Release # 71 | Release Notes Overview Fall 2024

What's going on everybody? It's Richard Kohberger here, the blue collar nerd. Well, release notes, time is upon us once again. I'm gonna need you guys to go a little bit easy on me this time because your boy is a little bit sick at the moment and you might be wondering, Richard, how could you get sick? Don't you spend most of your days all alone in a studio, just looking at a computer and occasionally speaking to a camera? Well, first of all, that did feel a little bit pointed and I feel strongly that you could have worded it differently, but typically, yes, you are technically correct. However, as of the time of me recording this video, I. I recently got back from Pantheon and even though I did end up catching a cold, totally worth it. Pantheon is always so much fun and I just absolutely love getting to meet everybody and interact with you guys. Now I did record some footage while I was there and I plan on putting that together in some sort of like vlog style video. So keep an eye out for that. It's gonna be a couple of weeks though, cause I had to prioritize this video. Apparently the release notes are more important. But for now, here's a short little montage to commemorate the times that we shared. As we go along we rem all the times change come whatever. Anyways, release notes. So first of all, under early access. Now I want to be clear with what this means. Everything in the early access section is not actually coming out with this release. Meaning when this release hits your account, you're not automatically going to see these features, but they are going into early access with this release, which basically means that you can request through your CSM to have them enabled for you. Just keep in mind that by doing so you're accepting the risk of potentially encountering more bugs than you would if you waited until it was generally available. And also sometimes in the early access section, we'll have features that are they're done, but they just can't be turned on for everybody all at once for some specific back end reason. For example, the one that we're about to go over, which is the new global search and I'll be needing this. So global search is something that people have been asking for forever. We saw a preview of it at the Last Pantheon, Pantheon 2023 and now it is finally starting to roll out. But it is one of those things that we can't give to everybody all at once. And the reason for that is in order to enable global search, the data in your account needs to be indexed and the process to do that is a little bit resource intensive on the back end. And so if we did everybody all at once, server setting, cache fire and nobody wants that. So instead it's being enabled a little bit at a time. If you attended Pantheon 2024 just recently, then you should have Global Search enabled for your account. And then for everybody else we're going to be slowly enabling it for people with the goal of having everybody on the new search by the end of this year. And it's already October, so we're talking about a couple of months now. In case you're not familiar, this is what the new Global search looks like. So it's up here on top of the navigation bar now. So no matter where you are in Service Titan, it's always very easily accessible. There's also a keyboard shortcut for it so that you can just invoke it wherever that's control slash. And as the name Global Search implies, it is. So you don't need to specify what it is you're looking for. Like in the old search experience you had a dropdown where you had to say I'm looking for a customer, a location, a form, whatever. But here we can just start typing and you see that just pulls up results in these different categories. So you can search for customer names, addresses, invoice numbers, whatever you need. You can even search like within SMS messages. Although if you are getting too many results and you're not able to find the exact thing you're looking for, we do have this dropdown over here where you can specify the exact thing, thing, the category that you're looking for. And we also have these handy breadcrumb trails up here. So these are my job results and it's showing that these job results are under John Richards the customer and then John Richards the location. So I could open the location page or the customer page by clicking on these. And if it was a specific job I was looking for, but I wasn't seeing it here, I could click View all up here to take me into all of the job related results. And this new search is very typo tolerant. So if you're looking for a customer and you're not quite sure how to spell the name or something, you can still easily find it. Overall, so much more convenient than the old experience. Although I will mention that the old experience is still here. If we click Advanced Search, that'll take us to the old page or if we click this icon over here that takes us back to the old search page. So you haven't lost access to that if you still need it. But I love this. Again, people have been asking for it forever and so far the feedback from people who have it already has been fantastic and it's only going to get better with time. There's a lot of plans for this that's going to make it even more useful and I very strongly believe it's going to be a very integral thing as far as how we use Service Titan in the future. Okay, next up, still early access, but we have a wait list for the new weekly dispatch board view. Again, something people have been requesting for a very long time. This is going to give you a seven day overview of your dispatch board all in one view. And this is going to make certain dispatching strategies a whole lot easier. Plus for certain roles like field managers, it's going to make it a lot easier to just get an overview of what's coming up and we'll take a deeper dive into it and how exactly it works once it's actually coming out. But for now it's just going into early access. So if you're interested in it, you can talk to your CSM and they can get you on the waitlist also. All right, next, the