How To Use Chat Templates In ServiceTitan!

What's going on, everybody? It's Richard Coburger here, the blue collar nerd. And in this video, I'm going to be showing you how you can save your CSRs a ton of time and make them way more efficient through the use of texting templates. Now, we all know that texting and chat is becoming a more and more popular way for a company to communicate with its client every day. And that's great because it's really low friction for clients and it opens up more avenues for clients to book with a company. But there is a downside, which is that typing is a less efficient way of communicating than talking. And it's especially inefficient to be typing the same few things over and over again every single day. Now, the method I'm going to show you today will work within Servicetitan chats, but it will also work anywhere that you type. So you can use the same templates in your Service Titan chats that you use in your emails, or if you use something like angie's List or HomeAdvisor or that one that rhymes with help that we don't like to talk about, but it's there any place that you communicate with clients, you can use these exact same templates. Now, if you've been following me for a while, then you have some familiarity with this concept already, because I made a video maybe a year ago, maybe even a little bit more at this point, showing how technicians can be quicker and more efficient at filling out invoice summaries using a concept called text expansion. And if you've not seen that video yet, check it out. I'll put a link in the corner of the screen here as well as in the description down below. But we'll. But what I'm going to be showing you today is that on steroids, it's way more powerful. Now, at the time of me recording this video, service Titan does not have native chat templates, meaning it's not something that's built into Servicetitan. And I am recording this video in early September of 2020. I point that out because ServiceTitan may very well build this into the program later on. Wouldn't surprise me at all. But for now, there is a really cool program that will achieve this for you. So let me take you to my screen here. This is a program called Text Expander. Now, the basic concept here is that you have short codes and when you type out those shortcodes, they expand out into whatever you want. So in this example here, I have the value Build portion of my call script. So in this main paragraph area here is where you type out what you want the full expanded text to be. Label is just a name for your own reference. So that when you have a ton of these, you know which is which and abbreviation, that's your shortcode. That when you type that abbreviation out, it will expand out into all of this. So I have my abbreviation here set as xvb. I always like to start my short codes out with an X. That way I know that I am starting out a short code. It's a very clear way to start one. So I don't accidentally trigger one when I'm just trying to type out a regular sentence. So an X, a pound, a slash. You want to use something at the beginning to start so that you don't accidentally trigger these things. So let me show you what happens now when I type that. So X VB and then boom, that expands out into that paragraph. Now right now you see I have like blanks in here. It says great. So I have you scheduled for blank. Between blank and blank. You should receive a text message and email confirmation shortly. Let me share with you what you can expect on the day of your appointment. We will be sending blank to your home in a clearly marked company vehicle. Blank is a highly qualified technician and receives excellent client ratings. You get the idea. You can pause the video here if you just want to kind of peep the script. So we could leave this alone and then have our CSRs come back in and manually fill in all these blanks. We but. And this is part of what makes textexpander so powerful. There is a better way. So back in the builder here on this toolbar at the top, you see, I have this fill ins option so I can make all of those blanks fill ins. Let me show you what that looks like. So I'm going to say a single line field and I'm going to name the field day. Between another single line field, I'll do window start and another single line field window end. Okay. And then we will be sending call this one tech name. And then the rest of these blanks down here, they're all the text name as well. So I'm going to name them the exact same thing. I'm going to name them tech name. Okay, so this is what we've got now. Let's go test it out. And I love this about textexpander. There's no save button or anything. It's just ready to go immediately. We'll delete all that previous Stuff and let's try it again. Xvb. So now we get this window and in this window I can fill in all the fields. So the day, let's say It's Monday between 8 and 10. I misspelled window in my second fill in there, but I'll fix that later. Now here's where it gets really cool. So the rest of these fields are all tech name, right? So let's say my text name is Dave. You notice it fills in everywhere that that tech name field is, so I don't have to type it in over and over. Then I hit okay and boom, there it is. So there is great value in that, right? Because you can make it very personalized without making it too manual. So your text messages won't sound overly robotic when you're