ServiceTitan Phones Pro Review

What's going on, everybody? It's Richard Cobberger here, the blue collar nerd. I'm just getting over a cold. Sorry. In this video, I'm going to be reviewing Surface Titan Phones Pro, or we'll call it a first looks review. I might do a second looks video on this later, but this is what I think so far. And honestly, I have a lot of mixed feelings about this. Let me start with the stuff I like. The alerts you can set up are great. You can set up certain alerts for things like, hey, there's no agents on duty. All of your agents are marked as off duty. Very important to know when something like that happens. So to be able to set up an alert is really cool. I've been impressed with the call quality. It's been noticeably better than my previous provider. Your mileage may vary on that. I've heard some people say that they've had trouble with their call quality, but my quality has definitely improved. Everything sounds super crisp, super clear. The call transcripts that are automatically generated are okay. They're definitely not spot on, word for word, perfect. But you can get the gist of what's going on in the phone call. And for me, that's still enough to make it useful because I don't know what it is. Something about listening to a recorded phone call makes me deeply uncomfortable. Like borderline physically painful. I hate doing it, and reading a transcript of a phone call gives me none of those feelings. But just having a transcript where I can at least understand the general flow of the conversation, that's great. That's super helpful for me because it means I'm going to be auditing more phone calls than I would previously. By the way, drop me a comment. Is that just a me thing? Like, do other people have that? Is it weird to listen to phone calls for anybody else? I don't know what it is. Basically, I just want to know how weird I am. I also like how complex you can get with the call flows. You can have a failover number, so if agents aren't available for whatever reason, it will just automatically forward to your call center or whatever. You can also set a queue limit, so if there's too many people in the queue, they will get pushed over into your call center or a time limit on hold. If somebody's been on hold for too long, they will roll over onto your call center. You can offer an option to your clients where they don't have to wait on hold if they don't want to. They can press a button and then the system will call them back when it's their turn in the queue. I think that's pretty handy. There's a whole lot of options with the setup. Whatever your dream setup is in your head, you can probably achieve it with Pose Pro and other VoIP systems have all that stuff as well. I'm just trying to give credit where credit's due. Another feature I think is really cool are the trigger cards. So you can set it up so that when somebody says a certain word, you can populate a script or whatever you want to show up for your agent at that. And that's pretty handy. But there's some problems. First, we gotta talk about the onboarding process. Two thumbs down. I'm sorry, guys. It was bad. Onboarding took a really, really long time. I'm still technically not done. My numbers still aren't actually ported. During the onboarding process, I was dealing with a lot of different people. And all these people were just names on a screen to me. So I never really knew who to talk to about what, whose job was what. It all just got very confusing. Things would kind of grind to a halt and I'd be like, looking around, like, who do I email? Like, what happened? Where did the ball get dropped? Is it me? Are they waiting on me for something? Who do I need to talk to? It was just a lot. It took a very long time. On my go live day, there was nobody to really support us. So in the morning, I have two agents, and one of those agents couldn't receive calls. The other agent could receive calls, but they were still going through our old provider. I'm in Atlanta. Service Titan is based out of California. They do have an Atlanta office, but nobody there was able to support me on this. So for the first three hours of the day, one of my agents couldn't receive calls. Now, luckily, I was at least able to receive calls one day way or another. But that is pure lucky star circumstance that that was the case. I could have just as easily had no phones whatsoever, and I would have had to wait three hours for somebody to help me. Well, that's no good at all. It's the cold. There was also really no training on how to use all this stuff. Nobody went over the features with us or showed us where to go, how to set up coaching groups, how to do all these cool things that they say you can do. It was pretty much just go live and bye. So lat left me to figure a lot out on my own. For example, those cool cards that I was talking about before that, you can populate based on trigger words. That's not part of the API tie in with Dialpad. You have to have the Dialpad app downloaded on the computer and then you can get those cards to show up. But nobody told me that. And that brings me to an important point. Service Titan Phones Pro is Dialpad. Dialpad is a VoIP system that already existed that ServiceTitan has partnered with and tied their API in with. I'll get more to that a little bit later. Right now all I'm trying to say was onboarding. Two thumbs down. Here's how I'd like to see it. During the initial getting all the information together phase, I want one point of contact. One guy or one gal. One person. They can communicate with all the different teams and people who need to coordinate on this. But I want to have a single person and I'd really like to have a web meeting with them. I want to face with the name my Go Live day. I want that one point of contact to have their calendar clear. Their whole day is making sure that my Go Live is smooth. Because here's the thing. This ain't my first rodeo. It's never smooth. Telecom stuff, switching providers, there's always a problem on the Go Live day. I've never not had that happen. So I wasn't surprised when it didn't go smooth. But I was just like, why didn't we plan for this, guys? And when I say that I want their calendar clear, I mean my time zone. I need them either in my time zone or adjusting to my time zone for that day because phones are really important. I also want that point of contact to do training with myself and my managers and my team. Show us how to use all this stuff after we've gone live. I want that point of contact to remain my point of contact for at least a couple of weeks on everything