Addressing Your Requests With ServiceTitan Co-Founder Vahe Kuzoyan

What's going on everybody? It's Richard Coburger here, the blue collar nerd. I am here in Glendale, California at the Service Titan offices with an intern who has just started here at Service Titan.

No, that's Vahe.

That's the co founder.

Oh sh.

What's going on everybody? It's Richard Coper here, the blue collar nerd. I'm here with Vahe Kuzoyan, the co founder of Servicetitan. We're going to have a conversation. What's going on?

Vii these are great. How you doing?

I'm doing pretty good. So we put a feeler out on Facebook a little while ago in the Service Titan Mastermind group, asking people what they kind of wanted to see out of Service Titan. We're going to get into that in a little bit. But first of all I want to know what's big picture happening in 2020 with Service Titan.

Sure. The focus for this year is really all about kind of getting back to the basics and focusing on what really got us here, which was the love of our customers. And so what we realized throughout the last few months in particular is there's some key gaps that we need to fill both on just as a company in terms of how we interface with our customers. And then within the product there's certain workflows that are like almost there, but they have these little fences things that need to be adjusted. And so this year is really around completeness of the product and making it work end to end than it is around releasing any major new feature sets.

Although there's going to be a few that makes sense. So just closing those little gaps, those little things that have kind of been nagging at people, focusing on those versus focusing on big major new release projects.

Yeah. And I think it's going to be also a really big year in terms of how we go about making the product. What we're really focused on this year is closing the gap between our team and our customers. And so the kind of Service Titan communities should expect a lot more asks of us to come visit the office, come just sit there and see what's going on, validate that things are doing what they're supposed to and just do a better job of having their ear to the ground.

Awesome. Cool. So Service Titan is like a super deep product. Right. It does a lot, it touches a lot of the business and sometimes it's hard to have everything set up properly. So what do you feel like are some under adopted features that are already out there? What do you feel like Service Titan can already do. I'm sure you guys have the metrics. What are people not using as much as they should?

Yeah, I mean, there's a few things that we recently released that I think are really big that are underutilized right now. So overall, one of the major problems that we see and it kind of goes back.

Can we cut just real quick, Tom, Just like walk back. I think that was on purpose. I think that was a bit. But so what can service Titan already do that's really cool, really useful that isn't getting utilized as much as maybe it should?

Yeah. And kind of going back to this theme of completeness, one of the things that we saw a lot was our memberships module can do a whole bunch of really cool stuff. But it was really easy for users to get themselves in trouble by, for example, not connecting the maintenance visit to the membership plan. And that one little gap being there has all sorts of downstream consequences for reporting for accounting that customers kind of remaining visits. So it creates a lot of problems where on the surface it might not necessarily be obvious that that's a really key piece to make sure there's guardrails around.

Right.

So there's two key features that we just released that is that are really important. One of them is to be able to tell service titan that specific job types must require a visit. So it actually stops the CSR from booking the job. But we didn't want to just have it be a wall that they hit and then now they got to go back and go through some really awkward workflow to find the visit that they want to go to in a different screen. So what we did was we pulled that experience to the screen that the CSRs were on, on the call booking screen, where you can see how many remaining visits this customer has and be able to make that connection at the point at which you would be booking the call. So in between these two things, we think you can really control and account for the no longer missing that connection, which should then make everything else in the product, especially when it comes to reporting and accounting for memberships, cleaner. Because now the ability to have that become not clean is controlled.

Right. So to kind of recap that jobs can now be booked from the call booking screen instead of having to book off the recurring event on the job page, wherever you had to pull that from, and you can tie them to specific job types. So I can say, for example, my maintenance job type, well, that's always going to require this recurring service. So don't book that if there's no recurring service. Right.

Exactly.

Awesome.

And then the one other area that I think we've made a lot of progress in that's super valuable is this ability to coordinate with the homeowner or really anybody that you're visiting and make that confirmation process a lot cleaner. So a few months back we released the ability to have confirmations. After that came the ability for the customer to confirm via text so they don't have to interact with a human in the office and have a person doing that. And then kind of the last mile that we closed very recently was showing the technician that this job is confirmed, so they no longer have to call the office to know if it's been confirmed or not. So we now connect the homeowner, the office and the technician all can interact with the system directly, not having to talk to another human to make that process happen.

