Never Miss a Call: How ServiceTitan’s AI Voice Agent Keeps Your Business Moving | Podcast Ep. 100

A voice agent is going to sit within your IVR and be an extension of your CSR team. So it's not a bolt-on IVR or third-party answering service. It's an AI CSR that's going to sit inside your ServiceTitan tenant. It's going to read your real capacity. It can actually book the job. There are so many things that the voice agent can do outside of just answering the phone that helps you guys 24/7.

Welcome to Mastering ServiceTitan, where you get expert advice from Power Hello, ServiceTitan user. I'm your host, Josh Lew, and today I'm joined by Lindsay Gortz, the Senior Account Executive for Virtual Agent here at ServiceTitan. Lindsay, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much. I'm happy to be here.

I just wanted to share your background a little bit in the telecom space. You are such an expert here, and I just want people to know all the expertise that you bring. So how did you get into telecom and what's your background that brought you here to ServiceTitan?

I stumbled into telecom probably like 7, 8 years ago now. It was kind of a fluke where I saw this opportunity to flex my engineering skills a little bit from a previous marketing company I was at. And I moved to a company called TalkDesk, which is a CCaaS system. A lot of our customers use it and loved working there. Got to work in all different sectors in finance, in healthcare, in retail, in banking, all kinds of stuff. But I worked with a lot of service setting customers and they were some of my favorites to work with because they were always so kind. And there was an opening on the SE team here at ServiceTitan to help launch Contact Center Pro. So this brand new platform that we were building, I had no knowledge of it and I had to pitch it as part of the interview and I got like basic access to it. It was so fun to be a part of a product that was like so new in its infancy and like see it from the ground up. And so I came over to ServiceTitan and I helped launched that product, was the first SE to start getting that in customers' hands and really finding the right fit. And naturally voice agents came into play. We started building voice agents within Contact Center Pro first, and it was a natural, kind of a natural swing to where I could best flex and use my skills from a telecom perspective. Voice agents, you know, sit so tightly within an IVR and within a customer's contact center. That having both of those skills and knowing the best way to, to have it flow within your IVR was really crucial. And so a couple people at, at ServiceSight approached me and they were like, would you want to do this? And I said, of course. So I started working on the voice agents team really in like late December. I'd already been working with the product for years, but late December we were thinking about launching this voice agents, more of like an architect role. How do we help our customers optimize it, use it, onboard it, get them support?. And so now we've slowly started to bring on other team members underneath me and it's been so fun and we're like so smart and agile and love meeting with customers and it's techie and it's engineering, but it's also customer facing and it's, it's like the best of both worlds. I couldn't ask for a better role.

I think, uh, I've said this a few times and probably once when we're on a webinar, I don't think I've seen a product at ServiceTitan evolve so quickly cuz end of December to now it's like completely changed, I think. And for people who don't know what voice agents are, we did an episode with Henry Chang a few episodes back, which may be outdated at this point given how much is new. But can you give a quick background on what voice agents are in case people don't know?

Absolutely. A voice agent is going to sit within, within your IVR and be an extension of your CSR team. So it's not a bolt-on IVR or third-party answering service. It's an AI CSR that's going to sit inside your ServiceTitan tenant. It's going to read your real capacity. It can actually book the job. It can answer FAQ questions, answer questions about your memberships, confirm, reschedule, take payment. There are so many things that the voice agent can do outside of just answering the phone that helps you guys 24/7. And this, this CSR is never sick. They don't ever take vacation days, of course, right? It's truly just an extension of your team when you need it. Back to your point a second ago, we are releasing stuff so quickly, directly based on customer feedback. So a lot of times customers that I work with will be like, Lindsay, it'd be so cool if we could do this. I get to take that to engineering and they're like, you're right, we can have that in 2 weeks. And I'm like, what? So it's, it's such a cool space to be in. And again, it's, it's an opportunity to uncover things in phone calls that are, that we may have missed otherwise if we send them to a third-party answering service or we just route a customer to voicemail. This gives us the opportunity to, to capture every single dollar of revenue that comes through the contact center.

