Satisfied vs dissatisfied users

Note: This is part 2 of 8 field notes from a solar home system assessment my team conducted in remote communities in Palawan. Details that could identify the service provider and specific project have been redacted to protect the integrity of the work. The observations and reflections here are my own.

Not everyone I spoke with was happy—but the reasons were more varied than I expected, and some of them surprised me. A few users had no idea they could connect an inverter to their 50Ah unit to run appliances beyond what the service provided. They wanted more from the service; they just didn’t know how to get it. Others had a 23Ah unit and complained they couldn’t run a light and a fan at the same time, which, to be fair, may have been a sign of a defective unit since other households use them together. But they hadn’t reported it to anyone. They absorbed the frustration quietly instead of escalating it. And then there were the ones who had done everything right—paying their monthly fees faithfully, reporting breakdowns promptly—and were still waiting for a replacement unit more than a month later. That last group was the hardest to hear about.

What stayed with me was the quietness of some of the dissatisfaction: users absorbing problems they could have reported, sitting with frustration that might have had a simple fix. Maybe they didn’t know who to call. Maybe they didn’t think it would make a difference. That kind of silence is worth paying attention to.

Satisfaction and dissatisfaction, I found, often lived next door to each other, and sometimes in the same household.

Meanwhile, the satisfied users were satisfied for different reasons, and some of those reasons gave me pause. A few had previously managed their own solar home systems—the maintenance, the breakdowns, the cost of it all landing entirely on them—and compared to that, the service felt like a genuine relief. They weren’t just happy with what they had. They couldn’t imagine going back. Others had simply never experienced a breakdown yet, which is a kind of quiet, provisional satisfaction—but probably the kind that holds until it doesn’t. And then there were those who had reported a problem and received a replacement quickly. For them, the trust was earned. The system had been tested and it had held.