7 Quick TitanAdvisor Wins to Save You Time | Podcast Ep. 51 | Mastering ServiceTitan

This, I will say is the easiest. Of all the features we're talking about today to implement and get points, I think this is the easiest one. It's four points. And the success criteria is truly so easy to get.

Welcome to Mastering Service Titan, where we get expert advice from power users. I'm your host, Josh Liu and today I'm joined by Sina Sadegi, the senior manager of customer programs here at ServiceTitan here. Been at ServiceTlein for over seven years now and so certainly a power user. And so Cena, welcome back to the show, Josh.

Thanks again for having me. Third time's a charm here, huh?

It's so fun to have you back on the show. You're such an expert. I feel like I could throw any topic at you and you will have something to share and so appreciate you coming back on.

It's my pleasure.

Today we wanted to cover a handful of quick Titan Advisor wins. We've got seven Titan Advisor wins on the theme of driving efficiency for your business. So are going to be quick wins. Some require a little more setup, but all on this theme of efficiency. And wanted to kick off with the first win, which would be to learn how to automate your appointment reminders. Can you tell us a little bit about this feature?

Absolutely. So one of the customer communications obviously is appointment reminders. So if I'm a customer and I book a call with you, I can just essentially get that notification automatically. Automatically through the system, which is really nice. This one as well is worth four points for Titan Advisor and it's a quick win. And whenever we say quick win, that means it's a low level of effort to implement. But usually you'll get some nice roi. And obviously this is a huge efficiency gain.

Yeah. What were people doing before if they don't automate their appointment reminders? What's that workflow look like for those listening today who might have not done this yet?

Yeah, and I'm sure a lot of people maybe still do. This today is just calling the customer, getting on the phone, hey, Josh, we have you scheduled for 10 o' clock today. Does that time still work? Let's just automate that system. Let's just get the system to automatically send out that reminder notification. So if a customer wants to cancel, they can call us, they can text us and cancel it rather than having somebody else in the office sort of reach out to them.

This seems like a no brainer. Is there any reason why someone doesn't want to set this up? Like why do people hesitate with this one?

That's a good question. I really can't think of anything, but if you do want to exclude some things, there are some exclusion settings inside of the customer notifications as well. So excluding things like job types, like business units, that is an option. But honestly, I can't really think of a reason why you wouldn't want to sort of automate your appointment reminders.

Makes sense. And the reminder is that sent in an email, a text message? Is it both?

It can be both. It's a choice. You can choose a text email or you can just do both.

Okay, makes a lot of sense. That definitely seems like a no brainer. I mean, I just had a restaurant recommendation yesterday, took my girlfriend out for her birthday and I get texts along the way, hey, you're still coming, right? Confirm reply 1 if you're going to be there because they want to make sure you don't cancel and make sure they have that slot booked. So makes a lot of sense.

Yeah. And happy birthday to your girlfriend.

I'll have to send her this episode after the second Titan Advisor win here to drive efficiency is using the chat to stay connected with your customers. Can you tell us a little bit about this win?

I mean, I'm going to throw this right back at you, Josh. If you have a choice to call someone or to chat in, which choice are you taking?

Oh, it's so much easier to chat in.

I'm chatting in 100% of the time. Maybe that's just something that I like to do, but essentially chat is the way to go, especially in this day and age. And there's a few benefits with chat. First, if I'm a CSR chatting in, I can have multiple threads open with multiple customers or rather than just one phone call with one customer. So a nice efficiency gain there. You also can send pictures and videos. So if I'm a customer and I'm. I'm explaining things but it's not really making sense, I can just send a video to someone who's using a chat and that way they can see exactly what's going on in here and sort of see the picture, hear the videos, all that good stuff.

And is it usually the CSRs and maybe the dispatchers who are using this chat feature? Like who, who's it designed for us?

Usually the CSRs, whoever's taking in those calls or taking in those chats. Usually it's going to be on the CSR side of things, but some companies have a shared CSR dispatcher. It's one person doing both things. So mostly for csr. But if you got both doing one role, it's for them as well.

Gotcha. And where do customers like the homeowners access this chat for for them? Is the experience via like a text message thing or is it a different kind of chat platform?

Just that, yeah, just texting. So they'll have a specific number that is set and then they'll just start chatting in to that number. A couple of other call outs here. This one's a big feature. Five points for this specific Titan Advisor feature and the success criteria. Let me actually mention this as well. It's the percent of chat threads, excluding those marked as spam, which are either closed or where the last message is outbound by an office user for the last seven days. If that is over 75%, you get your full five points and we're riding. Nice.

Got it. So it seems like the points incentivize you to kind of just manage your chats in a healthy way rather than like having a bunch of things open or like customers talk in where you haven't replied. Is that right?