Amazing. You talk to so many customers. If you could sum up the feedback, like, what do you think? How do people think about the value of voice agents for their business, you know, across the board?

Yeah, I think from a value perspective, it's huge. I mean, I have some customers that have it in front of their CSRs as a whole, right? So it doesn't even touch the CSRs unless the customer needs more support. I have accounts that have booked 500+ jobs in the last 30 days alone. I have one account additionally that has hit, that handled 7,000 calls during an extreme weather event, this, this heat wave that we had in a single weekend. And that would have just completely overwhelmed their CSRs. So the ability to just turn that thing on or flip the switch when you need the help is instrumental. Knowing it's baked within ServiceSight and it knows the job types you want it to book, it knows your dispatch fees, it knows the messaging you want it to read to a customer after a job is booked and you don't even have to worry about it is, is, is massive.

That is insane. 7,000 calls. Oh my gosh. And I also, if I remember correctly, Henry was also saying it's a great one where you can kind of throttle it on as well. Like maybe some people would start for just after hours or weekends.

Exactly. It allows you to grow and scale as fast as you need it to. So a lot of times when I meet with customers, they have this idea of, of where it could best fit. And most of the time it's overflow to start. You know, my CSR during the summer, we're so overwhelmed. I don't have the capacity to bring on a new CSR and train them in time to where it would really be of help. So I want to use this, this VA for overall help. Ask, can you spin it up? And most of the time I tell them 30 minutes. Give me 30 minutes with you and I will have it turned on to at least start taking your like high-impact jobs, the no cools, the no heats, etc. And so the value is just, is huge.

I've heard this a lot and it's super impressive, the 30 minutes. Like give me 30 minutes and we can have this thing on taking calls for you. Can you paint a picture of what happens in those 30 minutes so people don't feel as intimidated?

Yeah, it's one of my most favorite pieces of my job is getting somebody set up. And the first part that I walk them through is giving their voice agent a personality. It is truly supposed to be an extension of their CSR team. So we think about a name and I try to make it really fun, right? Like what? Make a poll between your CSRs, pick 3 and let them vote. Get them involved in the process so that they know it is truly an extension of what they are already doing and is there to support them. So from there, we start building out things like what questions are super impactful for us to ask your customers so that when the technician goes on site, they know what they need to bring, they know what they're about to go work on, etc. And then we start to do things like what are your daytime dispatch fees versus what are your after-hours dispatch fees? Because we get to set all that within the VA so that she will read that seamlessly no matter if it's you know, 12 noon or if it's 12 a.m. and the voice agent's booking the job. So the majority of it is truly just setting up the voice agent to read the parameters within your tenant accurately. And then the last part is me saying, okay, let's get into your phone system and put this thing in there. And that's also my favorite part because I'm a telecom nerd.

So, and I bet it's really exciting the first call that the VA starts to take. And then what does adjusting it look like from there?

So typically what we do on my team is we will meet with you week over week, whatever cadence you are most comfortable with. I tend to meet with my customers every single week. We do a check-in, we look at calls that went unbooked, right? So the voice agent took these calls, but she wasn't able to convert 20 of them. So I literally will run an analysis on those 20 unbooked calls and start to look at the things that we could capture that maybe we're not capturing. I think the important thing to understand is the way that we verbalize things internally as ServiceTitan people. Is different than what a customer will say when they call in. So we need the voice agent to be able to interpret what our customers are saying and then say, oh, in ServiceSight, that actually means X, right? So I, on my end, start to look through those calls and see what needs to be captured or what we have not captured by design. So you get to choose what jobs the voice agent is actually able to book. So installs, for example, if you don't want her to book those, that's completely fine. She's going to do all the intake for you, validate the customer, answer questions that the customer might have, and then she will seamlessly escalate that to the appropriate party to finish the booking from there. So the customer still feels like they're taken care of, etc., but a live team member is going to book those calls. And so when calls come through the voice agent and that shows as unbooked, I like to point that out to a customer that says, you know, we could book this. We don't, we don't have it turned on right now to book, which is why she didn't book it and it's flagged as unbooked, right? So those are the things that I start to go through with the customer, and it's just fine-tuning again based on the way that their customers are explaining things and the way that the customers are bringing these issues to the voice agent, right? So my goal after that first call is to optimize, optimize, optimize, optimize, and be that expert in their pocket that they can just text, call, email, hey, this weird thing happened on a call, can you take a look at that? So that they don't even have to worry about it. They know that ServiceTitan has their back and, and We'll tweak it as we go.

