Release #80 | ServiceTitan Release Notes Overview

What's going on, everybody? It's Richard Kohberger here, the Blue Collar Nerd, and it is time once again to go over some release notes. Let's jump into it.

98 degrees and the sun shines bright. She rummaged through our attic all through the night. Technically still summer through the end of September. Spooky girls simply choose never to remember this. Happy fall, y'all. Though the leaves are green, the decor is sprawled. A calendar is not the boss of you. So starting mid-August, you know just what to do. Fear not, you'll never pay the price. You can simply have your pumpkin spice poured over ice.

So first on these notes, under customer portal, you can now share job photos, completed forms, and other attachments with your customers through the customer portal. Now, just to be clear, this note only applies to the new customer portal. So if you're still on the older version of the customer portal, this is not going to apply to you. So previously, the customer portal gave your customers a summary of the job, but not much beyond that. They couldn't see photos or completed forms or any other attachments on the job, which meant if somebody wanted more solid proof of the work for a rebate or for an insurance claim, or just for their own records, They had to call or email into your office, and then somebody on your team had to go dig through the files of the job. But now your office can mark individual attachments and completed forms as customer-facing right on the job, and then only the things that you mark show up on that job in the portal. So nothing is going to be automatically customer-facing. It's just what somebody in the office marks to be customer-facing. So if the technician took like 50 pictures of the cracked heat exchanger and 25 pictures of the rusty evaporator coil, you don't need to show the customer all of those. You can just select the ones that are relevant. And maybe you have some photos that you want your ops manager to look at before a property manager on the client side sees it. That's fine. You can just leave it unmarked. Your customer's not gonna see it until you mark it as able to be seen. Now setup-wise, this one does need to be turned on for your account. So that's a conversation with support or your CSM. Then once it's live, here's what the actual workflow looks like. So from the job screen, you scroll down to the history section. And over on the right you'll see a button that says Mark Items as Customer Facing. Click on that and your forms and files turn into a checklist and you can just check off all of the items that you want your customers to be able to see in the portal and hit Accept. Anything you mark is going to get this little eyeball icon next to it indicating that the customers can see it through their portal. All right. Next, under Dispatching, we've got a few dispatching experience improvements. All of these improvements, by the way, are to the more recently redesigned dispatch board. So if you're still on the classic dispatch board, these don't apply. Okay, so there's 3 things here. The first one is technician activity lines. So if you've got the setting turned on to show technician activity history, that setting, by the way, is in the dispatcher preferences under the view options on the dispatch board. With that turned on, you've got those thin little activity lines on the board under your job bubbles. But previously there was no visual connection between the 2, between the job bubbles and the activity lines. So if your board got a little bit messy, technicians were running, you know, ahead of schedule or behind schedule, maybe things were getting stacked on top of each other, it could be hard to figure out which, uh, job the actual activity lines belonged to. So now you can just hover over an activity line and the job or non-job event that it belongs to will light up on the dispatch board. And that also works in the other direction. So if you hover over a job bubble or a non-job event, then its associated activity line is going to light up in that technician's row. The second thing here is really just a housekeeping item. So the setting that used to be called display status is now called technician status details. Same options, nothing's actually changing with the setting itself. It's just a more accurately descriptive name. And then the third change under this section is appointment reminder time zones. So previously your appointment reminders always went out in your account's time zone, which is completely fine assuming that your entire company only exists in one time zone, but that's not the case for everybody. If you've got a branch that's an hour or 2 away, which plenty of you do, especially commercial folks running, you know, multi-state territories, Well then you were texting a customer an arrival time that was just flat out wrong because it was based on a time zone that the customer was not in. But now there's a setting in your reminder notification settings that lets you send the reminder in the time zone of the job's location. And you'll find that under settings, communications, customer notifications, and then reminder notifications. And heads up, this does also need the new notifications experience to be turned on for this to work. All right, next, still under dispatching, we have 3 more improvements to the new dispatch board. Number 1 is a change to the weekly board. So previously, if you were planning next week on the weekly dispatch board and you needed to know a tech's skills or their availability or how many jobs they already have, you had to bounce over to the daily board to look and then come back to the weekly dispatch board to actually place the job. But now the weekly board has the same