Pantheon 2024 Vlog & Recap

What's going on, everybody?

It's Richard Coburger here, the Blue Collar Nerd. And in this video we're gonna do something a little crazy, alright? A little, a little weird.

Something we haven't done on this channel.

In a very long time. We're gonna leave the studio. So way back in the olden days.

Of 2019, I attended my first Pantheon.

This is before I was a service tech employee. I went as a customer. And that year I recorded this like fun little vlog video. It was, you know, no big deal, just like recorded on my phone. It was before Blue Collar Nerd was really a major thing. It was just this little, you know, channel I had where I had posted like two or three videos at the time. And you know, I like doing those types of videos once in a while. But now that there's so much stuff happening and so many like education focused.

Videos to make, you know, I spend.

Most of my time working in the studio. So it's always kind of been in the back of my mind to like do another Pantheon vlog video. But you know, the first pantheon when I was hired on was a virtual Pantheon because that was during all the unpleasantness.

And then the next Pantheon after that.

You know, I had like a breakout session to worry about and I had a thing to do on the stage.

And then the Pantheon after that I was the mc.

I was hosting the thing. So that was taking up all of my time. But this year, this year your boy's not doing jackside from, you know, kissing hands and shaking babies. So I figured, you know what, this is the year to bring it back. This is the year we're gonna do another Pantheon vlog. So come along with me. We're on our way to Orlando. Trying to look at my underwear, you freak. So once I arrived in Orlando, my first stop was the Gaylord Palms Resort, which is where they had all of the Service Titan employees stationed up this time.

All right, we have arrived here in Orlando. I think this year they wanted to save as much space as possible in the Marriott where the, the convention center that petcound is actually happening at for customers and not service site employees like myself. So they've got us stationed out at the Gaylord, which is a pretty nice place. They've got this cool like atrium area, kind of like a indoor but feels like outside kind of space. Pretty cool. There's a. There's fish. They got fish they got in there is live gators. And you know, those are my two, those are my two needs when it comes to any lodging accommodations. I need fish and I need live gators. You don't have those, you're no good to me. One star.

One star.

Anyways, I need to go over to the Marriott. There's a bus. I need to get my badge and my shirts and all that stuff that employees are supposed to have. And then there's a welcome reception happening. And it only goes for, like, another hour and a half because I got here kind of late. So let me go. I'm going to change my shirt. We're going to do it. All right, I got my badge.

I went to the local FedEx here.

At the Marriott Center.

I had some stickers delivered that I'm going to give out to people that I meet while I'm here at Pantheon. If you ever. If you're ever at a Pantheon, I mean, obviously you're not. You're not going to hear this message in time for this Pantheon, but if you're ever at a Pantheon, don't be a stranger. You know, come up. I bring stuff to hand out. And I'm really just mainly here to meet people. So come see me.

Hi.

So once I had gathered all my necessary gatherables, I headed down to the welcome reception, which was great, a fun time. Got to hang out, meet everybody, have some food and drink, and it was here that I met Jen. And Jen handed me a very special gift. It was what appeared to be a Ziploc bag full of what I was afraid for a brief moment was real eggs that I would now have to deal with for the rest of the day. But luckily, no, my friend Jen would never do that to me. They were like silicone eggs, kind of like stress balls. You know, squeezy eggs. Which was very nice and very funny as a reference to a video that I've done in the past. If you know, you know. But anyways, after the welcome reception, I went ahead and took the bus headed back to the hotel I was staying at because I needed to get to sleep. I had an early morning ahead of me.

Okay, good morning. It's time for day one. Your boy's not a morning person. So when you tell me that breakfast ends. It ends at 8am ends. It's gonna be a struggle. A little bit of a struggle.

Focus.

Focus on my face. Oh, come on. There we go.

Like, it's not.

I'm not being dramatic. My body.

My body physically rejects it.

My stomach gets all, mmm. My stomach gets all, mmm. I get, like a histamine response. Like, I'm.

I might literally be Allergic to morning.

Honestly, it's caused me a lot of.

Struggle in my life because school obviously.

Started very early and then I worked.

At Nature AC Co. Where we had.

Like morning meetings and stuff. So, you know, I'm not, I'm not a stranger to 6am I just. We're not friends. But anyways, I am excited for day one, so let's head on over to.