Got it. So that's where they can go from just dipping their toe in with Overflow and then all of a sudden one weekend they have 7,000 calls and the voice agent's handling most of them.

Exactly. Yeah. And a lot of times, you know, what we'll do is we'll— that's kind of where our testing will start is we'll start from an Overflow perspective, get their customers comfortable with using AI, really start to like triage how their customers are feeling speaking to an AI bot. You know, a lot of times when we launch a bot, the verbiage will be like, you're about to speak to a virtual assistant. I have seen that our customers really benefit when we change words from like virtual assistant to virtual concierge and like make it a little bit softer of a greeting. So I start to go in and I listen to those little pieces of the calls and I fine-tune those as we go. And it's the, it's, it's so fun.

Wow. That's such a cool, uh, little hint that you gave there.

Yeah. How people can little things that I know from experience that work really well. And if you, if you think about all of the times that, you know, we've gotten caught in an endless loop in our calls with like Comcast, et cetera, those are the things that I upfront wanna like take out of our customer's experience completely and make sure that they don't even, even, you know, see that from that perspective. Customer relations are like, like part of my passion and making sure that they're my customer's customers feel like they're just talking to Sam, another one of the CSRs that works the shop. Wow.

I know there's so much to get to in terms of new features, but I did want to cover just on the core voice agent, virtual, virtual agent side. Are there any common fears or misconceptions that you just hear all the time that you wish people would just be like, okay, that actually, it may seem that way, but the truth isn't, isn't that scary?

I think the biggest one is, is probably the fear of switching from ACP to Adaptive Capacity. That is a prerequisite from the voice agent's perspective so that she can reach your raw capacity and know exactly where she or he is able to book versus where you don't want her to book. Now we have a ton of redundancies in place to help you do that, that I think sometimes customers just might not know about yet. So typically if a customer comes to me and they're like, I really want to use voice agents, I don't have AdCap set up, I don't know where to go, we have put together an entire tiger team of AdCap experts. Experts that will meet with these customers one-on-one. They tell me, Lindsay, yes, I want to use this, I need help with AdCap. I get them set up in the— hopefully the same day, hopefully the same week to meet with this team. They take care of getting that set up for them. And it does not have to be all of these complex rules and, and things like that. AdCap just gives us the ability to say, hey, Mr. or Mrs. Voice Agent, I want you to book a little extra in this, this job type. I want you to not allow bookings in this job type. And it allows us to really grow and scale from a voice agent perspective. But that's typically a fear that I hear a lot. And it's truly just because it's, it's new to the customer, right? We have this fear of change and we have this fear of having to start from zero. But we have a whole team of experts that are willing to meet with you and help you. And so that's probably the fear I hear the most. The rest of it is very simple, plug and play. We have templates and resources and team members that are just dying to meet with you.

And then how about the fear? Do you ever hear people say like, oh, I'm not sure if my customers are going to be okay talking to quote unquote a robot or whatever?

Yeah.

Yeah. What are your thoughts on that? Like, are we way past that now? Or?