technician hover-over window and the same technician shortcut window that the daily board has. So just like on the daily board, you can hover over the name to get the details and then click on it to get that sidebar of actions. Next, the clock-in clock-out modal now tells you whose clock you're editing. So if you click a technician's profile picture, the modal opens, and previously it just opened. There was no name. So if you accidentally clicked the wrong technician, there was nothing to alert you that you were editing the wrong person's hours. So now it actually names the technician. Small change, but you know, pretty helpful. Next, we have another change that brings some functionality from the daily dispatch board over to the weekly board as well. So now on the weekly board, you can right-click on a job bubble and you'll see the arrive technician and mark as done options right there in the context menu. Whereas previously on the weekly version of the dispatch board anyway, in order to do those things, you had to open up the little side flyout to see those options. All right, next under estimates, and you know what? I'm gonna call this one a y'all item. So, if you'll recall, in a previous release notes, we talked about a feature called Margin Enforcement. And in that video, I noted that enforcement was a strong descriptor for what the feature actually did, because at the time, it didn't actually stop anybody from doing anything, it was just like a warning. So, it was able to warn somebody that they were about to sell something under your margin threshold, but they were still able to do it. But now, that feature is able to actually block somebody from selling underneath your margin threshold. So previously you had one global minimum margin percentage and you could override it for individual roles, but that was the extent of it. You had one margin floor for your entire company, but now you get 2 global numbers instead of one. You get a global minimum, which will result in a hard block, like nobody can sell below that. And you also get a global warning threshold, which just issues the warning. And the system is gonna require that the warning threshold is set higher than the minimum threshold. So you've got kind of like a yellow zone and a red zone there. And then on top of that, you can now build out custom rules that are scoped to a particular role, a particular business unit, a particular job type, or any combination of those 3. Each rule carries its own minimum threshold and its own warning threshold. Or you can flip on the option for no limit and turn enforcement entirely off for anything that that particular rule covers. So if you're doing like insurance work, for example, where the pricing isn't really yours to set, You can just set that particular job type to no limit so that the margin enforcement stays out of the way. These rules, by the way, run both in the office and on the mobile app, so it doesn't matter where somebody is selling from. And on the mobile app side, these rules are saved on device. So even if the device is offline for some reason, the rules will still get applied. Now you can find all of this under settings, estimates, estimate revenue protection, and then estimate margin control on the margin percent tab. There's also a new employee permission for it called Edit Margin Thresholds. I really like these enhancements to this feature. When the feature first came out, I was like, ooh, this is a really like good idea, but it's not actually useful yet. It was just missing those last pieces of, you know, being able to set specific rules for specific business units or job types, and then being able to actually block the bad sale from happening versus just putting up a warning. And now it does both of those things. So this is a really useful feature.

Howdy y'all!

Alright, next under equipment, we have equipment systems, physical locations, and service areas. So previously, an equipment record in ServiceTitan told you what a thing was and gave you its history, but that was pretty much it. It couldn't tell you what that thing was connected to, like if it was part of a greater system, and it couldn't tell you where it was physically. So maybe a condenser, an evaporator, and a furnace all make up one system. But previously those things could only exist as separate unrelated records. And if you wanted to record where something sat, well then you had to shove that information into a tag or a memo or a custom field, which meant you couldn't filter on it and it was less searchable. But now you get 3 things. So you can group related equipment into a system, which is an actual like parent-child relationship between these items. You can also give the equipment as many service areas as it serves. So that's like what that piece of equipment is actually covering. So maybe this is the upstairs unit versus the downstairs unit. So physical location is like where the unit is. It's on the side of the house, it's in the attic, it's in the basement closet, whatever. And then the service area is the area of the property that the equipment actually services. Equipment systems carry service areas only, no physical location. Since the different pieces of the system can be in different locations. And service areas are built as hierarchies up to 5 levels deep per service location. So you could have like Building A, Floor 3, East Mechanical Room, Rack 2. You build those out from the Manage Areas section, which you can get to from the equipment drawer, the equipment landing screen, or the systems screen. You're also now able to filter by physical location or service area on the equipment landing screen. And you can also filter by area in the attach equipment drawer when you're actually booking a job. Now, a strong