new reporting library is going into early access. So you know how in reporting, okay, let's say you're trying to build out a custom report and you have a certain KPI or group of KPIs in mind that you want on this report, but you don't know what template they live in. So when you go to build a custom report, you're first asked to pick a category of templates and then you have to pick a template and only then do you see the KPIs that are within that template. So it can be quite the magic carpet ride to find what the heck you're looking for. Well, the reporting library solves that problem. Now here I am on the reports page. Let's say we're looking for a number of preventative maintenances. Sold KPI. Here's the old experience. I'm asked to choose a report type, so maybe it's under technicians. Then I have to select a report template. Could be invoices, could be jobs. Let's go with jobs. I'm looking for preventative maintenance is sold. I call those PMs. So I type in PM, I get no results. I flip my desk over, somebody comes in another court mandated anger management class. So instead, now I've got the banner for it right here. So I could click open right there. But I Could also get to it. Back on the reporting page, we see this section over here for Templates Library. Now this page gives me information about all of the KPIs and what exactly they do and what they mean. So that's very helpful, kind of your encyclopedia of KPIs. But I can also come up here and click Open. And then I get this search field and here I can search for whatever KPI it is that I'm looking for. So let's say I'm looking for average ticket, I'll hit enter. And then here are all of the results and the template that they live inside of. And you see we have this match percentage here. So that's very important. This is a very powerful search in that you don't necessarily need to know what the KPI is called in Service Titan. So this is a big problem, right? Because not only are the KPIs like buried within these sections and these templates, but they're also called specific things. And within the industry there might be different names for it. You might call it something different than what it's called in Service Titan. Different industries like plumbing versus electrical might have different kind of nomenclature for this thing. For example, before I was looking for PM Sold, but there's no such KPI in Service Titan. It's called Membership Sold. But with this new search, I don't need to know that I can type in PM Sold and my first result is what I'm looking for, Memberships Sold. And once I've got it pulled up in my search here, I can simply click on it and say Create Report. And now I'm in the Report Builder, I'm already in the report type and the report template that I need and Membership Sold is checked off for me. So I'm off to the races. This is going to be game changing. I think people struggle a lot with reports and this is going to be such a useful tool. Again, only going into early access right now. This one, I believe there is a particular signup form that you can just click into and sign up for yourself. And that signup link is in the Release Notes document and I'll also put it in the description box down below for you. Save you a bit of time. Howdy y'. All. Okay, next, Sales Pro is now in early access. So if you were at Pantheon, then you already know about Sales Pro. It was announced there. But basically the elevator pitch is SalesPro is a tool that allows you to do virtual ride alongs. So when a technician is out in the field, as soon as they hit arrive on a job, a recording is started. So their job and their interactions with the customer get recorded and processed through an AI. So a manager can see a full transcript of the job. They can see key moments identified by Titan Intelligence. You can see an overview of what kind of objections your technicians are running into the most. You can get an overview of top coaching opportunities. And there's also kind of a social aspect to it where technicians can take moments of their jobs and post them to a shared feedback. That's as deep as I'm going to go into it for now, once this comes out, it'll probably get its own dedicated video. Okay, next, under improvements, but still early access, we have a y' all item. So access to improved dispatch messaging is now in early access. So these are messaging improvements that relate to how you message technicians back and forth from the dispatch board previously, or I guess I should say the current experience, because this is only early access. But notifications and messages with the text were all kind of together in one news feedback. So that could make incoming messages from your text kind of hard to find and easy to miss. Plus, if you wanted to initiate a conversation with a tech that was done from a different place than that newsfeed, you had to go over to the technician's name or their picture and click on that and then go to send message from there. But with the new experience, messages will be separate from notifications. So in the upper right hand corner you'll have this messages icon with a badge showing how many unread messages you have. And then separate from that will be the bell icon where you access your notifications. So this is what the messages fly out looks like. So you have a section for all and unread, we can click into any particular conversation to type a message. We have a checkbox to choose whether we want to attach this message to the technician's current job. And we have this plus icon in the upper right where we could create a new message and then we would select our technician from here. I'm not sure this is quite looking the way it's supposed to, as it doesn't quite look right. Well, look at that handsome fellow though. Again, early access, minor visual bug. You might run into something like that. It's what you're signing up for. But we could select the technician that we're trying to message and then just initiate a new message from there. So no more having to come over here and say send message. We've got a filter over here. We could