9 Recent Automation Features You May Have Missed

What's going on everybody? It's Richard Kohberger here, the blue collar nerd. So listen, I know Service Titan is constantly coming out with new features, which is a good thing, but it can be hard to keep up. After all, for most people, implementing new Service Titan features as they come out is not your full time job. You have other things to do and so it can be easy to miss a really useful new feature that came out or to hear about it, but then just never actually get it implemented because you just never found the time. So this video is going to be a compilation of some useful automation focused features that have come out over the past year or so. And the purpose here is really just to resurface them to you, just in case you missed them or never got them implemented for whatever reason. What you're going to see are some short clips that just kind of give a high level overview of what the feature is. For some of the features that's going to be enough, but for others, you're going to see snippets out of full length videos with a lot more instruction and context. And so if you'd like to see the full length videos, I'll put links to those in the description box down below. And with that I'm going to hand it off to me from the past. We have some enhancements to the Estimate email settings. So by going into Settings, invoicing and Email and clicking on the Estimates tab, you will now see two new options. First, you can now customize when online estimate links will expire. So previously an online estimate link that you sent out, it worked for 60 days and you couldn't change that. But maybe your policy is to honor pricing only for 30 days. We're. Or maybe you'll honor it longer than 60 days and you don't want to have to send out a new link. Well, now you can customize that to whatever you want. So if you click that dropdown, you'll see some presets, but you can also click this Add Custom Days button to put in whatever number you like. And if you have certain situations where you want to have this number set differently, that's fine because you also have the option to edit this per estimate when emailing out an estimate from the office. This was one of the top ideas in the community with 497 votes. But wait, we didn't stop there. You can also now choose to automatically resend the estimate in a certain number of days if it hasn't been either dismissed or accepted. So a couple of things to know about this feature, one is that it does pay attention to both the estimate and the opportunity status. So if the opportunity is marked as won or dismissed, that will also stop the estimate from being resent. If you're fuzzy on what I mean by that and you need some help with the difference between estimates and opportunities, I've got a separate video on that. I'll put a link to it in the description box down below. The other thing to note is that this is not tied into Marketing Pro in any way. So if you're using Marketing Pro and you've already got a campaign set up to remarket unsold estimates, then you wanna be careful about using this because you might be doubling up. So to get to the auto batching settings, we're going to go to the settings cog in the upper right hand corner. And then under accounting you should see auto batching and this is where you will change your various auto batching settings. So I would recommend coming in here and reading all of these. Just make sure you understand everything because that's gonna give you some good insight as to what what's recommended and what could be useful, depending on your circumstances. But for most people, most of the time, I would recommend for your invoices that you have those auto batched daily. That's gonna make life pretty easy. Every day you're gonna have an automatic batch and that batch is going to have the dates that the batch was created in the name. So it's nice and easy to find. Now, you'll note over here we have a checkbox for group by business unit that would create separate batches every single day for every business unit. For most people, I would recommend leaving that unchecked. A reason to leave it checked might be if you are running multiple businesses out of one service titan account and you're using separate business units to do that, that might be a reason to group by business unit. Now, payments. You'll see that we do have the option to automatically batch payments as well. But if we read this text, it says as a best practice, we recommend manually grouping payments so that they can match your bank deposits. And if you do choose to auto batch, then we recommend that you verify that bank deposits match your bank before exporting. And bills, just like invoices, we recommend as a best practice automatically batching those on a daily basis. We also have options for credits, bill payments, inventory adjustments and inventory transfers. And just to show you what kind of options we have here, if I click the dropdown again, I do typically recommend daily, but you could also automatically create batches per transaction. You could do weekly, you could do monthly, or, of course, you could choose to manually create your batches. Now, at the top here, you might notice the switch that says group transactions with the same cadence. If I were to toggle that on, then let's say, okay, my invoices here are set to the daily cadence, and my bills here are set to a daily cadence. With that switch on, my invoices and my bills will be grouped together under one single batch. Even though they're different transaction types, invoices and bills, they have the same cadence. And so they're grouped together. But with that off, the invoices are in their own batch, and the bills are in their own batch. There is now a new GPS timekeeping integration with Fleet Pro. So, typically, you know, the time that a technician is on the job is dictated by when they arrive and when they close out the job. But that, of course, relies on the technician doing that accurately. So now, if you have Fleet Pro, then in the payroll dashboard, any discrepancies between the technician's recorded time and the GPS data will be highlighted for you. And you can view those discrepancies and choose to automatically correct some or all of them. There are some settings for this. So if you go to settings and payroll, you can choose to turn the feature completely off if you want to. It is on by default. And you are also able to set your discrepancy thresholds there. So maybe you want things really accurate. And so you want your threshold to be like five minutes. So