having a conversation. But for all the default scripted stuff, you're not having to retype it every single time. Nor are you having to like go into a sticky note somewhere and copy and paste it. None of that. You just know the code. Now maybe for the first like week or so, a CSR might have textexpander open so that they can remind themselves what the codes are. But once you've been using it for a little while, you remember the codes and it just becomes second nature. So let me show you another thing that makes textexpander powerful. So let's say you wanted to make a snippet. That's what these are called, they're snippets. Let's say you wanted to build a snippet that you send to commercial clients after the job is done, just to thank them for their business and also remind them that their invoice is due in 90 days. So here's what we can do. Let's say thank you for your business. We'll do a fill in client name and then please note that your full invoice payment is due by. And then we can actually do date math within textexpander. I can come up to this calculator here and go add days. I'm going to add 90 days. Hit. Okay. And then I can come up to this calendar icon and put the day of the week, comma space, the month comma space, the day number, comma space and the year. Okay, now if I've done this correctly, what should happen is it should automatically add 90 days to today's date, which is Tuesday, September 8, 2020. So let's test it out. My abbreviation here is XDU due so X D U E. I have to fill in my client Name? We'll call her Sarah. Okay, so thank you for your business, Sarah. Please note that your full invoice payment is due by Monday, December 7, 2020, and that is 90 days from today. Now, I noticed that there's no space here and there should be. So I can just go back, put in that space, retest it to make sure I'm happy, and there we go. That looks perfect. So that's the basics of it. Textexpander is really great. I use it a ton. Just personally. You can actually go on the textexpender website and download like pre made packs of snippets. And one of them is like an autocorrect pack. So it just takes commonly misspelled words and fixes them for you automatically. And that is great for me because I'm terrible at spelling. For example, two words that I have to type all the time but can't spell for the life of me. Technician and maintenance. So watch as I attempt to spell it. Technician. Oh, that was wrong, but it fixed it for me. Let's do maintenance. Wrong, but it fixed it for me. Learning I have technology. Thanks. It can also do things like change the position of the cursor at the end of a snippet. So like I have one that when I type an open parenthesis, it automatically types a close parenthesis and then puts the cursor in the middle of the parentheses so that I'm typing in the center. Little things like that. I mean there's tons of poss. I have another pack for brand names, so like it'll always capitalize brand names correctly. And if it has like an accent letter, it'll put that in there for me. So for example, if I type like Pokemon, it puts that accent over the E for me. So textexpander does have a cost associated with it. If you're going to use it in your company, I would recommend this team package because it says right up here perfect for companies. With that package you can make it so that anybody with your company email can automatically create an account. You can, you get an admin panel where you can create permissions and give people certain roles. And most importantly, you get a central place where you can build snippets that you then distribute out to your entire team. So that way you as a manager or administrator can make all of the snippets push them out to everybody. And then if and when there needs to be some updates made, you can update them centrally and give them out to everybody and they'll just have them so this team package is $7.96 per user per month if you were billing annually, or $9.95 if you're paying month to month. Now, if you're not willing to swing that, there are free alternatives. For example, I know that there is a chrome extension called Autotextexpander 2, I believe, but that's gonna be much more basic. You're not gonna get those fill in fields, you're not gonna get any calculations, and you're not gonna get a central place to create and update snippets. So everybody has to have them made individually and you have to update them individually. So if you have a smaller team, that will work, but it's not very scalable. If you are interested in signing up for textexpander, I do have a link in the description down below where you can sign up and that is an affiliate link. So if you sign up using that link, they will kick me a few bucks. I want to point out that if you're watching this video, you're watching it on the Blue Collar Nerd channel, not the Service Titan channel. So I am not speaking on behalf of Service Titan right now. Nobody's paying me to make this video. This is just a personal recommendation from your boy and textexpander is a program that I am happy to recommend. Anyways, that's all I got for today. Thank you so much for watching. Be sure to hit that like button. If you liked this video and found it valuable, subscribe. Subscribe to my YouTube channel. If you haven't done that already, leave me a comment down below. I'd love to hear from you guys and I will catch you in the next one. Appreciate it.