That's exactly right. Yeah. We want to make sure you're monitoring those chats, you're closing those chats if those chats are done. And there is a second part for this specific feature and it's looking at response times. So if it's under two minutes, you'll get those full points. So to your point, making sure we're giving that great customer experience.

Got it. For a best practice sense, do you think most CSRs should also have chat kind of open on the side? Or is it Maybe a few CSRs are just dedicated to handling all the chats?

That's a good question. I'm sure each company does it differently, but if somebody's on the phone, I think it's really hard to also be keeping up with chat. So it might be worth sort of divvying out and dividing and conquering. I'm sure every company does it a little bit differently, but yeah, if I'm on the phone and I'm trying to chat into a customer, I might get things a little twisted.

And do customers, how do they discover this chat? Is it usually the contracting business send a text message to the customer first and they respond? Or is the customer finding this number somewhere somehow?

I'd hope it'd be something that the service titan customer is sort of advertising out there. Hey, we have a chat option if you would like, if you don't want to call us or if you want to send us a picture or Send us a video of the issue. You can use his phone number as well. So hopefully they're advertising that on their website. And if you've got Marketing Pro, hopefully you've got a Marketing Pro campaign sort of advertising. Hey, if you don't want to call, you can chat in as well, right?

You can just tell them, hey, this is a texting number. You can send us photos, videos anytime you need and we'll get back to you. So what a cool way to stay in touch with your customers in a. In a way that's easy for them.

Yes, indeed.

All right, moving on to the third Titan Advisor win here. Improving efficiency by going paperless. This is one. Before I started recording, I was like, wait, what, what's this mean? Isn't everybody paperless? So, yeah, can you tell us a little more about this win?

We hope everyone is paperless. That is definitely the goal. But this is a very interesting one. One other thing I will say for this again, five points for Titan Advisor. So another big one. And this one is actually a required feature, meaning this must be completed in order to go to the next stage. But what is actually improved efficiency by going paperless? The success criteria for this one is the percent of managed technicians who took an action in Service Titan Mobile over the last seven days. Thus the question is, Josh, what is an action in Service Height Mobile? And there's a few different ways that you can actually get this sort of success criteria done. Arriving at a job, adding invoice items, creating and presenting estimates, collecting payments and finally completing jobs. Those are all considered actions in Service Titan. And one more reminder, Managed technicians is what this is looking at perfect.

I feel like that one is pretty. I don't even know what to call it. That one, like everyone probably is already doing. And so is there anything else we need to cover for that one or.

No, I think most people probably have that one done. And if you don't, I would just double check that manage technician list to make sure. Oh yeah, these, everyone's managed. Yes, this person has been arriving, adding invoice items. But yeah, to your point, I feel like most people probably have that feature complete and getting five points perfect.

Yeah, if you don't just double check that one, maybe it's like a quick check mark you can just look at. Hey, just making sure this is good. Our managed checklist is good. Everybody's doing things the right way. This next one I know you're personally really excited about. I feel like this might be one of your favorite features. Improving efficiency with conditional logic. In Forms. Can you tell us about this one?

You remember Josh? I feel so honored. Yes. For some reason, I don't know why. Forms is my favorite feature inside of the system. Ever since I started over seven years ago, for some reason, forms just clicked with me and I just really love it. Conditional logic, the if then logic for forms. So if they say, oh, we do not collect payment, and my technician answers no, I can have another question pop up from that conditional logic that says, why? Why haven't we collected payment? This, I will say, is the easiest of all the features we're talking about today to implement and get points. I think this is the easiest one. It's four points. And the success criteria is truly so easy to get. At least one published form has published conditional logic rules. And if you're thinking to yourself, I don't know where to start, go. Inside of Titan Exchange, we have conditional logic forms that you can just go and grab, put them into your system, review them, make your adjustments, and. And then publish it. And boom, you've got yourself a cool four points. Really easy.

And this one, I'm pretty sure every technician out there has felt frustrated with a form before, and so this could be a great way to just make their lives easier. You can ask your team like, hey, which form is your least favorite? And you'll probably find out there's a bunch of questions that are maybe not relevant to every job. And so what you can do with conditional logic, if I'm understanding correct, is you use that if then logic. So if they answer this, then show the next set of questions so your forms can get shorter and, like, easier to fill out. And you're not showing irrelevant questions to technicians for every job and they're just skipping through or answering too quickly and whatnot.

You're making it much more efficient. And that's something we talked about last time, is getting that buy in. From your text to your point, ask them what's their least favorite form. Talk about how you can basically implement conditional logic into that form and get their buy in. And I think everyone is much, much happier and technicians are more efficient out there in the field.