Phones Pro because and bringing me into my next gripe. Support for Phones Pro is bad. Since I've gone live, I've probably put in five or six Phones Pro related tickets into Service Titan and every single one of those had to be escalated to telecom. Not a single one could just be handled on the spot. It was always let me get that over to telecom and we'll email you back. We're usually Talking about a 24 hour turnaround time with that. For example, today I wrote in one of the features of Phones Pro is supposed to be that you can have a coaching group and the coach of that coaching group is supposed to be able to view, listen in on live calls, view the transcript live and barge in on a live call if necessary. But when my manager goes into the live calls tab of the coaching group section in the dialpad app, which you have to have installed for this to work, which again, would have been nice to know, it never shows any live calls, even if there are live calls. And it shows live calls elsewhere, you can go over to the agent and it'll show on a call, but then you go back to live calls and there are none. So you can't do all that cool coaching stuff that I was just talking about. Put in a request for that today, and once again escalated to telecom. It's just, it's just frustrating. And you know what? I'm okay with frustrating because luckily these problems have been not super urgent. But look, guys, these are the phones. It's the phones. It's the main way that people contact the business and say, hey, business, I got money and I want you to have it. The phones have to work. We took a pie chart of all the possible support tickets that service Titan handles on a daily basis. Phone related ones have the highest probability of being urgent, and yet in my experience, they have the lowest probability of being able to be handled on the spot. It's not great. And while we're on the subject of coaching groups, let me bring up another point related to that. Whoa. You're in a different place and you changed clothes. I know, right? Movie magic. What a time to be alive. Anyways, Surfacetitan Phones Pro is broken up into two different types of seats or licenses. There's the standard and there's the advanced or dialpad. Calls it the talk and the sails. Same thing, different branding. And the advanced seat or the sail seat is significantly more expensive. And that's the seat you're gonna need for all of your CSRs. That's the, the one that lets you do all of the fancy call routing, that's the one that gets you the transcripting, all of the stuff that makes it more than just a regular old phone. What I didn't realize going into this was that not only do your CSRs need it, but coaches for your CSRs are going to need that as well. So anybody who you want to be able to listen in on live calls and barge in on live calls and read the live transcript, they're going to need an advanced seat as well. So you really need more advanced seats than you probably think. Another major problem with Phones Pro right now is how it handles call centers. The big advantage of using dialpad through Servicetitan through Phones Pro is that it's tied in with ServiceTitan's API. So no more clicking the green call bubble, right? No more big old list of abandoned calls. Well, if you use a call center, an answering service, all of the calls that they take still end up in abandoned. So we haven't solved the problem. To me, that's not something that's half solvable. It's either solved or it's not. There's still unreliable data. I still have to filter through all these abandoned calls and classify them manually. We haven't solved the problem there. And I hate to be the guy that points out a problem with no suggested solution, but I don't know enough about telecom to have a suggestion here. I just know that this isn't good enough. We've got to figure out some other way to deal with call centers there. Also, for at least a while was this thing where when my call center took a call, it would only record the first minute of the phone call. And that was apparently not just me. Other companies were reporting that as well. I was checking again today and that seems to have gone away. That seems to have been taken care of. But again, just another one of those bumps in the road. The call center thing, by the way, is what kept Phones Pro from ever having a beta test. There was supposed to be a big beta for Phones Pro and it never went live because they didn't have any solution at all in place for call centers. That was something that Dial Pad and Service Titan had to kind of custom build for this relationship, as I understand. So I'm not crazy surprised. There's some bumps in the road there. Alright, here's something I found really irritating. So to use Dialpad through Phones Pro through Service Titan, we're paying a little bit more. Dialpad has certain rates and then Service Titans, you know, put some buffer on top of that to cover all of their telecom team and their support and all that kind of stuff. Fair enough, right? But Dialpad has some features that Servicetitan has made unavailable. For example, Dialpad has a Slack integration. I use Slack now I use Dialpad. I was pretty excited about this, but when I went to go enable it, that tab wasn't available to me. When I asked about it, I was told that Servicetitan is not supporting that, even though there's no reason that it wouldn't be supported. The API is the same. They've basically just hidden it. Hey, Servicetitan, I'm paying more. I'm paying more to use it through, you so don't take stuff out. Don't take stuff. I want more stuff. Don't take stuff out. I don't like that. I also think it's a big missed opportunity that you can't set alerts based on trigger words, at least not that I've found. You can do some cool stuff in analytics and reports for certain words, you know, cancel and stuff like that. But there's no way for me to just get, you know, a text message every time somebody on the other end of the phone says the word cancel. Text message, there's no way to do that. But all the pieces for that are in place. It seems like a big missed opportunity. Dialpad also has a cool thing called short abandon. So if a call is under a certain threshold, say five seconds, it's abandoned. But it's a short abandoned, it's classified separately. That feature is not really tied into Service Titan. So I still have a whole bunch of these like 0 second calls that are just robocalls, dialers, whatever they are, that still landed my abandoned calls list and have to be reclassified. Even though Dialpad can filter those out. That to me is another