Yeah. Yes and no. I think it definitely depends on the market that you're in. And that's where the expertise of this voice agents architects team really comes into play because there are things that we can do to make that greeting or that bridge softer. One of the new prompts that came out, it's actually called the Lindsay prompt. Is so human-like that a lot of customers that are talking to it right now do not even realize that it is a voice agent unless we disclose it upfront, right? That, hey, you're about to speak to AI, but they— she is— she has these natural ums and uhs and pauses that most of the time the customer does not even realize that they're actually talking to AI. So I think for the most part, while we have gotten past that, there are definitely things within smaller markets that we can do to help your customers feel a lot, um, a lot more comfortable with it. And most of the time in conversations, I will say like reference the name of your bot, right? You're about to speak to Josh, our virtual concierge, rather than you're about to speak to a concierge, right? Make this person part of your team. There's one of our customers who even has a profile on their page about their voice agent, and they've named her and they give her a picture. So the more that you can make your customers feel more comfortable talking to it, the better the experience will be. And that's part of my team's process is looking at these calls and evaluating every single call and how their customers feel about it and making sure that we make these small changes to continue to enhance that over time.

I heard there was one, I think it's Reading Heating and Air. I think they have it say like, press 1 if you'd like to speak to our like virtual. Yeah. Can you share maybe a few more examples of those creative bridges or, or how different people in different markets deal with that?

Totally. So absolutely, Reading definitely does that where they have it in their IVR, press 1 to speak to our virtual concierge. There are other things that I do when customers are just getting started and they might be a little bit nervous to put this in their IVR is when they are in their peak busy, busy daytime, right? It's like noon, CSRs are off to lunch. Instead of saying press 1 to our virtual, to speak to our virtual concierge, I recommend saying something like, for faster booking, press 1, and then it naturally flows into that call. I think when we give our customers the option, and it's totally fine to do that, it is absolutely— we have many customers who are giving their customers an option. But when we give them the option to not go through the BA, they are seemingly, without even talking to it, making their assumption that they don't want to speak to AI, right? So when we flow our customers through the bot, press 1 for faster booking. Cool. I am, I'm on my lunch break. I just need to book this job really quick. I call in, I get the VA. At any point, if I need to speak to a live human, all I gotta say is, get me a human, right? Or if the customer senses that I'm frustrated, it's gonna automatically escalate me back to a live CSR. So it's not like if we funnel these customers into the, the voice agent that they're, they're there forever and they can't escape and get back to a live human. We can absolutely still do that. I even have some customers who are gonna just start with payments. Press 2 to pay your bill, right? And then all of those calls go to the voice agent and she goes ahead and she sends them the payment link. And that takes that low-hanging fruit off of the CSRs so they can, they can focus on the revenue-generating activities. And we're taking that low-hanging fruit and routing all of that through the voice agent. I have customers that do that with confirmations. I have customers that do that with reschedules because the voice agent can do all of that for them.

It's a perfect segue. I know we can talk ideas and best practices for probably hours, but yeah, let's get to some of these new features you mentioned. Taking payments, rescheduling. This might be the first time people are ever hearing about those. Where should we start with the new updates with virtual agents?

