ServiceTitan ST-41 Release Notes Overview

Alright, hang on. Sexy singles in er area want to meet you and. Great. What's going on everybody? It's Richard Coburg here, the blue collar nerd. Well, we just had a secret release and now it's time to go over the regular release. So here we go. Actually, before I jump into it, I do want to clarify I'm changing the way that I title these release note videos. I think the way I was doing it before was confusing people a little bit. So instead of saying like January release, February release, I'm just gonna name it 41, 42, whatever the release is that it's titled on the release notes. The reason I think it was confusing before is because I would say January release if I was making the video in January and the release notes came out in January, but the actual release would oftentimes not hit until the next month. So even though it said January release, the actual release didn't hit your live accounts until February and I think that had some people confused. So hopefully just naming it the release number will make it a little bit less confusing. Okay, with that said, let's go ahead and jump in now. This is a pretty long one. I am going to end up condensing a few things. As always, I do recommend checking out the release notes for yourself if you want to see all the nitty gritty details. So the first thing we've got here Under Dispatch Maps 2.0 Beta Maps 2.0 is a live updated filterable map with color coded jobs by technician. It also shows the order in which work will be performed by the technician. So this is something that I actually made a video about with with Miles, one of the product managers over Dispatch. So this has been in beta for a while. It's still in beta. I think they're just taking this as an opportunity to document it. So you still do have to ask to turn this on if this is something you want to play with. But if you're interested to see more about that, I'll put a link. You should see a card coming up in the corner of the screen here and I'll put it in the description below as well. Next, under forms, we can now link forms to equipment. So when you're creating a form office side, you know how you can choose where that form is going to show up, be it on the job or on the location page or any combination. You can now tie it to equipment. So that should be very helpful for a lot of people. Under Marketing Pro you can automatically generate new phone numbers for new campaigns. So when you create a new campaign, you can now generate a phone number within the campaign to track its success. Also set a forwarding number for your campaign to make sure incoming calls are routed to the right person on your team. Okay, so this is definitely going to simplify the workflow of making your tracking numbers work within Marketing Pro. Before it was kind of a pain in the butt because you still did have to go and manually create a tracking number to then add into Marketing Pro and that was a totally different screen. Once you're in kind of the marketing area, it's hard to navigate out of that. So you would have to maybe like use a separate tab somewhere. It was a pain. So, so having it automatically generate that is gonna definitely be helpful and also just help make sure more people use it and are tracking things properly. Along those same lines, there's a new campaign phone number merge tag. So merge tags, again, they're those little short codes that you can put into your email templates that will populate that information. So like customer address or last service date or whatever it is. So now there's one, it just says phone number on the actual selector page for the merge tag, but that is going to be the campaign phone number. So the phone number that was generated for this email campaign that you're working on. And we also have example audiences and campaigns. This I really like. So you can now use pre built audiences and campaigns to learn how to build optimal marketing strategies for your business. Example audiences and campaigns come in four themes. Idle accounts, aging equipment, membership renewal, and unsold estimates. So you'll have some pre made campaigns for you. Now, if you're just getting started, or if you've been on Marketing Pro for a while, but you haven't really dove in that deeply, then this is gonna be really helpful. These are campaigns that are pretty much built for you to get the ball rolling. And you can dig in and see how those campaigns were built to help you wrap your head around how to build your own campaigns in the future. All right, next, under call booking, click to call on bookings. So when viewing bookings from online sources like the web Scheduler, you can now click the phone number on the booking to call the customer. So I haven't been able to test this since it's all in the next account right now. But I'm assuming this is gonna work the same way like it does in the mobile side with your technicians where they kinda tap the phone number to call and then their phone rings, they pick it up and then that connects them to the customer. I'm assuming it's going to work that same way. And if I'm correct on that, then you'll need to make sure that all of your CSRs who are going to be clicking these buttons to call have DID set up in their Service Titan account. DID stands for direct inward dial, and that's a phone number that is tied specifically to that person's phone. So if you have a call queue, a DID is a way to call a specific person without getting thrown into the queue. And the reason you'll want to have that is let's say somebody wants to click to call, so they click the button. But this phone number that's set up for them in Service Titan is the main office phone number. So it goes into the queue, it rings to whoever's next in line to receive a phone call, and another CSR picks up and then they get connected to a client and now they're confused that they're on the phone with somebody who's also confused because they're. The CSR thinks that they called them and they think that the csr it's just going to be bad. So it's a good feature. But if you're planning on using it, make sure that you have direct inward dials set up. That's something you would have to do through your phone provider. Under chat thread now shows technician photo. So if you have set up your technician profiles with photos, then when your dispatch notification shows up in the chat threads, you'll see the technician pictures. It's pretty cool. Under dispatch, right