos come in through whichever channel the customer found first.
- Nobody checks them until the surveyor looks, often days later.
- Follow-up questions (how far is the car from the board, is the wall brick or render) are asked one at a time by phone.
- The images end up on a personal phone rather than on the job.
What the gaps cost on install day
Every missing photo becomes a guess. The quote might understate the cable run, the fitter might need a different mounting kit, or the job might need network operator involvement that nobody spotted. Some of those surface as a return visit, some as an awkward extra on the day, and some as a cancelled slot you cannot refill at short notice. Meanwhile the office spends its mornings chasing pictures instead of booking installs, and the surveyor spends evenings scrolling through a chat thread looking for the one image that shows the tails.
How we build the guided survey
- When an enquiry is accepted, the customer gets a text or email link (sent through Twilio or your email system) to a short mobile page with your branding.
- The page asks for one shot at a time, each with an example image: consumer unit with the cover on, consumer unit label, meter and cut-out, main fuse marking, the proposed charger wall, the route from board to wall, and where the car parks.
- Each photo is checked as it uploads for blur, darkness and whether it looks like the thing requested. If it does not, the page asks again straight away, while the customer is still standing in the hallway.
- Short questions sit alongside the photos: property type, wall construction, approximate distance, whether there is a tethered or untethered preference, and any existing heat pump or solar.
- Everything is filed against the job in your job management system, or in a survey record we build if you do not have one, with the photos in a fixed order.
- The surveyor gets a review queue, not a pile of messages. They mark each job ready to quote, needs more photos (which re-sends only the missing items) or needs a site visit.
We do not decide whether an installation is suitable. The checks are about whether the photo is usable. Your surveyor makes every technical call, with the evidence in one place.
| Survey step | Today | With the guided request |
|---|---|---|
| Asking for photos | Edited template message | One shot at a time with an example |
| Receiving them | Several phones and inboxes | Filed to the job automatically |
| Spotting bad photos | Surveyor, days later | At upload, while the customer is there |
| Follow-up questions | Phone calls | Asked on the same page |
| Deciding next step | Scrolling a chat thread | Review queue with a status per job |
A calmer surveyor, fewer wasted van rolls
The office sends one link and moves on. The surveyor sees complete sets of photos, in the same order every time, and can quote from them or decide a visit is needed without phoning anyone. Fitters open the job on their phone and see the board and the route before they leave the yard. When a customer asks what you based the quote on, the answer is on the job record rather than in someone's camera roll.
Does your survey process look like this?
- Customer photos arrive on the sales phone or a personal WhatsApp.
- Surveyors regularly ask for the same photo twice.
- Installs have been abandoned because of something a photo would have shown.
- Nobody can say which jobs are waiting on customer photos right now.
- The survey message has been rewritten so many times nobody knows the current version.