BIG Changes Happening In Support & Success | Conversation W/ Co-Founder Vahe Kuzoyan

What's going on, everybody? I'm here in Glendale, California with Vaho Kazoyan. Vaho, what is it that you do here? What's your title?

Co founder. Cool.

Yeah. Yeah, man, me too. What's that? He's the president.

Son of a.

What's going on, everybody? It's Richard Kohberger here, the blue collar nerd. I'm here in Glendale, California with Service Titan president and co founder Vahe Kazoyan. Vahe, what's going on?

Not much, just hanging out in Glendale.

So I'm out here, Vahe, because I'm told that there are some changes happening in the success and support area of Servicetitan and I'm involved in the front lines a lot. I'm on Servicetitan Community, I'm on Servicetitan Masterminds, the Facebook group. And I see a lot of the complaints and the pain points that customers are bringing to us. And this is one area where I see it come up a lot. People have a lot of concerns. They don't super feel like our support is up to par. So I see a lot of complaints about the time that it takes to get in touch with a support agent. I see a lot of complaints about the time that it takes to hear back from their csm. They'll say it takes a week, sometimes a week and a half, two weeks, whatever, an unacceptably long amount of time to hear back from their csm. And I'll also hear that, that sometimes they contact somebody, they contact support or they contact their csm, but that they're not able to get their issue resolved right then and there. And so then there's a big long lead up time before their issue actually gets resolved and they're just waiting for their ticket to have some movement. So this is a big issue. It comes up a lot. So what, what is in the works, what's being done about it and how did we get in the position that we're in in the first place? Like why is this an issue that we have?

So it's a great question. I think in order to understand what we're doing, why we're doing it, it's probably good to maybe talk about the last part that you said, which is how we got here in the first place. If you just look at kind of the story of Service Titan and when we launched about 10 years ago now at that point, which we called the Will Smith years here at Service Titan, which was just the two of us, it was just me and Ara at that point. There was A relatively small number of customers. And then as we then grew from two people to today we're around 2,300 people and serving over 10,000 customers. The analogy that's maybe a little bit overused these days, but that was very, we'll call it accurate for us, was it was kind of like building an airplane on the way down. And so when you have to do that, you end up making decisions in the moment that may not always be the best long term structurally and such. And so now that we're fortunate enough to be not careening full speed towards the ground and have a chance to kind of catch our breath and say, okay, now that we're at the scale and we look forward in terms of where we're going, what would be the way in which we would do it? If we were designing kind of from a blank slate perspective, there's some meaningful changes that start to emerge. And so over the course of the next several months and probably year plus, we're going to be rolling out a lot of these kind of steps, incremental progress in terms of how we're organized internally and how our customers will experience servicetitan from a support perspective, from a success perspective. And so that's kind of what we're here to talk about today is what that first step of changes look like and then give you a glimpse in terms of likely where we're going to end up over the course of the next year, we'll call it, as we go through what we're calling broadly as our customer journey transformation.

All right, so I guess let's start with, on the support side of things, what's going to help there? What's going to help people get in touch with support faster? What's going to help people get their immediate issue resolved the first time that they contact somebody?

Yeah, great question. Part of the challenge that we have with support, especially over the last few years, it's just been more of a supply and demand issue. On the supply side, in terms of having agents, we were understaffed. And so that's why in 2022 alone, and we're not even done yet, we've hired 100 headcount to the support team in order to have a greater supply of agents. So that's been one part of the equation. The other part of the equation has really been on the demand side. Or in other words, what causes the need to go to support in the first place. And for that, the most important issues are, are the ones that have to do with availability and uptime Outages and such that create a huge surge in support, cause all sorts of problems for our customers. So the good news is things are getting better. They're getting better year over year, they're getting better quarter over quarter. And so that is helping stabilize and reduce the amount of support burden we create and obviously has a big benefit to the rest of our customers. The next kind of category of things are things like bugs and quality defects. And so those are also improving in terms of how many of those we generate over any given period. So that's, let's say, the tier one of demand that we're trying to reduce. The next set is the really big nasty problems that you get primarily from things like accounting and reporting. Both of those areas have been getting a lot of attention from the R and D Org. Lots and lots of changes going out there and they're going to continue to roll out, particularly on the accounting side. We've got some big changes that we're going to be rolling out over what the nature of the integrations look like, how much stuff you'll be able to do within service titan. That should also dramatically reduce the amount of demand. And so what we've seen is if you look at how long it takes for a support agent then to make that first contact with a customer, whether it's phone or email, about a year ago we were averaging about 10 minutes, and that's the average. So you have at least half the people having a higher number than that. The great news is we made a ton of progress there. So October, for example, our average was one minute for Q3. In aggregate, it was about one and a half minutes. Our target is to be under three minutes. So that part is actually looking really great. That's been where our primary focus has been over the next several quarters. Our focus is shifting now to driving progress around first call resolution.