any discrepancy five minutes or greater, that's going to get highlighted, or maybe that's a bit much for you. You want to set it to more like 15 minutes. In any case, you have those options there. Second Chance Leads intelligently analyzes phone calls using machine learning. And if it believes that that phone call was a lead, it, it will save it here under the Second Chance Leads bucket for further review. And it will do that even if the CSR marked it as not a lead. And that gives managers an opportunity to potentially save some leads that otherwise would have just been forgotten. So to set this feature up, go to Settings, and then under Invoicing, you'll see a new section called Automatic Invoicing. That is where you choose what types of jobs, if any, you want to automatically send invoices. So you've got lots of options here. You can set this up by job type. If you want to go a little broader than that, you can do it by business unit or you can also do it by specific technicians. You'll also notice the section at the bottom for excluded customers. So you don't actually exclude customers here from this screen. You do it with a new automatically generated tag. So you'll have this new do not auto send invoice tag and you can apply that to customers or locations or jobs, same as you can with any tag. But if you do apply it to customers, then those excluded customers will show up here on this list. Now, now, we do have the little issue of customers with multiple emails on their account. So how it works currently with this initial release is that it's going to send the automatic invoice, if it's set up to send to the most recently added email on that customer's profile. So if there's only one email, obviously we don't have a problem, it's just going to send to that one. But if there's multiple, it's going to go to whichever email was added last. Eventually we'll be able to add more granularity as far as which email the invoice goes to. But in the meantime, the workaround would just be if it's going to the wrong email, the one that you don't want it to go to, then remove that correct email and add it back in so it becomes the last one added. Next, we have some new AI powered email automation. So if you were at Pantheon this year, then you've already seen a demo of this, but there are now two new places in Service Titan where you can use AI to help you generate email text. So when sending an invoice to a customer, you can use AI to generate the email body itself. And you can also use AI to generate or help clean up invoice summaries. So for example, if you were in the very, very rare scenario where a technician out in the field didn't write the most thorough and professional sounding invoice summary, then you could use AI to clean that up. So to set this up, first go to Settings and then under invoicing you'll find generative content rules. And this is where we can give the AI some instructions on how we want our email bodies and our invoice summaries to sound. So when you get on the Settings page you'll notice at the top we have two tabs, INV Email and Invoice Summary. So I'm going to start with the invoice email. So first we need to enter a prompt. This is just general instructions on what we want to tell the AI to Do. So I'm going to click Enter prompt and it gives you some examples here of what kind of stuff you could put in for this demonstration. I'm going to use the third example that Service Titan gives me here. But to be clear, you can type in whatever you want into this box. It doesn't have to be one of the examples that ServiceTitan provides, but here's my prompt. It says generate a friendly reminder for invoices that are not past due. For invoices that are 30 days past due or more, create a firm overdue payment reminder that clearly emphasizes the urgency of the situation. Okay, so I'm going to click next. Now it gives me a summary of my prompt so I can double check and make sure that it's understanding what I'm trying to say properly. So I've got three bullets here and all of that looks good to me. So I'm just going to say done. Okay, now in this box down here, the prompt test settings. Here I can select what fields, what pieces of information I want the AI to always include in the email body. So by default everything is checked off in here. Leaving everything checked though, is probably going to result in a pretty wordy email. So I'm going to uncheck a few things. I'm going to say we don't need the invoice summary included. We don't need the job summary. That's probably instructions for the technician anyway. I'm going to assume they know what city and state they're in. I don't think I need invoice total and balance. I'll just do balance. All right, you get the idea. You can choose what you want to be included. Okay. And then we can come over here and click Generate test email. Give it a quick second. And then here is the example based on this actual invoice number. So I can search for a specific invoice so I can see how it words things differently if they're past due versus not past due. Now, in my test environment here, I think all of the example customers are past due, so it's probably only going to generate me some firmer email bodies here. But over here, this is what it gave me at a glance. It looks pretty good to me. But if we didn't like it, if we thought it was way off, then we could make some adjustments to our prompt and or what pieces of information we're asking it to include. But do keep in mind and I'll show you this later when I show you how to actually use this after it's set up, but you don't have to just use the text that it gives you word for word. You can make some edits. Okay, so once we're happy, very important we need to come up here. We need to say save as current prompt and then we need to toggle this switch up here. Generative invoice email. It's currently off. We need to toggle that on. And now that is ready to use. Next, let's do our settings for the invoice summaries. Very similar situation here. So first we need to offer it a. Just going to use the second example here that Service Titan provides. It just says create a refined bulleted summary highlighting the work that the technician provided. So down here, under my test settings again, I can search for a specific invoice so that I can see how it would treat that specific invoice. I have this checkbox here. Whether or not I want to include the job summary as well. For me, I'm going to uncheck that. My job summary usually is like instructions for the technician, so I don't want that information being mixed in there. Now this