How Solar Informatics accelerated its Time-to-Live for Notifications by 75% with SuprSend's Multi-Tenant Architecture?

Solar Informatics is a SAAS platform for the solar energy industry, offering a comprehensive solution that streamlines all aspects of solar project development, deployment, and management. Their platform serves as a centralized hub for managing ERP requirements end-to-end for various stakeholders, including off-loaders, O&M providers, community solar managers, and energy companies. 

At the heart of Solar Informatics' mission lies the indispensable role of notifications. These notifications serve as the vital conduits of seamless communication, ensuring that crucial information, such as real-time O&M alerts and insightful predictions concerning energy output, maintenance schedules, and other indispensable updates, flows effortlessly among all stakeholders. 

What were Solar Informatics notification use cases?

Solar Informatics tackled two primary notification use cases:

Initially, Solar Informatics relied on a basic email notification system catering to multiple tenants, a manual and engineering-intensive process involving template creation, event and workflow setup, as well as design and content customization at individual customer account levels. With scaling came the realization of the need for a more robust, scalable notification infrastructure capable of isolating and handling multi-tenant requirements. They also wanted to create a scalable white labeled notification experience for every client instead of involving engineering team every time.

Integrating with SuprSend:

Powerful template builder with rapid iteration capability:

Solar Informatics found a powerful ally in SuprSend, offering a front-end template builder with rapid iteration capabilities. This transformative shift reduced the burden on the engineering team, empowering the business and product teams to customize notifications based on customer requests.

"The flexibility of creating templates has really helped us here. Since we are dealing with different customers that have different kinds of brandings, so we had to create a lot of HTML templates for each customer and then customize them in backend code when asked, which was a lot of development work. We don't have that problem now."
Salman Khan, Chief Architect at Solar Informatics

They could also use batching and digest features, where multiple and recurring events were consolidated in a single template to reduce notification fatigue for stakeholders.

Additionally, they fetched templates over API to export the created HTML templates, which were then used to create necessary PDFs that could be shown within their platform.

A use-case: Sending complex weather alert emails using dynamic content

Solar Informatics needed to send some critical weather alerts that contained a wealth of information, including site-specific details, alert specifics, and comprehensive weather condition data, including graphs. To accommodate these intricacies of multiple dynamic fields, they used SuprSend’s handlebar helpers.

1. Dynamic Content: Handlebar helpers enabled real-time updates for tables, graphs, fields, and banners in email templates based on the latest data sent by Solar Informatics.
2. Colored Banners: Helpers dynamically changed banner colors to represent weather severity (red, yellow, green).
3. Diverse Date Formats: Handlebar helpers accommodated various date formats in emails, ensuring customized representation of date information in different fields.
4. Tenant Logos: Tenant logos were added using SuprSend’s tenant’s API for white-labeling, offering a personalized experience to each tenant’s customers.
5. Graphs: Using the data fetched from the HTML content, graphs were prepared and attached to the templates.

All these customizations were possible directly in the visual template editors managed by non-tech teams, which reduced time-to-market significantly.

White-labeling through SuprSend's Multi-Tenant Architecture:

Solar Informatics, being a B2B SaaS platform, faced a recurring request from clients for a white-labeled notification experience. Leveraging SuprSend's multi-tenant architecture, Solar Informatics implemented branded elements for multiple tenants while using a single dynamic template to send white-labeled notifications. This not only significantly reduced time-to-market but also facilitated rapid incorporation of customer customization demands, saving approximately 75% of the time required to go live for any new customer with their notifications.

This architecture also enabled them to implement a multi-tenant preference management center. The preference management center helped its customers control their notification types and channels proactively. 

Going Multi-channel for Increased User Engagement

While Solar Informatics initially relied on email notifications, they recognized the imperative of enhancing user engagement, particularly for critical alerts. To achieve this, they sought an additional communication channel that could deliver real-time alerts efficiently. The optimal choice was push notifications, and Solar Informatics swiftly integrated this channel without the need for additional API integrations in code.

Results: Increase in Customer engagement while reducing TTL

Solar Informatics reduced Time-to-Live by 75%, thanks to multi-tenant architecture and template builders. Real-time alerts increased user engagement. Leveraging Suprsend improved efficiency, reduced manual work, and boosted customer satisfaction. It also freed their developers from constant customer requests and saved engineering resources. 

"Our onboarding and customization requests TTL has reduced significantly, which increases customer satisfaction and reduces the engineering cost because now our development team is focusing on things, which are really development stuff, and not just all the time fixes and maintenance."
Salman Khan, Chief Architect at Solar Informatics