big missed opportunity. I mean, these things are supposed to be tied together, right? And a big feature of Service Titan Phones Pro is supposed to be that I don't have to worry about these abandoned calls that aren't really abandoned calls anymore. But I still get those 0 to 5 second robocalls in there and I still get all my call center calls in there. That to me really sucks because it makes the data worthless. Abandoned calls are a big deal when they're truly abandoned calls, but since the abandoned calls list is always so full of stuff, the number becomes meaningless. I see a big number in there and it doesn't scare me. But some of those could truly be abandoned calls. The only way to find out is to sit there and filter through each and every one of them. And Surface Titan Phones Pro still doesn't really solve that problem. Anyways, overall, Overall, I like Dialpad. I think it's a pretty good VoIP system. Call quality is great. The tech stuff is great. The transcripts are pretty cool, even though they're not perfect. The trigger cards are awesome. The reporting is very good. But I don't feel like the tie in with Servicetitan and their API is really providing enough value right now. I feel like there's so much more that can be done. For example, I really shouldn't need to have a Dialpad app at all, right? The card should be able to populate in the Service Titan user interface, listening in on a live call and barging in on one that should all be doable from the Service Titan ui. Really the only thing that's happening right now as far as I can tell with the API tie in, is the fact that you don't have to click the green call bubble anymore. But even the benefits of that get watered down if you use a call center, which most people do. So I don't know. I think it's got great potential and I think if you're already planning on switching phone companies anyway, you should go ahead and jump ship and switch to Service Titan Phones Pro. But if you're good right now on your current provider, I mean look, unless green call bubble clicking is just an unsolvable epidemic in your company, like nobody's doing it, it's giving you garbage data and you've tried and tried and you just can't get people to do it. I don't know. I think I might hold off for now. I don't regret going to Phones Pro again. I do like dial bed. I think I'm just a little bummed about the missed potential here. Bummed about the missed potential is what I was saying. If you are going to Phones Pro, you're planning on doing it soon. Some things to know if you're already on a POIP system, you may be able to use your current desk phones. That was the case for me. I'm still using the same desk phones I always had. That's been great. I'll put a link in the description below of desk phones that are compatible. I'm also going to put a link below to some headsets that will work well with the system. Again, Phones Pro is a totally voiceover ip. It's an Internet system so you don't necessarily need a phone at all. You need a microphone and you need speakers. The computer's the phone. I'll keep you guys updated. I haven't really been using it that long. Like I said, I'm still technically not fully onboarded. So I'll definitely be keeping you guys in the loop as things change. Now before I wrap things up here, here, come here, come here. Come closer. Wanna have a little chat? I want to tell you about Today's sponsor. Outbound 360 and inbound 365. Outbound 360 is fantastic. They'll do all your outbound calling or they'll work with your in house team. They'll follow up on stale estimates. They'll reach out to Customers you haven't heard from in a while, they'll schedule tune ups. They'll just call and say happy birthday to your clients if you want to. But you know what? Today I want to focus on what they just launched, which is their inbound division. Inbound 365. How do I describe inbound 365? Inbound 365 is like, okay, you've used an answering service before, right? You know what that is? Okay. Imagine that. But good. They do a fantastic job over there training their CSRs both in customer service and with service titan. I've seen a night and day difference ever since I switched to outbound365. Listening to the calls, I mean, you can just audibly tell within the first five seconds of the call that this is not my old answering service anymore. The CSRs are pleasant. They're helpful. They know how to handle the questions that come their way, and they actually care if they book the job or not. And that's really important. I mean, they actually bill based on how many jobs they book for you. You. Inbound 365 is so. Hang on. This guy's been ruining my shots all day. I'm trying to talk about in about 365. Come on, man. Some people just don't get it. Why? Why? There's more of them. Just disrespectful. Just disrespectful. They. They paid for this? See those two cars? They're your old answering service. You know, they're loud, they're rude, they're obnoxious. They don't care what you're doing. They're just going to fly right by. They think they're too cool for you. But inbound365, they're. That water fountain back there. Gentle, soothing. They care. I mean, I guess the water fountain doesn't care, but anyways, if you're not happy with your current answering service, which you're probably not, because, let's be honest, they mostly suck. Reach out to mary over at outbound 316. Inbound 365. That's maryoldbulletgroup.com and do me a favor. Let her know I sent you inbound 365 like an answering service, except it doesn't suck ass. That's not their slogan. They keep telling me I can say whatever, which is very dangerous. Anyways, that's all I got for today. Hey, I super appreciate you coming to my channel, checking out my content. By the way, I am working on a service titan coaching group. I currently have a test group going and I am on week two with my testees. Don't call them that, Richard. I'm currently on week two with my test group and after about four to six weeks of testing we'll be going live. So if that sounds like something you're interested in, check out the description below. I'm gonna have a form link down there that you can fill out to join the wait list. If you're on the waitlist, I will just send you some more information once we're going live. Don't forget to like the video. If you enjoyed this content, you want to see more like it, subscribe to the channel. If you haven't done that already. Tell all your friends and colleagues that this is the best dang YouTube channel in the world. I'll catch you guys in the next one. Peace Woo on the Foams Pro onboarding team. Goodbye Sam.