example invoice that it's pulled already has a pretty clean bulleted list, so I'm going to give it a different example. Okay, so here's a little bit of a more realistic real world example of what a technician might give us. Cleaned condenser coil, blew out drain line. Changed filter and inspected electrical components on two units. Found upstair unit low on refrigerant. Recommend leak search. All right, you know, it gets the point across, but, you know, so let's see how the AI cleans that up. I'm going to click generate test summary. And just like I asked, in my prompt, it's giving me a bulleted list. We performed a thorough cleaning of the condenser coil. The drain line was cleared of any obstructions. The filter was replaced with a new one. Our team also inspected the electrical components on both units. After the inspection, we discovered that the upstairs unit was low on refrigerant. In order to address this issue, we recommend conducting a leak search. And that sounds much more professional. Now again, you can make some minor tweaks before you send this out, but that's a darn good starting place. I mean, I'd feel comfortable just sending that as is. Okay, so once we're happy with how that's turning out, same situation, we're going to click save as current prompt. And again we need to toggle this switch here at the top to actually turn it On. Okay, so now we've got it set up. Let me show you how to actually use it day to day. So we'll start with the invoice email. So we're going to go to the accounting tab, I'm going to go to invoices. And then on this invoice right here, I'm going to say email invoice. And it still auto populates my default template body. But I have this new button here that says Generate email body with the little TI Titan Intelligence logo next to it. And if I click on that, then I get my AI generated email body that uses the prompt that we just set up. So of course I can read that over and any changes that I want to make, I'm free to type in here and make any edits that I want to make. Okay, so that's the invoice emails. Now let's do an invoice summary. So here's an invoice. It's got a very mediocre invoice summary, but I've got this new button that says enhance with ti. So I'm going to click on that, that gives me this fly out here so I can actually make edits on the fly to my prompt. Or I can choose to include the job summary. But what we set up in the settings is the default. And then I'm just going to click Generate Summary and there we go. There's our new cleaner invoice summary. Then I would just click Save generated invoice Summary. It's going to ask me if I'm sure. Yes, I am. So real high level of elevator pitch is that Dispatch Pro uses AI and machine learning to automatically and intelligently assign technicians to jobs and manage your dispatch board. It's able to factor in technician performance and skills and zones and the distance between jobs. And you have configuration options to choose how much you want it to weigh. Getting the right tech on the right job, like how much we want to focus on performance versus how much we want to focus on efficient routing. So how you want to weigh that is totally up to you. We have a new Titan intelligence feature for PriceBook Pro which is auto proposals. So this feature automatically generates good, better best proposal templates for you using artificial intelligence. So basically within just a couple of clicks, you can have a whole bunch of proposal templates for your technicians to use. This is big. This is a big one. Dynamic pricing is here. So if you have managed to not hear about this by now, then you don't watch all my videos and the disappointment I feel is immeasurable, but basically it allows you to set up pricing formulas that just says, hey, this is how I want to calculate my prices for this category, this category, this category, whatever. And then anytime anybody be in the field or in the office goes to look at the price of that item in the price book, the price is calculated instantly on the fly. As they go to look at it, boom, it runs the formula right then and there and they see the price. What that means is that the price is always up to date. It's always running the formula. So if your material costs go up, you don't need to manually go and update all of your service pricing. It's just going to keep following the formula. If you change the billable hours on a certain task, you don't need to go and update that price. It's just going to keep following the formula so the price will always be up to date. You're also able to dynamically modify that price based on certain factors like is this an add on, Is this an after hours job? Or is this job for some reason more difficult than normal? You can add pricing levels so you can add level one, level two, level three, easy, medium, hard, or all the way up to however many levels you want want. And that gives your technicians or your consultants or salespeople or whoever some ability to modify the pricing. If a job is going to be particularly hard or exceptionally easy or whatever, you're able to provide them that flexibility without giving them full control to just modify the price to whatever. Next we have client specific pricing. Now, client specific pricing is very similar to dynamic pricing, but where dynamic pricing is better for if you charge flat rate, client specific pricing is better if you charge time and materials or if you're like a commercial or possibly new construction company that has certain deals worked out with certain clients where you charge them differently. Now, both dynamic pricing and client specific pricing are major features. There's a lot to dive into, so I do have separate videos on both of those topics. So check out the description box down below for links to both of those videos. If you have a price book in Service Titan, I highly, highly, highly recommend looking into at least one of these features. Again, dynamic pricing is better if you charge flat rate. Client specific pricing is better if you are a bigger commercial shop or if you charge time and materials. All right, welcome back to Present Times. Thank you so much for watching. Again, I've got some links in the description box down below for some full length videos related to a few of the features that you just saw. If you like this video and found it valuable. Please be sure to hit that like button. Please be sure to subscribe to surface Titan's YouTube channel if you haven't done that already. Hit that bell icon so that YouTube notifies you anytime we upload a new video. Appreciate it. Peace.