filter down to specific business Units or teams. This is transparent when it should not be. Again, minor visual bug there. And again, I'm filming this footage even before the early access, so just keep that in mind. And we do still have access to that announcement feature to send everybody a text all at once. That's this icon right here. Clicking on that currently just takes you to the old page where you would send that mass text message, but the feature is still accessible. Okay, next, Second Chance Leads for basic phones is now in early access. So if you're not familiar, Second Chance Leads was a feature that was previously tied exclusively to Phones Pro. And basically what it does is transcribe your phone calls and then analyze it using Titan Intelligence. And then any calls that it believes were leads that could still potentially be saved, it puts that into a Second Chance Leads bucket. And it does this regardless of the CSR's manual classification of the call. So this is a great feature to help you save some revenue that would otherwise just be lost. And like I said previously, the only way to get it was to have Phones Pro, but there's now going to be a path to get it, even if you're on basic phones. And again, if that's something that interests you, get with your CSM to get on that early access list. Okay, now moving out of the early access section, we have some community features now in the Servicetitan platform. So if you haven't heard the news, then I'm very sorry to have to be the one to break this to you, but the Service Titan community is being sunset, meaning it's being retired. But that doesn't mean that we're sacrificing the important features that lived in Community. They're just being migrated into the Service Titan product itself. So the announcement section that used to live in Community is now part of the knowledge base. Same with the sections for product capabilities and the calendar, where you're able to see important events like webinar dates and the release drops, for example, that is now part of Titan Advisor, along with your CSM contact information and links to schedule meetings with them. The Ideas portal is of course very important and was part of Community. That's not going anywhere. It's found in the knowledge base now. So don't worry, you can still create ideas, vote on ideas, and get to see me in this stylish hat. All right, next, under Core Product and Accounting, enhanced security and accuracy in your financial records with improved accounting periods. So basically, well, first of all, this note's not going to make a lot of sense to you if you haven't already seen my video on the new touchless journal entry integration, which, if you haven't checked that out, I highly recommend you do because it can make your accounting a whole lot easier. You don't have to manually export to your accounting software anymore. But previously bank deposits were not included in accounting period locking, meaning even after you had locked an accounting period, people could still make changes to bank deposits within that locked period. But now that's no longer the case. Locking an accounting period also locks the bank deposits within that period. I'm hanging in there. I'm okay. Little topo chico to wet the whistle. Not a sponsor, unfortunately. All right, next Under Enterprise Hub, if you're not familiar, Enterprise Hub is a place where enterprise companies who have multiple Service Titan accounts or tenants can manage all of those accounts in one place. So this section isn't relevant to everybody. If it's not relevant to you, feel free to skip this section. I always chapter these videos out to make that easy to do so the Help center is now accessible directly from Enterprise Hub. That's that fly out that you get when you hit the question mark icon in the upper right hand corner of servicetitan. It's where you can quickly search the knowledge base, manage your support cases and contact support. Now I believe in the ST 71.0 release you won't have all of the features within Help center. You'll only have AI powered answers and knowledge based search results. And then in an upcoming minor release you'll get the rest of it, which is the managing of cases and contacting support directly. Next, we now have Marketing Pro Enterprise directly in Enterprise Hub. So this is a module within Enterprise Hub that allows you to create email campaigns in a template tenant and then you can deploy those campaigns across the tenants in your network. That way if you want to deploy a specific marketing campaign across multiple tenants, you don't have to go in and individually manually duplicate that across those tenants. You can just build it one time. You'll also be able to manage the performance of those campaigns using roll up reporting and stop campaigns as needed as well. Next, we have more granular permissions for the centralized price book. So before we did have some permissions as far as who could do what in regards to the centralized price book. But now we have options that are much more granular. So you can now assign much more specific permissions for things like pricing, management, managing tenant lists and automation and pushing updates. Next, under improvements for Enterprise Hub we have bulk user creation. So within User Management you can now add multiple Users simultaneously. All right, next, under Financing, another y' all item. So we now have two new integrated financing partners. Those are Synchrony and Wells Fargo. These are both very popular financing companies, both of which have been heavily requested to be integrated within Servicetitan, hence the hat. So now if you use Synchrony or Wells Fargo for financing, you can now have that integrated in ServiceTitan versus handling it outside of Servicetitan, which is more labor intensive, more complicated and has a greater chance for human error. Howdy y'. All. Next we have the new Financing dashboard. So on the accounting screen within the sidebar on the left, you'll see a new section called Financing where you can access the Financing dashboard. And from here you can