click to reassign technicians. So now on the dispatch board, if you right click a job, that menu that comes up reassign is now an option. And that's helpful because before the only way to reassign was to either a drag and drop on the dispatch board, which works and it's easy, but it can be imprecise and you can make mistakes that way. Or you would have to leave the dispatch board and go onto the job page, which is just more cumbersome. So adding that to the right click menu makes a more convenient way to do that. Message filtering. To ensure you see more of the communication that helps you dispatch efficiently, you can now filter the messages that show up in your queue on the dispatch board. This is something that was actually part of the ghost release. So we've gone over this and this is actually live already. I guess there's or just taking this opportunity to document it somewhere. And we have project filters for the schedule board. So to make it easier to Quickly reference multi day jobs and projects. You can now filter your view of the schedule board using the project number as a filter. All right, next, under follow ups, Audit Trail Entry for dismissal of Recurring Service events. When you dismiss a recurring service event, you now see a record of it on the audit trail for the job. This ensures that if anyone on your team has questions as to why the event was dismissed, they know who to ask about it. Okay, so this is definitely helpful, but I think it's a little bit confusing the way it's worded here because it says that it's going to be on the audit trail for the job, but we're dismissing the recurring service, so we're not ever making a job. So it's not on the job. It actually goes on the recurring service itself. So like if you're on the location page and you see the recurring services, you'll see one that says dismissed and you can click on that recurring service and. And there you'll see an audit trail that shows you who dismissed it. Maybe I'm misunderstanding something there, in which case I apologize, but that's the way I understand how this works. That's, that's what I found when I was testing it. So I just wanted to clarify that a little bit. Under invoicing Preview statements, you can now preview statements before you send them to customers, making it easier for you to prevent things like statement errors before sharing with your customers. So this one I couldn't really figure out when I was testing. I mean, when I go to send a statement, it still shows me the body, which I believe was always the case. But I still don't see like a preview of all the PDFs or any like that. Again, maybe I'm misunderstanding something, or maybe it's further down the trail after I hit send, but I'm in the next account, so that doesn't really work. So I couldn't figure that one out. But maybe I'm just misunderstanding something. That one's probably on me, to be honest. AR Transaction Reports Now Include Filter as of Date this new filter gives you the ability to run AR transactions reports without the limitation of date ranges. With the removal of Payment Status column and invoice status and and Payment Status Filter. This new filter gives you the ability to run AR transaction reports without the limitation of date ranges. With the removal of Payment Status column and invoice status and payment status filters, you can now use the as of Date filter to have a more comprehensive view of all of your outstanding invoices. So yeah, the filters work. A little bit differently now. I'll put a screenshot up. By the way, when I'm auditing Service Titan accounts for my work with blue collar profits. If you're not familiar, we're a team and we help people with their Service Titan issues or Service Titan consultants. I often see the permission for the AR tab disabled even for accounting positions. So go into your permission settings and double check that the AR Management checkbox is checked off. For people who need to be able to see the AR Management, the AR Management screen is really helpful. That's a page that's under the Invoice tab. It's a really clean place to manage all of your accounts receivable. Even if you don't have accounts receivable or don't think you have accounts receivable, you should probably take a look in that tab, make sure it's enabled and go see. You'll probably have some data that needs cleaning up or maybe even some money that's been lying on the ground that she didn't know about. All right? Also related to the AR Management screen Add Balance Forward Amount to the statements using new Date Filters when using AR Management, you can now use the newly added from and to Date filters to send easy to read Balance Forward statements to your customers. Balance Forward statements include a balance forward amount and transaction details within the date range selected in the filter. Next, customers can filter invoices when making payments online. So this update is related to online payments. That's the feature that allows people to pay you remotely via that online payments link. I went over that in my last video, but real quick one more time because I do feel like it's underutilized. So under Customer Communications and email you want to make sure that the online payments link is in your invoice email template and in your statement email template and I guess I should just close. I do believe that this is a Service Titan Payments exclusive feature. Anyway, when your customer clicks the online payment link from their statement email, they currently see a table that lists all of their outstanding invoices. This table now includes filters to view the invoices they want, giving them the flexibility to quickly identify and pay for specific invoices. Very nice. View emailed statements in the audit trail in the customer record you can now see an audit trail of all the statements you sent to customers through Service Titan. You can view the statement and message sent with the email. This gives you the ability to see a historical account for all of your statement communication. View original invoice PDF emailed to customers. So with this now, when you email out an invoice and you see that in the audit trail, the invoice will be clickable so that you can click that, it'll open up the PDF and you can see exactly which invoice we're talking about. Small but helpful. And that kind of seems to be the theme of a lot of the updates we've been seeing from service site and lately. All right, next, faster loading job screen. This