Yes, I think that was, that was a great feature to add that really closed the gap because this was something I actually called out in the video before you had to. It didn't really result in a more efficient workflow in some cases, depending on how you use the feature, of course. But for me, the technician ended up still having to call the office to see whether or not the job was confirmed, which actually ended up being an extra phone call because before they would just call the client directly. And so it wasn't really a more efficient workflow, but now it is. And now that's a feature that can pretty much self implement because it's self explanatory. It's right there. There's even an explanation on the mobile side that the technician can tap to understand what that confirmed tag means. So that really helps the workflow become more efficient without the client even really having to do much.

Exactly. And I think it's also a really good example of something where if you think about what ServiceTitan is trying to do, we're trying to make a system that operates the entire business end to end. And we have a team of 250 people in our product. Org now between engineers, product managers, and what ends up happening is when you draw the lines around what part of the product any given product manager has, it's really difficult to forecast all the things that it may touch. So in this case, the team that was working on that was the customer communication team and then they connected the office to the customer and they made that interface, but they didn't catch that. You know what, it's useful for the technician in the field to know this as well. And these are the types of things. That feedback from our user base is so helpful. And I should. I want to thank you specifically for calling that out because it really allowed us to see an opportunity where, look, as a business, we have to invest in our product development. Right. It costs a lot of money to have engineers and all the infrastructure that we need. And so when we find opportunities like this where we can create value with relatively a light level of effort, we love those scenarios. So the more you and the community can help us kind of discover these little nuggets of gold, the faster we'll be able to implement them. The challenge we have is because of the vast scope of the product and how deep it goes, in many cases the surface area is massive. So prioritization becomes like the key thing to get right.

Yeah. And I assume a lot of things that seem easy are really not, and some of them are. And it's hard to tell from a layman's perspective from an outside view, which is which. So I call them out regardless. But I understand how that works. You know, it seems like a quick thing, but actually it affects all these other parts of the product and it's actually coded in such a way that it's not as easy as it looks.

Yeah. And there's challenges from the way that the architecture can enable some things to go really fast and. And requires some pretty big refactoring work and having to tear stuff down and build it back up. And then there's this other aspect of unintended consequences because you change something on one screen for one user and then accounting gets really upset because now something messed up downstream that nobody really saw coming. So what we've had to do is really introduce a lot more layers of quality testing and just looking out for those situations. And so that adds a drag on the velocity and the speed with which we could do things. Even when it is relatively simple on the code level, we now have to go through a pretty robust set of testing and we don't always get it right. But that's another thing that we've been investing in a lot, which has improved quality, but it has come at the expense of speed.

Yeah.

Which I think is the right trade off.

Right. Let me ask you this. When people have feedback, what do you think is the best, most effective way to provide that to servicetitan in a way that's productive?

Yeah. I think we have multiple touch points with our customers. And so I think the right thing to do is actually engage with us in as many as possible, starting with your success manager and being able to give them context and to terms of not just what the feature is that you're asking for, but also the problem that you're looking to solve. Because sometimes there's a different way of solving the problem that we might be able to suggest, and sometimes there isn't, or sometimes the recommended solution doesn't make sense for a variety of reasons. But I would start there. We're investing heavily in improving our digital presence. So whether it's our own community, we have a pretty active Facebook group, there's a whole bunch of areas. So I would say engaging with the broader community is the other best way to do it. And really the best way to get our attention is really to coalesce kind of a group of users to be able to say, hey, this is really important. This is something that is either causing a lot of pain or is a big opportunity for cutting costs or increasing revenue or whatever the case may be. And when we see those types of things bubble up in terms of a large number of users that are asking for it, those are the things that typically get accelerated.

Got it. So kind of wrap that all up. Start with the csm, go as many places as possible. Talk to the broader community as well. Places like the community on Servicetitan, places like the ServiceTitan mastermind group and those Facebook groups, people are watching those. And. And when you're explaining what you want, explain not only your recommended solution, but explain the problem that you are trying to solve. Got it.

Because it's much more important for us to understand the problem than it is the feature ask itself. And the deeper we can understand the problem, the higher quality solution usually comes out of it.