Yeah, from a skills perspective, a lot of these enhancements are directly related to feedback that we get from customers who are using it. So I encourage you, if you are using the voice agent and you're listening to this podcast, reach out to your voice agent architect and give them your ideas, right? We want to know what you guys want from this voice agent and the capabilities. Because service site customers are the only ones using this, this voice agent. So from a new skills and capabilities perspective, we have so much that has come out probably since this last podcast with Henry. The ability to confirm and reschedule is huge. Those are separated now. So you could confirm appointments, but if you don't want the voice agent to reschedule them, no problem. Let's keep that off and it's going to go ahead and escalate either to a dispatcher or to a CSR to handle the reschedule from there. We can apply a standby tag or a waitlist tag on that customer who actually wants a sooner appointment, but maybe you don't have something available right away. Let's capture the booking and the voice agent's going to reassure them that, hey, we've placed you on this waitlist. The second a customer cancels and we can move you up, one of our team members is going to reach out to you and then we can move them up on the schedule. So it seamlessly applies this tag to the booking to let the internal staff know this person would like a sooner appointment if we can fit them in. Right? So that's a really cool one. We can also cancel appointments now. And there was a lot of talk earlier about, hey, we might not want the voice agent to do this. But again, it goes back to that low-hanging fruit that we might want to take off of our CSR. So the options are, before we just cancel the appointment, why don't we offer the reschedule first? Right? So the bot's going to go ahead and say, no problem. Can I offer you a reschedule before we go ahead and take you off the schedule? And if that doesn't work, then we can also offer to waive the dispatch fee or a percentage of the dispatch fee to keep that retention within the voice agent. And then if all else fails, the voice agent can go ahead and cancel that appointment for that customer. But we're gonna try to triage that call just like a normal CSR would before we have to even get somebody else involved, which is really cool. This next one is super cool when it comes to booking after hours, right? We have this voice agent, it's gonna answer calls for you after hours. But if it's an emergency job and it's an on-call technician, there's no point of you having to have a CSR or dispatcher on call to also then go dispatch the job on the board after hours. So now what will happen is if a customer calls in after hours and books an emergency or an on-call job, it's going to go ahead and book the job and the voice agent is going to go ahead and call that technician that's on schedule and say, hey Bob, a job has been booked, here are the details. And then 60 seconds later, it's going to fire off a text message to that same technician so that they are in the know that a job has been booked after hours without having to have a dispatcher or a CSR on call sitting there at 10:00 PM waiting for those, those calls to come through. So there's more control, but also that, that proactive notification to the technician, and it's going to assign it to the technician automatically as well without the need of DispatchPro. So for our customers who are not using DispatchPro, but are leveraging that voice agent, I highly encourage you to look into that on-call tech assignment because it's going to proactively alert the tech. As well as those jobs get booked after hours.

Amazing. Are all the features we just mentioned available now in Virtual Agents?

They are available now and ready to go.

Okay, awesome. Do they just go in settings somewhere and then toggle these on?

Yep, in settings. And under the ones we've been talking about under skills and capabilities, I also think we can somehow flash my contact information after this so that they can reach out to me if they need help. But under skills and capabilities, they will see these new enhancements. And the last one that has been super helpful for a lot of my customers who are using task management within ServiceTitan is allowing the voice agent to create tasks based on your task types and task management. So it's going to go ahead and create a task when a caller leaves a message or a follow-up is needed because the voice agent wasn't able to book the job. That way that person already goes in and knows that, hey, I've got a task, I need to go follow up with this customer. So for those customers who are using task management, I also highly encourage you to look into that and see if the voice agent can help take some of that off your plate as well.

It is insane how much more the voice agent can do.

I feel like multiple jobs on one call now. I mean, we could be here for hours just talking about the new enhancements. The ones I just covered are the top ones I'm bringing to my customers. There's also a new prompt I encourage everybody to go listen to under Persona. It's called Lindsay, and she is very human-like, very lifelike. Our customers are giving immense amount of feedback because of how real she sounds. So most of my customers that I work with daily have switched over to this new voice, but there are also male voices in there now. We have more languages coming, so lots more coming down the pipeline as well.

That is incredible. I know this summer, especially all over the US, there's like some crazy heat waves hitting in different places. Are there any— is there anything you're hearing from customers about different tricks or, or tactics that they're doing, especially in the summertime?