again was part of the secret lease, so we kind of already talked about this. To break it down, I mean, maybe there's more to it, but from what I can tell, the increased speed seems to be from the fact that it's now loading the audit trail separately from everything else. So before you would click on a job and then you would stay on whatever page you're originating from until it loaded everything, the audit trail and all of the information about the location. But now it no longer waits to have all of the audit trail information to start showing you the stuff that you need. So the customer name, the contact information, the location address, all that stuff is going to show up a lot faster. And then at the bottom you'll see the audit trail loading and it will pop in as it loads. So that ends up putting more information in front of your face faster. All right, under Marketing Pro. Under Marketing Pro, didn't we already do this? Yes, there's two Marketing Pro sections. All right, under Marketing Pro two. This time it's longer. New Marketing Pro customers now have a mandatory warm up period to ensure that new Marketing Pro customers are using the email marketing best practices. The total number of emails they can send each day is now limited. If a campaign is scheduled to send more emails than the daily limit, emails that exceed the threshold will be sent the following day. Each day more emails can be sent until the end of the warm up period when all restrictions are lifted. Okay, so I feel like this one needs some context. Let me try and help explain why they're doing this. So Marketing Pro is tough because some of the success of it is in the hands of ServiceTitan and some of the success of it is in the hands of us, the users. And there's room for improvement on both sides. So Service Titan is doing a lot of work right now in improving how many emails get through, get through the spam filters and all that stuff. This is an especially big issue with Gmail, so it seems to be trending in the right direction. It's not perfect yet. It's a tough thing because it's all like machine learning Algorithms. So even talking to Google support and saying, hey, what can we do to better improve how many of our customers emails are getting through? They'll kind of, you know, hmm. And ha. And beat around the bush because they don't really know the algorithm. It just do what it do. So that's the work that ServiceTitan has to do, but there's also work that we have to do. So when you first get started with Marketing Pro, you have this subdomain and that subdomain has no reputation whatsoever. So if you just get started and blast out 2,000 emails on day one, that's gonna put you in a tough spot. That's gonna give your subdomain the reputation of being spammy. So you have to ramp up. You have to start trickling out emails so that the algorithm can see that people actually are looking at your emails. They're actually opening them and clicking on things within them and maybe they're actually emails that people want to see. You have to do that a little bit at a time. If you just go 0 to 100, you're just going to end up in the spam filter. So this warm up period is to make sure that that doesn't happen to you so that even if you're unaware of that and you try to send 5,000 emails on day one, it doesn't let you. So I can see how that one would come off as kind of a jerk move, but it's actually a good thing. Alright, next we have instant feedback when writing subject lines. So when you write a new subject line for a marketing campaign, Marketing Pro will give you feedback on its quality and provide suggestions to help you improve it. Okay, so that's pretty cool. Along the same lines as the previous thing, kind of helping you along to make sure that you don't put in a subject that's spammy and gets caught in the spam filter. So let's test it out. All right, so let's see. What up bitches, it's your boy. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 exclamation points. And then I see there's like a little thing here. Scored this subject line. What? A B. Okay, that's a better score than I was expecting. Alright, hang on. Sexy singles in er area want to meet you and great. A bit a B. I don't know, Service titan. I mean I see what you're trying to do here and I like the direction but I just don't think this is gonna be very helpful. I mean for one the discoverability on it is pretty Low. It was hard for me to figure out how it was supposed to be grading me. I kind of expected just like a hovering pop up type of situation telling me how that scored. I didn't realize I had to actually like manually click this faint gray thing to figure out what the score is. Plus Chrome has this little contact card thing to put in your autofill stuff and a lot of extensions will put stuff in that same spot as well. So it's kind of covered up on my screen. You can tell. And I mean I can see why you're using this third party, what's it called, sendcheckit.com I mean I get why you would do that. It's a lot quicker than trying to build something internally, but boy, this seems generous. Maybe if I put exclamation points, 3, 4, 5 exclamation points that got me to a C. I mean, what's it take to get a failing grade on this? It's a good direction. I like the thought behind it, but I think it needs to be more straight up guard rail y than this. I mean, no matter what, you kind of gotta let people bypass it if they want to bypass it. But for this to be so hard to find and so generous. Alright, next new options when building audiences. You can now create audiences for your marketing content across a wide range of filters, including, and I'm just gonna kind of shoot through these real quick, new customers, recurring services for customers without a membership invoice and customer balance. If you wanna read the details on what you can do with all those different data sets, check out the full release notes. In the interest of not making this video an hour long, I'm not gonna dig into all of those here. You can also now manually type campaign launch date so you don't have to use that selector, you can just type it in. If it's way out in the future and you don't wanna have tons of pages, audience details pop up, you can now hover over the name of an audience to see the total number of customers in that audience as well as the number of unique email and mailing addresses. Small error in this note. It's actually not the name of the campaign, it's over the reach