tip here, if you're going to use this feature, is gonna be that you should all agree on your naming conventions first because areas are shared across every equipment record at a given service location. So if 3 different people build out the same building, then you could end up with like mech room, mechanical room, mech room 1, all just like varying names for the same place. So, you know, try not to do that. Next, still under equipment, we have Findings. Now Findings has been out in private preview since around last November. So some of you have been using this for a while now, but in this release it is exiting private preview and becoming generally available. So previously when a tech spotted something on a maintenance visit, like a worn part, a corroded fitting, something that's going to fail in the next 6 months, that observation probably landed inside of like an invoice summary or on a form somewhere. And so for somebody to find that information later, they really had to go digging. But now a finding is its own entity, its own record. So the technician logs a finding in the Field Mobile app with a name, an urgency level, and a recommended solution, as well as internal notes and photos. And findings attach to pieces of equipment and to locations, not the job. That way it stays visible even after the job has closed. The team in the office can go to follow-ups and findings, and that's where they'll find the findings dashboard. That's where they can see everything that's been flagged, and from the finding itself, they can create an estimate, they can book a job, they can add work to an existing job, or they can just archive it. And because findings link to equipment estimates and service agreements, you can actually see which recommendations turned into work and which ones are still just sitting there. Now this is something that needs to be turned on for your account and your technicians need to be using the newer Field Mobile app to log findings. So if this is something you want, talk to support or your CSM. Okay, next under the Field Mobile app. So the first note here is just the other half of the equipment thing that we just talked about. So previously a tech pulls up an equipment record on their phone, and it tells them what the unit is, but nothing about where to find it. But now techs can create and assign physical locations and service areas right in the app, and they can also filter equipment systems on their end to help them, you know, filter things down and find what they're looking for. Something pretty cool here is that for outdoor units, technicians can actually drop a GPS pin on a satellite map. So, you know, if somebody is like doing PMs on a big flat rooftop, they can drop a pin on each RTU on the first round. And now that roof is just kind of mapped out forever. You can also mark existing equipment attachments as location attachments. So a photo of the electrical panel door label, a marked up floor plan, the mechanical drawings that came in the turnover package, you can flag those as location attachments and then they open right off the equipment record. Something important to know here is that there is a new technician permission. It's called Enable Editing Equipment Physical Locations and Service Areas. And it's gonna be off by default for every existing technician role. So nobody in the field is gonna actually be able to do any of this stuff until you turn it on for them. Without it, the techs can still see the location and the area and view the map pins and all of that. They just can't change anything. All right, next under financing, and this one's only gonna be relevant to you if you're using the ServiceTitan financing integration with Wells Fargo or Synchrony. So previously, one business unit could have exactly one active financing program. So one rate sheet and one merchant ID. And if you needed to offer different terms for different brands or different product lines inside that same business unit, like say you carry 2 equipment brands and each one has its own branded financing program. Well, there was previously just no way to do that. People did work around it by spinning up extra business units that they didn't actually need, or by just, you know, managing financing outside of ServiceTitan entirely. But now you can add up to 3 merchant IDs to a single business unit's default configuration. You can name each one so that you can tell them apart and then assign them to your default or your custom financing rules. So setup for this runs as a 4-step wizard. First, you add in your merchant IDs and give each one a clear name. Then you pick a primary merchant ID, which is the rate sheet that shows up when your technician opens a job. Then you assign the business units for that merchant ID and you optionally exclude business units from it. Then when your technician opens up a job in the Field mobile app, the rate sheets are gonna show up as separate tabs with your primary one being first. This feature's been in early access for a little bit, but it is now generally available. This one's just gonna be on for you by default, so there's nothing you have to request to have turned on. But again, it is for Wells Fargo and Synchrony at this time. All right, next under financing, we have Wells Fargo prequalification and automatic second look. So previously, if you emailed a customer an estimate and they opened it in the online estimates portal, their only financing option was to fill out a full credit application, which meant that they were gonna get hit with a hard credit pull before having any idea whether they qualify for anything. Prequalification did exist, but only in the Field mobile app. So it was only beneficial if the technician was actually standing there with them. But now there