BCI Solutions: a regional player boosts productivity and profitability with Revolt.eco

BCI Solutions is a multi-activity energy renovation company founded in 2012 and based in Beynost, in the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region. With a team of nearly 70 employees, BCI Solutions reaches as far as the south of France, generating annual sales of around 10 million. BCI Solutions chose Revolt.eco, the leading platform for solar panel installers, to support the development of its new photovoltaic business. The collaboration has been a great success for BCI Solutions, which has seen time savings and increased profitability. Interview with Brice Aloth, Director of BCI Solutions.

BCI Solutions is a large, multi-activity company that recently expanded its offering to include the installation of photovoltaic panels.

One of the leaders in energy renovation in its region

"Originally, BCI Solutions specialized in attic insulation. With the boom in energy renovation, we acquired various companies with expertise in different trades. Today, we cover all aspects of energy renovation: insulation, heating, ventilation and photovoltaics. Taking all trades together, we carry out around 500 projects a month. We work mainly with private customers, but are also developing our commercial business. In the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region, we are probably one of the four biggest structures in the energy renovation sector.. "

Photovoltaics, a new business

"About a year and a half ago, in 2023, we made the strategic decision to develop the photovoltaic part of our business.. It's a business we didn't know anything about, but we felt that our existing customers were quite keen. In fact, we have a large base of customers for whom we do a lot of work, and they were calling on us for photovoltaic solutions. Today, we have technical teams that work exclusively on photovoltaics. Our technical sales staff, on the other hand, are multi-skilled. They are capable of selling all energy-related businesses. Since we really launched the solar business in February 2024, we've completed just over 450 installations. "

As soon as it launched its new photovoltaic business, BCI Solutions was faced with several challenges:

Increase the conversion rate from prospects to customers

"BCI solutions is very well established locally and is still considered a family business despite its size. However, at the beginning, unlike our other activities, photovoltaics was generating a transformation rate that was not good. This alerted us. We asked ourselves why we couldn't sign up customers for this business. After analysis, we concluded that our approach wasn't professional enough. That's why we looked for software to support us.

Equipping sales staff to better sell photovoltaic projects

"When we started our photovoltaic business, we didn't have any tools. We were quickly faced with a problem: our technical sales staff were arriving at customers' premises without the right tools and the right approach to present the advantages of photovoltaics. To put it plainly, we were lacking a solution for auditing private customers and presenting projects. So we went looking for a software package dedicated to studying customer consumption and showing them their own document with their energy expenditure, the project we were going to propose, the various savings envisaged, amortization, etc. Something denser than a simple estimate.

Improve administrative efficiency

" As part of our new photovoltaic business, administrative issues were a real challenge that we didn't necessarily master at the outset. After the sale, we had to submit preliminary building applications to the town hall and carry out a number of other tasks. In the peak months, we can do 80 photovoltaic installations, or 80 pre-applications. Each application takes around 1 h 30, so with 80 preliminary applications per month, we were falling way behind schedule. We had estimated that we needed two full-time people to do just that.. "

Find an agile tool to stand out from the competition

"Before discovering Revolt.eco, we had come across other solutions, but in our eyes they weren't intuitive enough or too generic. We didn't want a practical tool that everyone had, that didn't set us apart from the competition.. On the other hand are a fairly agile company. We see ourselves more as a start-up than a construction company. We have to deal with a lot of changes in legislation and a lot of developments in our business. For example, we've had to industrialize a lot of things, such as aid applications and customer support. To develop our business, we needed an agile service provider.

In Revolt.eco, BCI Solutions found the tool it needed to make life easier for its sales staff, but also, more unexpectedly, to save its employees precious time on the heavy administrative side.

A high-performance, differentiating sales support tool

"We were looking for a sales support tool capable of analyzing customer data and estimating the project's return on investment. Initially, we used Revolt.eco to optimize this pre-sales part. Revolt.eco added a lot of subtleties over the months. As a resultToday, our sales approach is almost perfect. We can retrieve customer consumption data and analyze it with real figures in real time. This ability to retrieve customer data directly is one of Revolt's great strengths. one of Revolt.eco's major advantages over the competition. We also use Revolt.eco for layout, to show customers what their house will look like with solar panels".