number. So you hover over the reach number and then you'll get that pop up and customers can now choose which content they unsubscribe from. This one's very good. When your customers click the unsubscribe link in one of your marketing emails, they can now choose which types of content they want to continue receiving from you. Content options include estimate follow ups, equipment, service check ins, membership reminders, haven't heard from your reminders, as well as newsletters, promotions and special announcements. So basically this means that just because somebody doesn't want to receive one type of email from you doesn't mean they have to unsubscribe from everything. Which is how it worked before. If they hit unsubscribe, they were unsubscribed from all of your emails. Under Memberships we have a couple new additions to membership report templates, so Improved Membership Renewals reporting in the Customer Membership Report template improvements include the newly added Renewed into column which lists the membership type that was renewed, making it easier to identify if a membership was renewed or not. Membership renewal sales details are now included in the Sold by and Sold on columns, and they do Note here that any saved reports that you already have built will be updated to reflect these changes. Also Deferred Revenue Filters in the Customer Membership Report Template the Deferred Revenue, Recognized Revenue and Deferred Revenue Balance columns of the Customer Membership Report template now include filters that let you set a range of totals to include in your report. This allows you to focus on your deferred revenue reporting on specific dollar amounts without having to export your report into a spreadsheet application we also have improved navigation when modifying recurring services. So now when you open a recurring service record from the Service Location Record or Customer Membership Record to make edits, after you save your changes, you return to the page you navigated from. This makes customizing memberships more intuitive. Previously, after editing a recurring service record, you return to the Customer Record page. Yeah, that was annoying. Thank you for fixing that. And finally, under Memberships Recurring Membership Billing Process Validates Billing Templates now if you try to process billing for a recurring membership using a billing template that includes material items, it moves to the Action Required list with this error message material on Billing Template. This prevents you from billing customers improperly for materials. So nothing to really think about here. Just a guardrail. All right, getting close Under Projects Nothing Calendar button on the Project screen so that you can more easily access an overall timeline view of your project. You can now click Calendar on the Project screen to go directly to the Schedule board. The Schedule board automatically filters using the project so that you can only see the jobs relevant to it. So this ties back to that other update we saw in the notes before, where we can now filter the schedule board by project number and you've now heard me say schedule board quite a few times. So You've probably thrown up a little bit in your mouth, so I'll just give you a minute to go get some mouthwash and then come back. I've got some good news for you. Go ahead, I'll wait. All right, look, I know the schedule board isn't super useful for most people right now, but I did see a preview, a mockup of some ideas, some things that are hopefully to come, and that tab should be getting a lot more useful. Can't show you the mockup. I don't even have the mock up to show you. But you will see me seeing the mock up in the interview that I did with Fahey, which either it has released already or I might save it until after this one. I'm not sure yet. But keep an eye out for it if you haven't seen it yet. All right? Finally, under reports new entry method column in the credit card transaction report. So you can now run the credit card transaction report to learn which credit card payments were keyed in, swiped or processed using a saved credit card. That's good data to have. That's a very good addition. And enhanced reporting interface. Reports have been updated offering a more intuitive design including an improved date picker, additional report filters, a new column search bar that makes it easier to customize your reports. You can also duplicate reports, letting you easily create multiple variations of custom report. Oh hell yeah, that's cheating. Service titan, you know I can't resist me a good duplicate button, but no really? Yeah, that's great. Duplicate button, all the things. And I also like what they've done here. When you go to the reports page, there's something built into the user interface to let you know what's been updated and how to use the new features. I think that's the right direction because I mean, yes, there's release notes, but not everybody reads them. Yes, there's blue collar nerd, but not everybody tragically watches them. So just having something in the user interface the first time you see it after it's been updated, kind of walking you through it. I think that's a good direction to go. And the last thing on these release notes is a fix. Statements when emailing customer statements, your customers can now see your company logo on the statement PDF attachment in the email. Email when emailing customer statements, your customers can now see your company logo on the statement PDF attachment in the email. That's great. We don't send a lot of statements at my company, but that is something I've seen posted about in the Facebook groups and wherever so I'm happy to see that that was identified as a bug and corrected. Anyways, that's all I got for today. Please subscribe to this YouTube channel. If you've not done that already, hit that little bell icon next to it so that YouTube notifies you anytime I upload a new video. Hit the like button if you liked the video and you want to see more. And let me know how you feel about the updates that have been coming out lately. Like I mentioned, they've all been smaller little things just kind of closing small gaps. But personally, I think that's the right move right now. I think that's what the product needs right now more than groundbreaking new features. So for the next few months, we just get small, little gap closing changes. I'm totally fine with that, but let me know what you think. Appreciate it. Peace. Sam.