ServiceTitan August 2019 Release Notes | Big Marketing Pro Holes Patched!

What's going on everybody? It's Richard Coburg here, the blue collar nerd. Well, that time of the month again, that time of the month, meaning service titan release notes time. I'm gonna phrase that differently next time. Anyways, we've got quite a few things going on here, so let's jump into it. By the way, as always, I'm not going to be going over the entirety of the release notes. I'm just going over the stuff that stood out to me. I highly recommend that you check out the release notes for yourself to see all of the little details. So the first thing I see here, Payment terms applied to invoices and bills. Invoices and bills now include payments terms to help you better track and prioritize the collection of payments for customers with invoices that aren't immediately due. Payment terms use due dates to indicate when you expect to receive payment from a customer or pay bills to your vendor. Now, I wasn't able to find where to set this up. Maybe it's not in the next accounts yet, or maybe I just couldn't find it. But this sounds pretty useful if you do a lot of ar, you know, billing stuff. Next up, email customer statements from ServiceTitan. So you're now able to email a customer statement. Or whereas before you would have to download the statement and then email it separately. Okay. Under the alerts section, link invoices in the completed job alert. You can now add a placeholder to directly link the invoice for a job in the completed job alert. Additionally, the invoice ID in the alert is now a clickable link. This makes it more convenient for anyone receiving the alert to find out more about the completed job. Now in this they're making it sound like you're able to customize the alert. Like you're able to go into a text box and change what exactly it says or which you're not. So I'm not really sure what they mean here. I'm guessing they mean that there's just going to be a clickable link to the invoice on a completed job alert. Now, but that's not something I can test in the next account, so we'll just have to wait and see on that Under Follow ups. Audit Trail Entry for dismissal of upcoming Appointments. When you dismiss an upcoming appointment, you now see a record of it on the audit trail for the job. I don't get this one at all. So the audit trail is that little trail underneath the job that tells you all of the tomfoolery that's occurred with you that so and so did this. So and so did that. This note is saying that when an upcoming appointment gets dismissed, you're going to see that on the audit trail for the job. But what job? We dismissed it. If you dismiss it, then you never booked a job. So where is this audit trail entry going? I played around with it. I couldn't figure it out. Nowhere did I see an audit trail that was showing where I dismissed the alert. If you book the job, then it's too late to dismiss it. You would just have to cancel the job at that point. So if you dismiss it, there's no job. So what job are you. Maybe I'm missing something really obvious here. I just. I can't wrap my head around it. Okay, Marketing Pro. And this is where the bulk of this update is set up Details in Settings Marketing Pro Email to add things like values and key information and use this info for your marketing campaigns and email templates. Okay, let's go see what they mean by that. They don't mean anything by that. But I do see the next bullet here, which is define a time window to determine when attributed revenue is allocated to a campaign, allowing you to control when allocation occurs. So if I'm understanding this correctly, what this setting does is. Okay, let's say you send out an email campaign and somebody clicks that email. How long after they opened that email are we going to say? If they book a job, we're going to give credit to the email campaign. So the default here is set to two weeks. So if they open the email and then eight days later they book a job, the credit for that job is going to get attributed to the email campaign. But if they wait three weeks to book a job, then the email campaign doesn't get the credit. Edit email templates from your template list without having to access the template editor, letting you quickly update details. Nuh. Unless there's more changes coming. That's not currently the case. They did change what the screen looks like. So there's a little spot for a thumbnail that. The thumbnails are all blank right now. Hoping that's just a temporary glitch that will get worked out. By the way, Service titan on that thumbnail thing, if you actually can get a thumbnail to show up, everything's transparent with the buttons. It looks real bad. You gotta put a white background there. But you're still only able to actually edit the same stuff that you were able to edit before without having to click in and go to the main template. Editing interface. So visually there's a slight change, but nothing's really different. Don't you ever lie to me again. Go to a customer record and see if they've received emails for a campaign, including when an email was sent and the date it was opened, when it was clicked and to which campaign the customer belongs. Giving you full access to marketing details from any given customer record. Okay, so I wasn't really able to test this one because last time I spoke to somebody in the Marketing Pro department, they told me that in the next account Marketing Pro is still live. Like it will still send emails, which was terrifying to me. Nowhere else in the next account the communications go out. It won't send any text messages if you say email. And invoice doesn't actually do it. So I. So I assumed that Marketing Pro was the same deal. I asked just to be on the safe side. I thought it was a real throwaway. I was like, hey, just to make sure. I mean, I know the answer, but just to make sure, you know, I can't actually send anything from Marketing Pro out of the next account. Right? And they're like, oh no. Oh, you can like Jesus Christ, service titan. Tell somebody about that or just don't let that happen. That shouldn't be the case. That's scary. I don't like that. Anyways, all that to say, I don't have a screenshot for you on that one. See an error message if you marked your campaign as ongoing and set a fixed date in the filters for the audience selected for that campaign, ensuring your campaign and audience selections match before you send. Okay, so what this is saying is that before, if you set up a dynamic campaign, so an ongoing automatic campaign and the audience that you put in that