is a see if you prequalify option right in the online estimates portal. They just enter in their info and then Wells Fargo comes back with a prequalification decision. With no hard credit check. And then there's also the second half to this, which is the automatic second look. So if Wells Fargo declines, then ServiceTitan automatically sends that same application to your second look provider using the same information that the homeowner already typed in. So they don't have to fill out a second form. They don't have to start over. The second look offers come back in the same flow. So this reduces a ton of friction that a customer might experience when considering financing. The friction of not wanting to go through with a hard credit pull, plus the friction of if they get declined, having to fill out something else for a second look. So to set this up, you're gonna go to settings, then integrations and financing, and then go under the settings tab there. Under presentation, turn on allow customers to apply for financing through online estimates. Then pick Wells Fargo from the online estimates provider dropdown and save. Also, you want to make sure that your second look provider is actually selected in the financing settings, or else there will be nothing for a decline to route over to. Now again, this is Wells Fargo only right now, and it only applies to estimates sent by email. So your estimate email template has to include the online estimate link. All right, next up under MFA, we have some enhancements to multifactor authentication. So the first change for admins, there is now a CSV export button on the MFA screen. So previously, if you were trying to get ready for enforcement, you could see everybody's status on the screen, but you could not export it out of there. And the second change here is the 15-minute countdown. So previously, when enforcement reached somebody who hadn't set up a verification method yet, they were just kind of signed out immediately with no warning. So now in that same scenario, that person gets a banner across the top of their screen with a 15-minute countdown that tells them MFA is being turned on and a sign out is coming. All right, next under job booking and contact experience, we have an announcement for an upcoming feature. So voice intelligence is coming to ServiceTitan Core in an upcoming release. So voice intelligence listens to your recorded phone calls, produces a graded scorecard, the purpose of the call, whether it was actually bookable, any objections raised, and the outcome. And each of those is gonna be backed up by a quote from the actual transcript. 2 new screens are gonna show up under the main calls screen. So there will be call analysis, which is for, you know, going through one call at a time, and insights, which is where you can see trends across all of them. Again, this is not a feature that's actually coming out with this release. It's just an announcement that these features are coming to the core product. So not something that you need any kind of pro product to use. Now, something important to note here is that if you are currently on Contact Center Pro or Max with transcripts, 3 new permissions are coming to core. Alongside the existing listen to call recording permission. So download call recording, view transcript, and download transcript. If you're on Contact Center Pro today, then these permissions are set inside of Contact Center Pro. But because these features are coming to the core product, the core settings are gonna become the source of truth for those, which means that if you do nothing, people on your team can lose access to the workflows that they're currently using. So again, no changes yet, but just alerting you to be ready for that so that you can go and review your role permissions so that in the upcoming release where this does come out, everybody can just make sure that their permissions are still set up properly for everybody to use the workflows that they're currently using. All right, next up under Virtual Agents, we have Parts Follow-Up. Now this one needs the full stack, so SMS agents, voice agents, and Adaptive Capacity all configured. So previously, if a special order part came in, Then the process was somebody notices, that's step 1, somebody has to notice, and then that person calls or texts the customer, checks tech availability by hand, and books the follow-up. Which means, I think we all know, sometimes that falls through the cracks and then you have this part just sitting on your shelf and it's just sitting there until the customer calls in angry wondering when their part's coming in and you're like, oh yeah, it just got here, uh, you know, like a liar. But now the virtual agent watches for parts to arrive and texts the homeowner automatically. The homeowner can then reply with a time that works for them, and the agent can go ahead and book that follow-up appointment. And it'll do that using the same job type and same duration as the original job. So the trigger for this is a job tag by default. So whatever tag your team is already using to mark something as parts received, you can point it at that. Or if you're running Dispatch Pro console rules and you've got a rule that detects part arrivals, you can use that instead too. Next, under virtual agents, book jobs when customers reply to Marketing Pro texts. So previously, Marketing Pro would fire off a campaign text, you know, a missed call campaign or aging equipment campaign or whatever, and the customer could text back, but nothing automatically happened. The virtual agent didn't recognize the number as one of yours, and so it didn't recognize the reply as part of a conversation. So that message would just sit in a thread until a CSR saw it and dealt with it