Right. And well, you guys have a whole different set of context that that will come into play when trying to solve a problem where maybe the solution proposed wouldn't make sense for 50% of users, whereas you can still solve their problem in a way that solves for everybody. It's similar to like for my company, I always tell my call takers, don't put in the notes what the customer thinks the problem is. Let the technician do the diagnosing. That is their job and will mislead them. We'll send them down a bad trail if we put that in their head that what the customer thought the problem was. So it calls to mind that same kind of thing.

Yeah. And honestly, from a user perspective, you don't want us necessarily to be pulled in a thousand different directions. Especially as a company continues to scale and the number of users goes up. The danger from a Product perspective is you just keep adding complexity without there being a sufficient ROI for that complexity complexity. Because every button, every option, every fork in settings that you can change the behavior creates additional kind of variations of situations where problems start occurring. And so what may seem like, oh, I just want a button, I just want a checkbox. If we were to just like even bandwidth constraint, do as fast as many of those as possible, I promise you, the product would devolve and it would just become another crappy legacy business thing that's got a bajillion buttons everywhere that no one really loves.

So we put a feeler out on Facebook. Tom Howard put a post out on the Mastermind group asking what you guys, the community wanted to see out of ServiceTitan. And Vahe has seen that we got a great response and we're gonna kind of go over some of the top responses from that.

Cool. Before we dive into the specific requests, I thought it would be cool to maybe talk about just high areas of focus for the product team as a whole and how we're thinking about some of these things. So as you saw in the responses, there's a lot of requests around forms and this is an area that we think is going to become a bigger and bigger part of the experience for the technician and where we're investing a lot of kind of resources behind. Our current priority is really around improving the performance of the PDF forms. Those tend to have a lot of it's not the best kind of speed experience. It crashes higher than the native forms feature. So a lot of it is focused on stability right now. But where we're going is very much aligned with a lot of the asks around being able to make it smarter. So it can do some calculations, some basic ones, giving it a little bit more robustness in terms of some logic to control what shows up when and then being able to improve the ability for it to trigger things. So being able to have responses within the forms do stuff. Yeah. The other kind of direction that we want to go is to allow you greater flexibility in presenting information. So improving the amount of kind of smart fields you can put into a form. So there's a lot of effort going into it. And this is one of those areas that's very, very difficult to work in just because of the complexity of the code base. And so it's not as something that we can go as fast as maybe in some other parts of the product. So that's kind of overall on the forms. The other one where you saw a lot of action was around the estimate templates. Yep. So this was one of the areas where we wanted to move fast, early, and we made some decisions that have kind of painted us into a corner in terms of having an existing job become the template and now you got to book a job to do a new template, all that. So the way we're thinking about it is we're trying to bring forward some key functionality that I think is really important to do as quickly as possible. Like, for example, changing the price so that you can, when your price book changes, update your estimate templates to reflect the current price. Yep. So that's going to be coming out very soon. The other big one was controlling the ordering and the sequencing. So both of those are coming out together, I believe sometime in the April release.

Okay.

And so we want to get those quick wins, but what we're also going to be doing is kind of deconstructing it and building it back up on some kind of more intuitive and longer term footing. So you no longer will need to book a job. Better experience in the office, being able to use templates in the office, being able to preview those kinds of things that right now a lot of that is limited to the field.

Right.

So this is going to be another big area that we focus on. And sorry to cut you off, but this feature, when we look at, when our data science team looks at what is the performance of our companies, what is their revenue growth and what features correlate to that revenue growth. Using estimate templates is literally the top correlator between our users who use it and how fast they grow, particularly in terms of the average ticket size. It's a huge, huge win and it makes sense. Right. Being able to do that really quickly versus having a technician. So that's why we're investing so much, is because not only do we get anecdotal feedback about how powerful it is, but we see it in the data when we look at that correlation.

Yeah. And I think I said pretty much exactly that in the video. I don't use this because it's a pain, but I know that if I did, I would see dramatic results. I know my average ticket would go up. There's no doubt in my mind about it. This just has too many problems for me right now. So to kind of repackage that and set proper expectations in the shorter term future, the structure will be the same, but we'll have quick wins. We'll be able to. The price will update when we update the price in the price book. So it's not like we still have that old price, we have to remember to go back and edit those. So that'll be shorter term but longer term, broader picture. Eventually we can expect to see a separate estimate builder where we can separately build out these templates without having to book a job.

Yep.

Awesome.