So.

So that making sure that not only do we answer the call or answer the chat quickly, but we're actually to do that in a way and resolve that issue on that first call without having to bring in other folks on the call or have other people call back. That's something that we'll be driving towards over the next several months. But that's the story for support.

So I mean, basically what I'm hearing is that we're increasing the supply that we have for support by hiring more agents, training more agents, while at the same time reducing the demand for support by making improvements in the product, making it more stable, making it more user friendly and just reducing the need that People have to go to support with problems in the first place, right?

That's right.

And also putting an emphasis on getting the issue resolved the first time that they get in touch with a support agent so that we don't have to then, okay, great, I got in touch with a support agent. My problem's still not solved. Having to wait around for that to move through the system.

Exactly, exactly.

How about on the success side? So success meaning CSMs, like a lot of people have issues right now with getting in touch with their csm. They say it takes a really long time to hear back. What are we doing about that?

Yeah. So let's first talk about why does success exist? What is the purpose of success? The way I think about it is success is there to guarantee that there's a minimum rate of progress in terms of the value that service site is delivering to its customers. So what that really means is we track and measure what parts of service site you're using and what parts you're not using. And the success manager's role is to consistently check in, see whether or not you're getting the full value that you should be from ServiceTitan, and then identify the highest priority, highest opportunity areas for us to then be able to drive that much more value to you. So what I want to be able to see is here's where our customers are in terms of both collectively and within certain cohorts, in terms of how much of the product are they using, and I want to see a minimum rate of progress in that number, primarily a Titan score. As to how we measure the efficacy of our success team, one of the first things that we're doing is helping that team focus on getting more value out of the product versus turning on certain configs or answering any questions or basically anything that's more of a reactive need. You shouldn't need to go to your success team. Your success team is meant to be like a proactive outreach to you. If you have anything that you need from ServiceTitan, support should be able to handle that. So what does that mean? That means if you used to have to go to your success manager to turn on a tenant config, that's going away. Anything that your success manager could give you in terms of turning stuff on, support can do for you now.

Great.

That's really important because support is set up to react quickly. That's their whole purpose. The other big difference that we're doing is for our customers that are under 15 technicians, they're going to be shifting to a pooled success model versus a dedicated success manager. The reason why we're doing that is, first and foremost, if you look at the relationships that service titan has with our customers and just what the average tenure and length of that relationship is, it's in the decades, which is exactly where we want it to be. But if you look at the average tenure of a success manager, it's nowhere near in the term of decades, you know, and there's a variety of reasons for that. Primarily millennials. Millennials hate those guys.

We hate them.

That's one part of the reason is it turns out that a success manager's tenure is on the order of a few years. The problem that that creates is anytime you have to change your success manager, it becomes incredibly painful.

And.

And so we wanted to get rid of that problem. In order to do that, however, you need to then be able to carry the context of that relationship right from one touch point to the other. And so we're mid flight through making that change. Our first phase of that should be done somewhere in mid December where we have all of our customers that are 15 technicians or less be within that pooled model. Phase two will happen sometime towards the end of January. And we're not sure exactly where the cutoff is going to be, but somewhere between 20 to 25 technicians is what will then be the cutoff to then go into this pooled model. We want to see what the results are there, and then we'll figure out kind of the rest of the steps there. But for now, there are no plans to have the pooled model for accounts greater than 25 technicians, because they just have a level of complexity that requires more context to be carried over that we're not gonna focus on anytime soon.

So a few things I heard there. I heard that there's a separation between the role of the support team versus success. The CSMS one is proactive. Right? The CSMS should be a proactive role who reach out to you to help you better your utilization of Servicetitan and help you along your journey as you continue to implement ServiceTitan, even years in with new features coming out, whereas support is more reactive. I've got a problem right here in the moment. I've got a question. Something's come up. I can't get through my workday here and I need help today.