manually. Which could lead to an unfortunate situation where you spent money to, you know, poke somebody in hopes that they would respond, and then they do respond and you don't reply back to them. But now the virtual agent can recognize and reply to registered MarketingPro campaign numbers. So it can just automatically pick up that conversation. It can check availability and it can work towards booking an appointment. And each reply gets tagged with its campaign category, like missed calls, aging equipment, or recurring services. So that way you can see where it came from. And both sides of it, the original campaign text and the customer's reply, show up together in order on the interaction record. That's in AI Concierge under Interactions. So your CSR can see the whole exchange without going and digging through Marketing Pro separately. Next, SMS Agent responds after reminders and automated texts. So previously, any text that your business sent to a customer started a quiet period. That's your re-engagement delay setting. And during that window, the inbound SMS agent stayed silent no matter what came back. The idea being to not let a robot barge into a conversation that a human is having, which makes perfect sense. But the problem was that it treated an appointment reminder the same as a live conversation. So the automated reminder goes out to the customer, the customer texts back, hey, actually, could we push this to Friday? And then the automated agent would just sit there and wait and not reply yet because it's just detecting that technically your business just sent a message. So it's trying not to barge into a conversation that 2 humans are having because it doesn't realize that the text that was sent was automated. But now the agent actually reads the recent conversation and judges whether the last thing you sent was like real from a person, or if it was just like an automated message. If it detects that your message was being sent by a real person, it does the same thing. It stays out of the way. But if it detects that it was an automated message, it will respond to anything that comes back and work towards a booking. All right, next up we have a feature that is labeled on the release notes as notify technicians of Dispatch Pro assignments with voice agent calls. The title here kind of makes this sound narrower than it really is. The title says Dispatch Pro assignments, but this actually works whether or not you use Dispatch Pro. It's possible that the title could be changed for the time you're watching this video. However, this does currently apply only to standard after-hours jobs booked through the voice agent. It does not apply to emergency bookings, and it does not apply to regular business hour jobs. It also does not apply to Spanish language calls, and it does not apply to calls that came in through manual or IVR routing. So this is like a really specific slice, but within that slice, here's the deal. So previously, when the voice agent booked a job after hours and assigned a tech, Nothing reached that technician directly. Notification depended on an in-app alert or an email, which at 11:30 at night is functionally the same as nothing. So the assignment in that scenario would probably just sit there until morning or until the tech happens to open up the app. But now ServiceTitan places an actual outbound phone call to that technician and sends them a text with the job date, the time, the address, and the job type. If they don't pick up the call, then the voice agent is going to retry the call one time. The call is informational only, so the tech can't reschedule or cancel from it, which is probably what you want, cuz if the technician's getting a call at midnight, they're probably gonna want to argue with the robot and tell it this can wait. So to set this up, if you are on Dispatch Pro, you're gonna go to Settings, Dispatch Pro, and then in the Skills and Capabilities section, turn on Notify On-Call Technician. And Dispatch Pro would need to be in auto mode. Now, if you are not on Dispatch Pro, Then you go into Agent Studio, Skills and Capabilities, and turn on both Assign On-Call Technician and Notify On-Call Technician. Both of those are gonna be off by default. And before you flip anything on, you're gonna want to confirm and make sure that your technician profiles actually have a mobile number assigned and the right business unit, and that your shifts are set up so somebody is actually available for that job type at that hour. All right. And last thing under Virtual Agents, Speed to Lead can now escalate to a voice call. So previously, Speed to Lead was text only. So a lead comes in from Angie, Google LSA, or a web form, and within seconds you've texted them, which is great. But then if they don't reply, that's the end of the automated part. The conversation just stalls and sits there until a CSR notices it. But now you can add a voice call step to your Speed to Lead sequence. So if the lead hasn't replied to the automated text inside of whatever time window that you configure, The AI voice agent calls them and has an actual conversation. And during that conversation, it can pull real-time availability from your adaptive capacity and book the job. So setup for this lives under Settings, Phones, and Voice Agent Settings. And before you turn escalation on, you might want to go through your persona transcripts, your skills, your job types, and your dispatch fees in there because the voice agent is now going to be talking to strangers on your behalf without a text message as a buffer. You'll also wanna make sure that adaptive capacity is set up well because it's gonna be booking jobs based off of that. But once you're good there, you can pick which campaigns get a voice step and set