And considering how much efficiency gain you get from this feature, I'm surprised that of all the ones we talked about today, it's actually the easiest one to implement.

It is conditional logic can take a bit of playing around with. So I think once you get in there, there might be some nuances. But like this specific success criteria literally just says you. You just have a published form that has conditional logic rules so if you want to just get a quick, easy four points, go to Titan Exchange, grab a conditional logic form, put it inside of your system, don't just publish it, obviously, review it, make it your own and then publish it. And you got yourself a cool four points.

Awesome. So those are four quick. Titan Advisor wins so far. We've got three more to go. This next one is actually one of my personal favorite features. Dynamic. We sound such like Service 9 nerds right now, but dynamic pricing, this one's one of my favorite features. Features because of how much it simplifies something that's so complex. For those who haven't heard of dynamic pricing, can you share first what that feature is?

We are service site nerds, Josh. We love the product. It helps a bunch. So I'm right there with you, my friends. Dynamic pricing, this is a really nice way to make sure your margins are protected. It allows you to set basically some rules of how you want some markups to be, some multipliers to be for your equipment, your materials. And then if you got things like after hours price levels, holiday pricing, you can add all of that stuff into dynamic pricing. So rather than going in service by service, adjusting these prices, because we know prices are constantly adjusting and fluctuating, you can set up these rules in dynamic pricing to make sure that your margins are protected the way you want them to be.

Yeah, this one is an amazing feature. I've heard of contractors duplicating price books and the technicians having a hard time making sure which price is correct. And a lot of that helps. A lot of that makes it complex and makes it tricky to make sure you have the right margins, especially if they get something wrong. This one, I feel like we can go down a huge rabbit hole in terms of the setup and all that. But I will link a video from our very own Richard Kohberger, the blue collar nerd. In a previous episode, I asked him what is one of the most underrated service titan features that we had, and dynamic pricing is the one that he called out. So I'll link a video of his. He walks through exactly how to set it up step by step, just to set expectations for our audience here. What's the setup look like for dynamic pricing?

This is one of those things where it's going to be an investment. It depends on how big your price book is. It depends on how your categories look like. But if you've got a fairly clean price book, I would say you could probably do it all in one day, maybe even a little bit less. But if you've got some cleaning up to do, which might not be a bad thing, by the way, might be a good thing to sort of look at your price book, make sure the services are still relevant, the categories are still relevant. It might take you a little bit longer. But features like these, I always just think of them as an investment. We always put the time up front so that way our technicians, our margins, everything becomes protected and more efficient along the way.

And how many points do they get for. For this one?

This one's only three points. I say only three points because the last few ones we've been talking about is 4 and 5. But beyond the Titan Advisor points, I think this will just be a massive gain for the business to make sure you're protecting your margins.

Oh, this one is huge. I feel like you and I need a rally and spam. Some people increase the three points to like 10 or something. This one is huge. I think it's a big one.

It's a big one.

One of the prerequisites for this one is having is it linked materials and sold hours that needs to be set up in your price book?

It's actually so funny. So we did record a video on this and that should be coming out in a couple of months. For this specific Titan Advisor feature, there's some limitations if you don't have linked materials or linked equipment, you can still technically use dynamic pricing, but there's definitely some limitations and you won't have as accurate of sort of pricing versus if you did have your linked materials and linked equipment. But I think that goes back to our cleaning up your price book conversation. A lot of these features will bank off of other things that are being used inside of the system. And this is one of those features where if you've got those linked materials, it just makes your life so much better and those prices so much more accurate.

Right. And so this is a good one to look at. Maybe if your price book is super messy, this could be an aspirational one and your first step is just cleaning up your price book. You'll see some impact to your business already from that and you can step your way into dynamic pricing. I did want to call out, for those of you listening on PriceBook Pro, you should already have all your materials linked in sold hours, I believe. And so if you're already on PriceBook Pro, please set up dynamic pricing. You're like so close to be able to do it and it's just so much easier for you, I think I.

Always say for pricebook Pro always double check your sold hours. That's just sort of my pro tip that I give for pricebook Pro. But yes, there are linked materials, there are linked assets, because it is PriceBook Pro. And that's one of the benefits of, of that specific Pro product.

Perfect. So moving on here to Tad win number six, preventing membership billing failures. This one seems like a niche but painful problem that contractors might have. Can you tell us about first this pain point and then what this feature is?

I'm sure a lot of you contractors who have those recurring memberships and you have those credit cards that are saved on file, you run those every month and then of course you'll get the oh, card declined for whatever reason. And you've got probably someone who calls the customer. It takes a long time, maybe they don't answer. It's just a huge pain. And the more memberships and credit cards you got saved, the more that problem sort of compounds itself. So Service Titan has actually created a feature called membership billing protection. The first thing I'm going to say about this is there's an extra cost to this. This is not included in the course subscription. It's not technically a pro product, but it is an extra cost. So just want to be upfront about that. But what it does is it essentially reviews those credit cards and updates them. If there's any updates for a new credit card issued, maybe there's an expired credit card. It just sort of takes that heavy lifting off of you, which makes that person who does memberships life so much easier.