automatic campaign had a fixed date range, a static date range, then the audience doesn't change and that will end up limiting the automation at some point. So if you're going to use a dynamic campaign, you really need to match that with a dynamic audience. And so now if those mismatch, you'll get an alert about it. Send test emails to yourself and your team before you send out to your customers, adding quality control to your marketing strategy. Great. It took me forever to find this, though I eventually found it. It's in the template editor. So in the top right corner there's that little actions dropdown. There used to be nothing under that drop down besides preview. So it was kind of pointless that it was a drop down. But now you also have this option that says send test. So you click that, you're able send out a test email to whoever and see what the thing's gonna look like. Alright, next bullet select the time of day you want your emails to go out, allowing you to better strategize and set the best times to reach your audiences for any campaign. Great. Still not quite the automated times that I really want in the future, but hey, at least we can change it now. But this also took me forever to find, so you'd think that it would be right here. Under the first step of creating a campaign, there's this delivery section the same place where you picked the date. That's not where it is. It's on the third page of creating a campaign under Build Email Sequence. I'm glad the feature is here. I think that's a weird place to put it, but whatever, it doesn't really matter. Alright, so under Memberships Enhanced membership renewals, you can now choose which membership you're going to renew after you have selected a renewal task to add or edit on an invoice or estimate. You can also renew more than one membership on an estimate. Okay, so this is only office side, but if you add a renewal task to an invoice it will give you options on which membership you want to renew. Create custom fields. You can now include additional information important to your customer memberships with customizable fields. You can also specify that a field only accepts numbers, no letters or symbols. Okay, so you can now add custom fields related to memberships. The setting for this is under Custom fields with all the rest of your custom field. It's not part of the membership settings and I can see how that would be pretty handy. It seems like it will also be tying into reporting. That's another bullet point on these release notes that you can set KPIs and things that tie into reporting with those custom fields. Alright. Mobile Warning message for on save changes to a purchase order. This one's pretty straightforward in mobile. If you go to edit a purchase order and go to tap out of it before you hit save, it'll just warn you about that nice little guardrail. Easier quantity change on invoices and estimates. This one's real minor when you go to change quantity. If you just tap it, it goes ahead and highlights the whole thing. So you can just start typing in the new number versus having to place the cursor and under reporting more flexible and robust permissions for custom reports. Better control how your custom reporting is shared. You can now specify which categories and data set templates you user can see. Additionally, when you create A new custom report. It will only be shared with the users you choose, including administrators. Before all custom reports were auto shared with all administrators. Your existing permissions for custom reports remain as is, with the added option to remove administrators from the sharing menu. This one also took me forever to find because I was looking for these new permissions. Under permissions, you know, like an idiot, but that's not where they are. There's a whole new category under the settings called reporting permissions. And there you're able to set very granular settings about what templates and what data sets everybody's allowed to see for some reason. This panel includes all users, including inactive users. I've got a big list of people who are just test accounts or people who aren't with the company anymore. That's kind of annoying. Can we get that fixed? Other than that though, this looks pretty cool. It's very granular. I do think it's kind of confusing to have certain permissions different places than other permissions. And while we're on permissions, I would really love permissions to be searchable and categorized better. But anyways, that's all I got for today. Hey, before I let you go, I'd like to thank today's sponsor, Outbound 360. Outbound 360 is a fantastic service. I actually use them personally. They can take care of all your outbounding. So following up on estimates, calling your customer base for tune ups when you're slow, calling your members to get their appointments scheduled, whatever you need, they'll take care of it. Outbounding is a really tough thing to do, right? Most companies, honestly, they kind of suck at it, but it's an amazing way to keep your board full and make sure you're not leaving a bunch of money on the table. Like I said, I use Outbound360 and they do a fantastic job. People will call our office asking for Brandy, who is our dedicated outbounder. So they don't have that third party feel. I pretty much consider Brandy a member of my company. Plus all of their agents are service titan trained, so they're able to book calls directly in Service Titan, which is a huge plus. They've also just launched Inbound360, which is their 24. 7 answering service. Hey, editing Richard here. The inbound service is actually called Inbound365. I don't know what filming Richard was talking about. That guy's an idiot. He's always making my life hard. I'm signed up for this as well. It's still too new, so I haven't actually started using it still in the onboarding process. But if the quality is even half as good as Outbound360, it's going to blow my current answering service out of the water. And again, on the inbound side, all of the agents are service titan trained and can book jobs directly on your board. So if that sounds like something you're interested in, if you're not happy with your current outbounding performance in house, or if you're not happy with your current answering service, I would definitely suggest you reach out to outbound 360 and inbound 365. Shoot an email over to maryoldbulletgroup.com and do me a favor, let her know I sent you. Appreciate it. Peace. Didn't hit the shelf this time. Time outbound 360, inbound 365, outbound 360 and inbound 365. Good at phone calls, bad at advertising.