see a lot of super helpful metrics as it regards to your financing usage. So you can see things like the percentage of revenue that you're doing from financing, your approval rate, your average ticket size through financing as well as your conversion rate. You can see a bar chart separating out your financed versus non financed revenue. You can see your average ticket size for jobs done through financing versus not through financing. You can see a breakdown of performance for individual financing plans. You can see a breakdown of how many customers applied for financing through the Technician's mobile app versus through the customer portal. And you can even see individual technician performance plus at the top, we've got filters where you can change what date range you're looking at, what specific partner you want to look at, as well as business unit, job type and technician. A lot of helpful insights to really hone in and optimize your financing strategy. And sticking with that theme, we also have the new Plan Optimizer which recommends the best financing plans for higher close rates. So this feature uses Titan Intelligence to help you pick out the best plans to offer as well as automatically set up financing rules. And if you're not familiar, Financing Rules is a feature that existed before, but it was all manual, where basically you can choose to only offer specific financing plans within certain ticket price ranges because with a larger ticket you're typically going to be more tolerant to a higher merchant fee because there's going to be more profit dollars in that ticket versus a smaller ticket. So here's what this looks like. I'm under Settings and Financing. I'm going to pick the loan options tab for whichever financing company I'm trying to set up these rules for. I'm going to click on Create Rule Now. This is a sample account, so you're probably going to see some errors pop up because I don't actually have a financing account set up, but then it's going to walk us through here. We're going to select what it is that we're planning to sell with these financing plans. So for my example, I'm going to go with H Vac equipment. I'll click next. It's going to ask me to choose a financing strategy. So the plan optimizer is going to use this to tailor our plans to our preferred business goals. So conservative is going to optimize for higher margins but with lower conversion rates, meaning basically lower dealer fees, but the plans aren't going to be as attractive to customers. And on the other end we have aggressive, which is going to optimize for higher conversion rates but with lower margins. So plans that are going to be very attractive to customers but are going to have higher dealer fees. For my example, I'm going to stick with balanced, which is the recommended option. I'll click next here. Yeah, yeah, this isn't going to work due to the not actually having a real account set up thing. All right, screenshots it is then. Once you get through there, it's going to offer you multiple tiers of plans that it selected. If you're curious as to why it chose the specific plans that it did, you can click on why. These plans there and the tiers here are those spending tiers that I was talking about. So it's going to offer different plans depending on the price of the proposal. And again, these tier based rules did exist before. What's really new here is the introduction of Titan Intelligence to help you decide which plans to choose and help you set these tiers up in a way that's going to be effective. All right, next, under payments we have new ID Tech card readers. So there's now a new card reader that can be used through service Titan Payments. I happen to have one right here. Now don't worry if you have the old device readers, they look here, let me take it out of the case. If you've got the ones that look like this, those are still going to work just fine for you. You don't need to replace them or anything. It's just that there's no more inventory of these. So any that you order going forward, they're going to be these, these new ones. And by the way, any software updates that we do that impact card readers, they are going to impact both card readers equally. There was an update to the card readers back in March that had a hugely positive impact on Bluetooth connection issues and transaction speed. We know that because the support cases around those issues have decreased dramatically since then. That said, we do have some even more exciting payment related updates coming very soon. So stay tuned for those. All right, next, under the improvement section of payments we have another y' all item. So you can now enable a new save card by default feature to streamline your payments and reduce collection times. This is another one from my original y' all list back in the day. And I don't say this a lot, I think I've said this one other time, but I don't think you guys were complaining enough about this one. I remember back when I was operating we were trying to transition from our like manually renewed memberships to auto renew on either an annual or a monthly plan. And of course in order to bill for those, you need to have a card saved on file. And I remember just being so absolutely devastated to learn that I had to rely on a technician manually checking a box to save the card. I was horrified. I was appalled. I would go so far to say I was a bit insulted. But thankfully now that's no longer the case. You can go into settings, invoicing and online payments and choose the option from there. Okay, next, under price book and Coming soon. So when something's under the coming soon section, it basically means that it's not tied to the point zero release. So this is going to be 71.0, but then there's going to be 71.1, 0.2, and the point zero is the major release and then the 1.2.3, those are the minor releases. So the feature that we're talking about here is going to come out in one of the minor releases tied to 71. But when this release first hits your account, you won't see it. But anyways, coming soon you'll be able to increase your