Yeah, Or I heard that there's this cool thing. How do I get on it? Great. Support can help you with that.

Great. So, yeah, that's a good point too, because in the past, a lot of the backend configurations, the gated features have been, some of them, support could turn on some of them, not some of you had to go to your success manager. So you're saying now if it's a gated feature, support will be able to turn that on for you.

So we're not at a point where it's 100%. We've got, I think it's somewhere in the 80, 90% of tenant configs our support team can handle. There's a few left, but eventually they'll be able to handle all of it.

Great. So the other thing I'm hearing is that we're moving a lot of accounts under a certain threshold of managed text, but we're moving a lot of accounts to a point pooled CSM model where you as a company now have multiple CSMs. Instead of just a you have a.

Success team, you have a success manager.

Okay. And am I understanding you correctly that the main benefit here is that now if one CSM were to leave for whatever reason, they don't take all that context of that relationship with them. Right. You still have a relationship with people at ServiceTitan who understand where you've been in, who understand what's happened in the past, and now somebody new comes in and they can kind of gain that knowledge. And you haven't lost all of that context just because somebody left.

Exactly. And by having the team construct, it allows us to more effectively specialize. So the types of things that you need as a contractor, when you're at one scale and one level of complexity and one part of your journey in terms of how much you're using, sometimes has a different kind of set of skill sets that you need from a success manager than when you're utilizing a big chunk of it. And you now are kind of trying to tweak on the edges.

Sure.

And so it allows us to better match which success manager is best situated to help you at whatever point you are in your journey. So it actually helps both from reducing the switching of CSMs if they get promoted or if they leave or something like that. And whenever you do have those interactions, you should expect a higher quality experience because they should be more specialized and better suited to meet you where you are.

Okay. So. But I know that a lot of customers, I see every angle. I see some customers who maybe are not so happy with their CSM or who like their CSM, but just have a lot of problems with these lead times. And then some customers, I see that like really love their csm. Right. And for Those customers, like, maybe this is not going to sound like such a good news, right. Because things are changing and they're happy with the way that it is. So is there any way that they can keep, like, how does that work for them?

Yeah, great question. So there's a lot of CSMs who have a whole lot of love from their customers, and that's a fantastic thing. And I'm a big fan of living in the world of and not or. So our plan is to allow you to basically opt in to have a preference for a success manager. And as long as they're in that role, and we'll do our best effort so that we match them as much as possible to be that person that you ultimately speak to. You know, it's kind of similar to when one of your customers calls and says, hey, I really love my tech. Can you send them out again? And you know, we have an option in Service 10 to set the preferred tech. It'll kind of work like that, right? If the tech is available, you'll send them out. Same idea with success manager. Now, obviously, if the CSM ends up getting promoted to a different role or something like that, that's not going to be possible. But the good news is you'll still be able to get that CSM if they're available and they'll have all this extra tooling now. So you should be able to get the best of both worlds in terms of better tooling. And if you really love your success manager, you'll be able to set them as a preference.

Okay, and is that more of a future state of something that we're working towards to be able to set a preference, or is that something available right away?

That's something that is a future preference. We don't have a date yet in terms of when we're going to be rolling that ability to have a preference yet. But we know it's going to be important, so we're going to be trying to get it out there as soon as we can.

How long before all of this actually gets implemented? Like, what's the rollout look like?

So we're mostly done with having support, being able to handle whatever success needs. There's a few tenant configs that are still left that they can't do, but if it's something that they can't do, they'll get. They'll handle the kind of handoff to success to have them handle it. So starting now, everyone should just call support for anything that they used to need to call their success manager. That's available today. In terms of the pooled model. Phase one will be for companies that have 15 technicians or less. That'll be mid December, when we'll be done shifting everyone over to the pooled model. Phase two is in end of January, and that's gonna target somewhere between 20 to 25 technicians as the cutoff for that second group. We're still finalizing exactly where to place it, based on looking at some of the complexities involved and how, frankly, the group is performing. And then we'll make that call closer into January.

And I also just wanted to call out. We are going to be touching base with everybody on this. We're going to be making videos kind of like this to just touch base every couple of months to say how things are going and just staying on track, keeping some accountability here. Because we all know that this is an important issue, and we just want to make sure that everybody knows that we're taking it seriously. Absolutely. Communicating with it. Great. Thanks so much, Vi.

All right. Thank you.

I appreciate it.