Yeah, so this kind of goes back to the, the ad cap component, right? So I think a lot of our customers see it as a, as a fear right now, or this giant prerequisite that I have to have completed before I start leveraging the voice agent. A lot of my customers are, most of the time, are like getting onboarded with AdCap as we're kind of getting onboarded with BA as well. But the two work hand in hand really well together. And what the AdCap tool will allow you to do during those heat waves is say, I want to overbook by 50%, because I know that we can actually take into those bookings, take that into account and actually put that on the schedule and allow the voice agent to actually overbook a little bit. In that, in that capacity or in that job site during this super, super busy heat wave. And then once that heat wave is over, we just take it back down to a normal booking percentage. Because as more calls come through, as this heat wave comes through, that's gonna drastically overwhelm the CSRs as well, like these human CSRs. So it's allowing the voice agent to still take those calls and book more jobs and create more revenue for, for the shop just by leveraging ATCAT, right? And just by touching that percentage.

Got it. That's, that's incredible. I know another misconception, maybe this was more around Pantheon and, you know, we had new pro product coming out. Some people think Voice Agent or Virtual Agent is a pro product. Can you share a little bit more about like where this sits, pricing, all of that?

Absolutely. I think that probably comes into play because when we first launched Voice Agents, it was for Contact Center Pro only. And then we had so many customers be like, I want it now. So we built it as a standalone. So if you ever hear us reference VA for All, that means I have Five9, I have 8x8, I have a Phones Pro account, right? I don't have Contact Center Pro. This will work with any telecom system that allows you to forward a call, right? So it can work with Verizon. I've worked with T-Mobile. I have worked with the small mom-and-pop shops locally within the region of our customers. So it'll, it'll truly work with any telecom provider that allows you to forward a call. Now, there are some things that we'll want to look for, like Will it allow me to route during certain business hours?

Right?

That really helps. But I even have some customers that just simply forward the call at the end of the night to the voice agent, and then when they come in the morning, they take it off. Any phone system, it's not a pro product. There's no prerequisites. There's no add-ons that you have to, to get when you use the voice agent. And when it comes to billing, it's really easy. It's just per call. It's not per minute. It's not, it's not anything complicated like that. It's truly just per call.

Her call and there's no contract. Like I know with Pro Products, some of them you have a contract and things like that.

So yeah, there's no, no contract needed. Typically it's pay as you go. If you know you're gonna have a certain amount of calls every month, for example, we, we can do what's called a commit, right? Where we commit you to a certain amount of calls and it brings down the price a little bit. But for the most part, it's, it's pay as you go and it's as you need it. Then my job from there is making sure that we, we capture every call that comes through and we keep optimizing from there, which eventually allows you to use the voice agent even more and even more scenarios that we weren't even looking at before when we originally started.

Awesome. Is there anything else that we didn't cover that you wish we could cover or that you wish people knew more about when it comes to virtual agents?

I think meeting with somebody and even at ServiceSight and meeting with somebody at ServiceSight and just asking the questions and getting a demo of it or saying like, hey, I want to meet with Lindsay for 30 minutes and see if this is the right fit. There is no harm, no foul. This is only going to add value to not only your contact center, but your business as a whole. We want feedback. We want all the goods, the bads, and all of that to continue making this product the best product at ServiceSight. And I will selfishly say, so the more people, the better. And I'd be more than happy to meet with anybody that needs it.

Awesome. So is there any way that people can reach out to you or the team if they want to get a demo, get their questions answered?

Absolutely. We can put a link in the description so anybody can reach out at any time. There's a full team of people who would love to meet with you.

Awesome. And it's crazy that I hear you always say, reach out to me, talk to me, here's my email, because on every webinar I think you say that. And I'm like, how, how does she handle her email inbox?

I am just, I am truly so passionate about this product and about telecom as a whole and giving our customers, customers the best experience. I will meet with anybody at any time that is willing to listen to me talk about it.

Amazing. Thank you, Lindsay, so much for coming on the show and sharing all the new updates with Virtual Agent. I'm sure we'll have you back on at some point. This feature and this product is evolving so quickly. So thank you for giving us—

Awesome. Coming for Pantheon as well.

So amazing. Thanks all for listening and we'll catch you on the next episode.