So there's one thing that I really wanted to show you. It's not ready for prime time yet, but I did want to get your and this is all real, real time reactions to what we're thinking about upgrading to. Another major part of the product that's been kind of not gotten love in a long time is the schedule board. So being able to view the schedule across multiple days, you kind of saw this as a request and some of the feedback.

Okay, so I haven't seen this yet. Let me see what we got.

So here is what is right now in design phase. So it may not look exactly like this, but this is where we are going. So you'll notice that the design layout is similar in concept to what we have on the dispatch board where you've got your technicians, but now instead of hours you can go into days. And the experience, we think that's going to be important is to get the key information about each day. So. So the feedback that we got was around, hey, I want to be able to know if I can book this call on a particular day and maybe swap out the whole day and if I want to drill in. Being able to then see that whole day when you click into any of the days and then be able to take action. Like being able to assign jobs from this experience, so then being able to look at what unassigned jobs do you have and then go through a flow to then assign them to a particular technician on a particular day. So purely just design concepts. But what do you think so far?

I mean, as just a mock up that I'm looking at without having something to actually try out. This looks like a much more useful schedule board because I know for a fact the schedule board is dead to me. It's like just a tablet.

It's dead to a lot of people.

That doesn't even register in my brain anymore. My eyes just kind of skip over it like it's not even there. So something had to happen there. I think this is a good direction. I definitely think this is a much more useful schedule board. And I do see that as something that gets brought up sometimes with people coming from other softwares saying that they had a better view of high level the whole month or whatever on their previous system. And that's somewhere that Servicetitan isn't really doing a good job. And I agree. So I think that this is. This is the right direction. I like that.

Sweet. So let's get back to the post. So in terms of the feedback we got on the Facebook post, there was kind of the top five that we looked at. The first one was around logic and forms, and this one, I can definitely say you're going to be seeing a lot of action here, but I don't have any specific dates right now. And what I'll kind of set expectations for the audience is that by the end of the year, the forms are going to be meaningfully better than they are today, with a whole lot more capabilities. And we'll try to give as much of a direction in terms of timing expectations as possible. But the ability to do logic to the ability to do math, the ability to pull stuff in are kind of the first areas that we're going to work in. So I think we're very much aligned with what people are asking for on that front. There was another one around notification of chats that come in after hours. So we are thinking about communication from how do we allow Service Titan to allow our customers to have conversations with customers across multiple channels? Right. So in order to do that, there's some infrastructure work that we want to do that's going to be consistent across all of them. So for example, how long does it take to respond to any given message, whether it's a text message or it's a. Maybe an email or it's a web chat. So I think that kind of functionality will be where we capture this. What we don't want to do is think about this as a one off that's just restricted to one channel. When in actuality you probably want this type of things on web bookings, for example, to know that you need to respond quickly. Right. So we're definitely going to be looking at solving that problem, but it's not something that we're going to do like as a hackathon project, because we think that the consequences of going down a particular path are very important to be thoughtful about. The other one was around emailing invoices after the tech completes the job.

Yes.

So this is one that we're going to be approaching from two different angles. One of them is to get. Give better visibility so that if there are instances where this doesn't happen, you could take some sort of a corrective action in the office. The one that they're really asking about is to be able to basically like check something on a job type or a technician so that it automatically sends it if it isn't there. From a feature perspective, it's actually one of those lightweight features. What we're going through right now is trying to make sure we understand all the potential unintended consequences of this happening. Because a lot of times companies are very sensitive to what gets sent out to the customer and they don't want anything to be automatic. So we just want to make sure that we don't rock the boat for those users that do not want this to be a disruptive change. Because anytime you send anything to the customer without a human doing something, it's a very risky area. So that's where we're going to be taking our time. But you should expect this to be in the product by the end of the year for sure. Hopefully sometime soon. The last two we actually have really good news about. One of them was One Click tech assignment that's actually going to be coming out in April. So look out for that release. And then the last one was we talked about updating the price on estimates that's also coming in the April release, along with the ability to sort the product estimates.

Awesome.

Cool.

I think that's going to wrap us up. We're kind of short on time here, so. Vihay, thank you so much. My pleasure has been awesome. Really appreciate your transparency with us and hopefully we can do this again sometime.

Yeah, absolutely.

Appreciate it.

Thanks.

Thanks so much.