your timing. All right, next up under Contact Center Pro, check your call quality before taking calls with the new network test. So previously, if you wanted to check whether somebody's connection could actually carry a clean phone call, then the process for that was kind of involved. You'd send them to an outside testing site and then you'd download a helper app. They'd run it as administrator, which depending on your IT setup could be its own little adventure. And then within a few minutes, you'd get a report. But now that sort of test is built right into the product. So in the Contact Center Pro web phone, click on your profile icon up in the top right corner and select Make a Test Call, and then Start Network Test. That takes about 30 seconds and your status shows as unavailable while that test runs. Once it does run, you'll get back a good, fair, or poor rating alongside a packet loss, jitter, latency, and MOS score. And if the result is poor, then you stay unavailable. So it doesn't just tell you that your connection is too poor to handle phone calls and then start handing you customers anyway. Now, if you want to do this, there is a permission called Run Network Test, and it is off by default for every single role. So nobody's gonna see that option until you turn it on. Your Enterprise Hub admin goes to User Management, Roles, picks the role, and opens the Enterprise Hub Permissions tab. They can just search for the word network, and then under Contact Center Pro, General Permissions, Action Call Options. Check off Run Network Test and save. People might have to sign out and back in to actually see that show up. All right, now there is a whole Early Access section on these release notes, but for the sake of keeping this video a reasonable length, I am going to be skipping that. Anything in the Early Access section is not actually coming out with this release, but it is entering Early Access, meaning if you want to get in early and test it, you can do so. And most of the Early Access items this go-around are centered around Pro products and ServiceTitan CRM. As well as Enterprise Hub. So if you are interested in potentially getting in early on some features that aren't out yet, check out the full release notes. I'll put a link to it in the description box down below. All right, now jumping forward to a lightning round of some enhancements and bug fixes. So as an accounting enhancement, invoices and credit memos you export to QuickBooks Online now carry the same ServiceTitan payment term with them, at least as long as a matching active term exists over in QuickBooks. That means that your due dates and your AR aging finally agree with each other instead of drifting apart every month. Under adaptive capacity, there's a new role permission called allow job duration adjustment, and that permission controls whether your office employees can edit a job's duration on the Get Adaptive Availability screen while they're booking a job. If you've ever wondered why the math on your capacity never quite works out, this is one of the reasons why that could be. Somebody could be shaving durations when they're booking a job to make it fit. So now you can decide who, if anybody, is allowed to do that. Next, under Communication Hub, you can now send emails from your own company domain instead of a shared ServiceTitan address. This was still possible to do before, but you had to go through support to make it happen. But now you can add the domain yourself in settings, copy the DNS records that it generates over to your domain provider, and verify it. The DNS part of that is something that you would want your web person to do. Next, we've got a couple of equipment-related enhancements. First, the equipment drawer is improved. So you're getting more information within there. A lot of that's coming from the new equipment stuff that came with these release notes. But along with all of that, we're getting ability to filter by all of those new fields. And then once you've filtered it down, you can select every matching unit in one click instead of checking boxes one at a time. Second, you can now filter the equipment audit trail, and you can do that by username, time range, action type, and field. Under estimates, there's a new setting that stops price book item images from getting saved as attachments on your estimates. So when the job gets booked, the attachments are your site photos and your forms and not 40 stock pictures of capacitors. Under Field Mobile App, you can now choose which office roles get access to the mobile command center from settings instead of being stuck with a fixed list of built-in roles. Under Inventory, the purchase order creation and detail screen has been rebuilt. You can now add comments while you're creating the order and start the next order without leaving the screen, as well as adjust your item columns and hover over to preview linked jobs. There's also a new inventory valuation snapshot report that lets you pull inventory valuation for a past date with costs read as part of that date for non-serialized items. It's a pretty niche thing, but if you've ever had an accountant ask you what your inventory was worth on December 31st and then had to reconstruct it by hand, this solves that problem. Under memberships, membership sale and renewal invoices now show the actual membership name in the invoice summary. Instead of the word unspecified, and renewals will say renewal. 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 ServiceTitan'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 leave me a comment down below. Let me know what your favorite part of this update is, what you're still hoping to see in future updates, or what your favorite place is to go for lunch. Appreciate it. Peace.