pricing flexibility with dynamic pricing using business units. So basically this feature is going to allow you to set up specific dynamic pricing rules per business unit. And the reason this is a big deal, the reason that people have asked for it, hence the y' all hat, is because this is a very useful feature for companies that service large service areas or have multiple locations and they want to charge differently based on those locations. Usually if you have multiple locations, you're separating them using business units. So you would have like H Vac Service Atlanta, H Vac Service Athens. And if you wanted to have separate pricing for one location versus the other, the previous workaround was to have multiple copies of the same price book item, meaning you essentially had to duplicate your whole Price book. There'd be one copy of a price book item that was for this location and one copy of a price book item that was for that location, which sucks. And you don't have to do that anymore because now you can set up dynamic pricing rules based on specific business units. Again, you won't see this immediately with the O release, but you will see it in one of the following minor releases. Next. And this is also going to be in one of the minor releases, but the template price book item is no longer going to be a gated feature. So we talked about template price book items back in the winter release, I believe. But to refresh your memory, basically what this feature does is allows you to have one particular item in your price book in every category. So you can have one particular service, one particular material, and one particular piece of equipment. And with that one particular template item, your employees will be able to edit the price and description, but you can keep the rest of your price book locked. And you're also able to choose whether or not you want to let technicians out in the field have access to edit that item, or only people in the office. But again, it's just those particular template items. It's not the entire price book that they're able to change. So this is great for those one off scenarios where you have to sell something that it's not in your price book because you've never encountered it before. If you want a slightly more step by step walkthrough on how to use this, go back to the winter release, ST68. I go through it a little bit deeper in that video, but now the reason it's showing up again is because previously when I talked about it in that winter release, it was a gated feature, meaning you had to ask somebody to have it turned on for you, but now it's going to be on for everybody by default. And this was a y' all feature to begin with because the functionality is something that people have been asking for for a long time. But now it's a. It's a y' all times two. It's a y' all on another level. Because anytime that we can take something that was gated and make it not gated and just open to everybody, we're going to call that a y'. All. Howdy, y'. All. Okay, next. Under Titan Intelligence, the fall Benchmark Report is coming on November 1st. So if you're not familiar, the Benchmark Report is a quarterly report that's generated by Service Titan to show you how your business is stacking up compared to other businesses like yours. It shows you what industry trends are happening and also gives you personalized recommendations. Once it's available on November 1st, you can download it by going to Titan Advisor and clicking the link right below your Titan score. Okay, next, under Marketing Pro we have Marketing Pro Autopilot. So basically Marketing Pro Autopilot makes launching a campaign a super easy experience. Like if you use Marketing Pro, then you might be familiar with like the design templates. It's like that, but for everything, the entire campaign. So it basically condenses the process of launching a campaign down to as little as two steps. You just confirm the information and launch the campaign. So when you go to launch an Autopilot campaign, you'll be presented with some pre built options. So in this example we're working with a residential H Vac company and so it's suggesting a seasonal H Vac tune up special, an H Vac inspection reminder, and a Beat the Heat this Summer campaign. So we could simply just check off some or all of those, click launch and they're off to the races. The audience is already built for us, the flow of emails is already built out for us, so we don't have to do anything. We can just hit launch. However, we could also click on View and edit to get an overview of what things are looking like and maybe tweak some things so we can maybe change the launch date. We could change some things about the email copy itself so you don't have to stick with exactly the way the campaign is built out. You can change some things if you want to, but overall this saves a ton of work when it comes to launching marketing campaigns. This is by the way, also coming to SMS and direct mail campaigns as well. Next, under Marketing Pro improvements, OpenAI has been added as a listing publisher in Marketing Pro Reputation. And basically that's going to improve the likelihood that if somebody is searching using ChatGPT, your business information will show up. Because that is a new search avenue now. So it's something that we need to be thinking about. And finally, under Marketing Pro Ads, you can now track all relevant leads on your campaign pages for better ad performance insights within the attributed leads table. So previously campaign pages only showed call data, but now you can measure all lead sources directly from your analytics dashboard. Anyways, that's all I got for today. Be sure to hit like if you liked this video and found it valuable, be sure to subscribe to surface Titan's YouTube channel. If you haven't done that already, hit that bell icon so that YouTube notifies you anytime we upload a new video. And if you enjoy these videos, you get value out of them and you want to see them keep coming, be sure to let me know down in the comments. That really helps me out. Appreciate it. Peace. Sam.