Automation of the preliminary work application section

"The Revolt.eco solution includes an administrative section which we can use to submit preliminary work applications to the town hall. So today, we use the whole pre-sales project part, but also the whole after-sales part. This administrative functionality is huge for us, as it enables us to reduce the time needed to make a preliminary work request from 1 h 30 to just 10 or 15 minutes."

For over a year, BCI Solutions has benefited from close support from Revolt.eco. Innovative, agile, attentive and responsive, the Revolt.eco teams have succeeded in rapidly building a software package that responds precisely to the field problems encountered by BCI Solutions.

A partnership under the banner of innovation and agility

"We discovered Revolt.eco by chance. Through friends, we met Fabien, one of the founders of Revolt.eco. As we chatted, we realized that Revolt.eco was launching software that was exactly what we'd been looking for. exactly what we were looking for. The team was proposing a new idea that could be the competition.. As we exchanged ideas, I sensed that the team was in the same same agile mindset as us. The human contact was also good. They're young people like us. All that made us choose this adventure."‍

An efficient, attentive team

"We started working with Revolt.eco at the beginning of 2024, just a short year ago. The tool was young. We were impressed by the speed with which the team responded to our comments and worked out any bugs. They were extremely responsive. That's another reason why we use Revolt.eco even more today. They were able to meet our needs in the field. In concrete terms, our sales manager with Revolt.eco once a week. The idea is to see how the collaboration is going, what could be improved, if there are any bugs, etc. We are also in daily contact via a WhatsApp group where we discuss our issues or things we'd like to change. Knowing that today the tool is complete, we no longer have any obstacles to working on Revolt.eco, so we exchange less on a day-to-day basis."

A solution that responds finely to problems in the field

"We followed the development of the tool. As it got off the ground, we were able to adapt it to our problems as photovoltaic installers in the field. At the very beginning, for example, we had problems with the software's layout when we had several roofs and had to separate photovoltaic installations. As soon as we had two roofs, we were stuck. We passed on the information to Revolt.eco and two or three days later the update was done. That's when we realized that things were moving fast, and that Revolt.eco was the solution we were looking for.

For Brice Aloth, Director of BCI Solutions, the Revolt.eco solution solved all his company's initial problems concerning the development of its photovoltaic business.

Increased conversion rate from prospects to customers

" Today , the transformation rate of our photovoltaic business has caught up with and even surpassed that of our other businesses.. We have a conversion rate of around 35% or 38% for our customers, which is good.

An effective sales plan and differentiating sales proposals

"With Revolt.eco, sales reps are 'driven' in their sales plan. By following the software, they discuss everything they need to talk about when selling photovoltaics. We have also improved the quality of our customer presentations and gained in professionalism. Now, when we go to the customer's premises, we can leave or e-mail them a personalized study with their own data. This document is quite sexy, with the logo, explanations and lots of other things. Thanks to this, when our sales staff visit the customer, they don't leave him indifferent, and that sets us apart from the competition.

Considerable time savings on administrative tasks

"Thanks to Revolt.eco, the processing time for preliminary work requests has been reduced from from 1 h 30 per file to just 10 or 15 minutes. A single personwho handles all our business, can handle the 80 requests we have to process every month. So we haven't had to outsource or hire anyone to handle all our pre-applications. In this sense, the savings are considerable. The automation of the preliminary work request part is what we couldn't do without Revolt.eco for".

A real competitive advantage

"Having Revolt.eco at your side is a real competitive advantage. In terms of profitability and gains for a structure like ours, it's enormous.especially on the administrative side. It's had such an impact on our sales prices that one of our competitors called us, because he couldn't understand how we could charge such affordable rates. I explained to him that while he was spending two hours doing a study and a work request, we were doing it in 20 minutes. Inevitably, this has an impact on prices. Finally, I sent him to Revolt.eco.

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