And it does that automatically, like magically in the background somehow.

Automatically. Josh, we've got some stuff. I'm sure we're working with some banks and payment processors to get that information updated, but yes, automatically. It's amazing.

Yeah, that blows my mind. But it makes sense. I've lost my credit card too many times. Like I was in. I dropped my wallet in a river earlier this year anyway, but there are things where I have a recurring payment and then I've noticed that it just. They automatically switch it to the new card. So is this kind of like that feature basically?

Exactly, exactly. I'm sure they've also got some arrangements with payment processors, some banks, but yeah, exactly like you're saying, it just automatically updates because the system knows, oh, they've got a new credit card.

Okay, makes sense. So then that saves all that time and headache of trying to get that customer on the, on the phone. Update the credit card, make sure you get paid. What if it's two months now? Like all that headache.

Basically, the compound, the problem just continue to compound as you continue to neglect those things. Absolutely right.

And where should people go to learn more if they are interested in getting this set up or finding out how much it costs for them?

Payments set up at servicetitan.com payment setup@servicetitan.com and they should be able to talk to you about this feature and obviously enable it for you if that is something that you would like. Three points, by the way. Three points for this specific feature.

Okay, perfect. And what was it called again?

Membership Billing Protection. It updates credit cards automatically. That should be the tagline. I don't know. I feel like I'm in marketing right now. That was crazy.

Perfect. Yeah. Automatically get your membership billing failures, updated email payment setup service line.com. i'll put that email address in the description as well if you're interested, to save that headache. Last one here is adding online payment links to invoices and statements.

We want to give people the option to pay in so many different ways. So of course maybe we're going on site and collecting payments, but maybe we're emailing invoices or we're emailing statements to our customers. Maybe they've got some net 30 terms. You can add an online payment link into those invoices and into those statements so customers have another way that they can pay you. Four points for this specific Titan Advisor feature. And I'll read the success criteria for this one as well. It's the percent of invoices, excluding adjustment invoices for residential jobs with an outstanding balance more than five days old that have been emailed. That last part is really the key. That have been emailed out more than five days. But yeah, you throw in that online payment link into your invoices, into and into your statements, and that way we give our customers another way to pay.

And what's the setup look like for this one?

It's so easy. All you have to do is go into your settings and go into your email and you'll see different tabs up at the top for your invoices, your statements. And it's just a personalized token. You just throw that thing into your email template and bada bing, bada boom, you're done.

Oh, so there's no setup on the back end in terms of taking payments, all that kind of stuff. You can just turn it on for your.

Yeah, assuming you've got Service Titan Payments. I guess that is a caveat that we should give. Yes, assuming you have Service Titan payments, you can just Throw this into the template of your email and it'll be in there. It's great.

Okay, perfect. I'm pretty sure everyone listening has service time payments. So yeah, that if you don't definitely reach out to our team and we'll help you get set up for that. But yeah, this seems like another no brainer. Quick win, getting paid faster, easier not having to follow up with customers and things like that.

Exactly. Yeah. To me, this is a no brainer. I definitely would want this option if I was running a business on service Titan. And it's four points. Why not get these four points for getting another way for you to get paid as the customer.

Exactly. And so there you have it. Seven QuickTitan advisor wins. All to help automagically drive efficiency for your business. I think we wanted to use this theme at this time of the year because it's the summer, people are busy. What are quick ways that we can just drive efficiency, save time on all these repeated tasks and get rid of those annoying headaches from all these different things piling up?

Let's get rid of them automatically. That's our word for today's episode.

That's my new favorite word. Awesome. Cena, thank you so much again for coming on. And we'll see you at Pantheon.

See you at Pantheon. Hopefully see the rest of you at Pantheon. And don't forget about the Titan Score Challenge, y'.

All.

And ends in September. So get your Titan Budger score up and if you don't know where to start, come to Ember. It's free. We will help you out with Titan Advisor.

What is the Titan Score Challenge? In case people haven't heard of it?

It's a challenge where we're essentially tracking everyone's score for a certain amount of time. And the contest ends in September and whoever wins is going to be shouted out at Pantheon.

Okay, very cool. So you've got some time to drive up your Titan Advisor score. There's some quick wins today. And then check out the previous episodes that we did together. Cena, there's a bunch of Titan Advisor wins quick wins that you can do covered there as well. So thank you so much.

Thanks again, Josh, for having me.