The other hotel and see what's going on. So Ara kicked us off with our first keynote of the day. Now for those of you who either weren't at Pantheon or who were, but could just use a recap, going to kind of go over the highlights of what was announced here. It's not going to be everything that was talked about by any means, but it's just going to be the highlights in my opinion. So the first thing that Ara talked about was Contact Center Pro. So Contact Center Pro gives you a universal inbox that pulls in your leads across different sources like your phone calls, your SMS messages, your social media, your emails. All that is pulled into this one place. It also has enterprise grade phone reliability, so it's built on a, like a higher grade infrastructure than Phones Pro was, for example. It also had some cool automation features. For example, as the customer is sharing their information, like their name, their address, their email, et cetera, all of that information is automatically filled into the job booking form without the CSR needing to manually type it in. They don't have to touch the keyboard. And it also includes a virtual AI agent that can answer and book calls for you when it's after hours or if your CSRs are too busy. They did a really cool demo of it on stage. I'm kind of tempted to just show the whole demo, but it was a little bit long and I don't want to make this video too long, but it's really cool. It can handle some very complex situations. This product also allows for simpler contact center consolidation. For example, if you're a company with multiple locations or multiple brands even, you can now bring all of that into one place. One contact center, meaning one call center as well. And all of those leads will be together in one place for your call center to handle. Next, he talked about Sales Pro. So Sales Pro is a product that allows you to do virtual ride alongs. It's powered by Xero so so it runs on your technicians, devices, their iPads or their phones to record jobs while they're out in the field. The jobs are then transcribed and processed through an AI so you can quickly identify coaching opportunities and praise opportunities. It also gives you reporting so that you could quickly visualize things like the most common objections that you're facing. And there's also a shared company board where techs can share their own moments and do some peer to peer coaching as well. Now the biggest differentiator here versus other similar products, at least in my opinion, is that with Sales Pro, the recording is started as soon as the technician arrives on the job, meaning we don't need to rely on the technician to manually start the recording. So we're going to get higher utilization rates. Next, we talked about some dispatch related stuff including adaptive capacity planning. So adaptive capacity planning is the new version of adjustable capacity planning. And this is going to be available starting in early 2025. The newer adaptive capacity planning will be easier to set up. It should remove some of the gotchas that we have with the current adjustable capacity planning. For example, if you have technicians that work in multiple business units, that gets complicated, that causes a problem with the current acp. So it'll resolve those little things like that. And it also allows you to make conditional rules using if then statements so you can automatically adjust your capacity based on certain conditions. I'm pretty excited about this because personally I was never quite satisfied with adjustable capacity planning and I think a lot of other people agree with me as well because the utilization wasn't quite as high as I think it should be because capacity planning is very useful and this newer version is going to unlock so much potential in ways that we can utilize that going forward. For example, they talked about the possibility of someday in the future being able to automatically adjust marketing campaigns based on your available capacity or even adjusting your pricing out in the field based on how busy you are. Now those are just speculative, forward looking things, but I am very excited about the possibilities there. All right.

Day one of Pantheon has been a massive success. It is now. Now the end of the day.

I'm back at the hotel.

I got my, I got my 80s attire on. I guess I already had this shirt. This is the closest thing. It looks 80s, right? It at least looks like I'm trying. So now we're gonna head over to the House of Blues at Downtown Disney. They don't call it that. What's it called? Disney Springs. Disney Springs. Actually, I don't think they're doing it there this year. I think it might just be. I think it's. It's at the Marriott. I don't know. It's somewhere. I'm gonna get on a bus and I'm gonna. I'M gonna show up at a party. I don't know, things, things. Maybe I'm in a convention center, maybe.

I'm at the House of Blues.

I don't know.

I'm not a fortune teller.

There's an 80s themed party and they've, they've hired some talent that even internally they've kept very secret. So I don't, I actually don't know who it is. I'm not doing a bit. I, I, I also don't know. So, looking forward to figuring that out. But so far everything's been a lot of fun. Been meeting a lot of great people. I'm considering right now if I want to bring, I'm thinking filming right now on like a big, like a full camera, like a, you know, a camera, ass camera. I don't really want to carry this around like a, like a party scenario. So you might, you might have to settle for like phone footage. And I've got like a small action camera, but it won't look, it won't look quite as pretty. You know. I'll make a deal with you, okay? Like, as, as compensation, I will give you back 25% of the fee that you paid for this video. Okay? Deal? Deal. Great. Let's go to the.

So as you can see, the party was a ton of fun. The musical guests turned out to be Wilson Phillips, Boyz II Men, and Brett Michaels. Only downer was that there was another room that I never found, found until everybody had already cleared out and they were tearing it down and it had like a skating rink in it. Like it looked really cool. We were kind of bummed that we didn't find out about it until everybody had already left. But hey, you know, we still had a great time. And at this point it was time to get back to the hotel and get some sleep because I was in for another early morning the next day.

So that was very fun. Enjoyed hanging out with everybody, had a great time. But you know how I was tired yesterday and my body was, was rejecting the morning yesterday when there wasn't a party last night and I didn't stay up quite as late and I didn't have to get up a little extra.

Early to pack up the room before I left.

My tummy hurts so bad.

So this day was Vahe's day to deliver keynotes. Now I'm not going to be spending as much time on these keynotes, not because I have any vendetta against Vahe, it's just that as I got into it, I realized that trying to deliver a condensed version of these keynotes in a way that made sense was just not going to be possible. But he focused mainly on things that are coming down the pipeline for commercial companies, construction companies and enterprise sized companies. Suffice it to say, if you fall into one of those buckets of commercial, construction or enterprise, there is a lot coming down pipeline for you. Vahey also talked about Ti Assist and these are basically AI chatbots that are going to be within Servicetitan to help provide you with information and help you perform tasks. We're probably all familiar with these large language model chatbots like ChatGPT. By now it would be kind of like that, but specific to your Service Titan account. So Vahe did mention that the first TI Assist bot that we're probably going to see is going to be one called Job Assist, which is one that lives in the mobile app and is geared towards technicians. So technicians can use it to get information about the job or the location that they're working at and they can use it to help them perform tasks like generate proposals. Meaning basically your technicians won't necessarily have to be great at navigating the mobile app anymore because they can just use the Ti Assist bot to get the information that they need and get some basic tasks done. And Bahei also mentioned that these TI Assist bots are going to be propagating across other areas of the product as well to help people out on the office side. And he also mentioned a new ground up rebuild of the customer portal, which is going to offer a more robust experience, a lot more functionality than the current customer portal does. Anyways, after Pantheon ended I stayed in Orlando a few extra days. I met up with some friends, we went to Universal Studios which was awesome. We had a really great time. Anyways, that's all I got for today. Thank you so much for watching and I hope to see you at a future Pantheon. Appreciate it. Peace.

Sam.