ServiceTitan's COVID Product Pack | More Than Expected!

What's going on, everybody? It's Richard Coburg here, the blue collar nerd. As you can see, not in the usual filming location today I had to get out of the house, so tried to find myself a nice isolated spot here. Drove out to the lake. Other than this, I have not left my apartment in several days. So I just thought I'd come out here and, you know, see a tree. Now there has just recently been a webinar from service titan going over some response that they're doing for this whole outbreak situation. So this video, I'm just going to be reviewing what we learned there, clarifying a couple of things where I feel like I can clarify and giving some opinions. Most of this stuff has not actually launched yet, so once things start rolling out, you can expect to see more detailed videos then. Now in this webinar they actually announced that they're giving us honestly a lot more than I was even expecting. Let's start with the low hanging fruit. And that's a contactless customer experience. We pretty much knew this one was coming. So online estimates are going to work better for same day work because right now they're really not built for that. They're built for more of an installation situation. Ooh, installation situation. Installation situation where, you know, somebody goes out, leaves multiple estimates, leaves. The client can then sign off on that online estimate and then a separate job is booked to go and install whatever they chose to go with. But now there's a lot of people trying to use it for a totally different use case, which is that the technician is there ready to do the work, but nobody wants to touch their dirty, nasty, stinky device. So. So we're gonna be able to use online estimates without booking separate jobs. In addition to that, we're also gonna be able to get all those other signatures online, the authorization of work, the three day right to cancel and the work complete. That way there's absolutely no reason why your client should have to touch the technician's iPad. They've also added a new notification so that a technician can get a text message once the client's payment has gone through. They're also adding in new pre built office productivity reports. So since a lot of people have their office staff working from home now, these reports will help management kind of keep an eye on things and see daily reports of who's booking what and when. Looking at the screens, it looks like we've got columns for obviously the name of the csr calls taken, lead calls, inbound calls booked, inbound booking rate, unbooked Calls manual, calls booked. It looks like there's probably some more columns that you would have to scroll to see, but that's what we can see in the screenshot. Now, in addition to that, there's also an employee activity report, and that one basically puts all of the audit trail information in one place. So in the screenshot here, you can see Amy booked a call for job number one, two, whatever. Amy scheduled a job for job number whatever. Brad dispatched whoever to job number whatever. So you can just kind of see all of that audit trail information for various different jobs in one spot. Now, for phones, they also talked about trying to implement some sort of phones panic button. Now, if I'm understanding the goal here correctly, I think that what we're trying to do here is create some sort of quick way to let office staff receive calls from home, even without Phones Pro. So with Phones Pro, being that it's a VoIP system, it's already pretty easy to take calls from wherever you are. But I believe they're trying to achieve a similar result with any phones that are routed through Service Titan. Whether it's Phones Pro or not, they're also going to be pushing out office payroll early. So office payroll is a highly requested feature to be able to pay office staff through Service Titan, the way that we can pay, you know, service technicians and field staff through Service Titan, with clocking in, clocking out time, tracking meal breaks, all that good stuff. This is something that was already in the works, but it seems like they're going to be rushing it out in response to this whole situation. And speaking of payroll, they're also going to be rushing out enhancements on the technician side of things. So they're going to be pushing out payroll approval and sign off early. So that's basically going to give managers an easy way to review payroll before it goes through. And it's going to give the field staff themselves the ability to view their payroll ahead of time and sign off on it or put in a dispute so they can see their own hours commissions. However it is you pay, and they can sign off on that or dispute it. Now, I'm not 100% sure, but a feature that kind of goes hand in hand with this feature that's also in beta is Configurable payroll. Configurable payroll basically just gives you a whole lot more flexibility in how you're able to pay technicians through Servicetitan. You know, our industry tends to have a lot of varying and fairly complex pay structures, and configurable payroll fits with a lot more situations I didn't really catch if they're also pushing that out early or if they're just pushing this sign off side of things. I believe if I understood correctly, they're taking both of these things out of closed beta, meaning that you still won't just have this by default, but you can opt into it now if you want to, making it an open beta now. I think the way this was phrased in the webinar led to a little bit of confusion. I know that I was a little bit taken off guard because there was some sort mention about configurable payroll or you know, these payroll figures in general being intended as part of a Pro product, but they're going to make it temporarily available as something like that along those lines. But we did get some clarification from Ara in the Facebook group. It was kind of buried in a comment section, so I just wanted to point that out in case anybody missed it. He said Apologies for the miscommunication. The payroll features we discussed on the webinar are not going to be part of a separate paid Pro product. Some customers signed up a long time ago when we only had one package. I many signed up in the past couple of years after we evolved to offer multiple options packages to fit businesses of different sizes and ambitions. Just like many of you evolved to offering multiple options packages to your customers. We are still building many of these features with lots of input from customers here. Some of the features had previously been communicated to customers as being available in a particular package. When customers signed up, they'll continue to be in those packages just as customers would expect for other features. We haven't determined a package. We released hundreds of improvements and features in the past year and all of this takes bandwidth. Given the situation we're all in. We just wanted to make sure to make these available for free for several months to everyone immediately, without worrying about anything else. If they could be of value to contractors to help during COVID while we continue to improve them and finalize their official release instead of investing our bandwidth in other things. So basically, if I'm understanding him correctly here, what he's saying is that these product features, these payroll features, they're going to be part of certain packages of ServiceTitan like when you sign up. So when you sign up for Service Titan now, and it wasn't like this when I signed up back in 2015, of course, but now when you sign up there's different levels and these features are only going to be part of specific levels. They haven't determined exactly which level that's going to be yet. He's just saying that it's going to be for everybody right now. But if you signed up without levels, then you're going to get this for free once it rolls out. It's also possible that some of these features are like prerequisites that are necessary to eventually release a planned Pro product in the future, but that's just speculation on my part. The point is, he's saying there's not going to be any, like, Payroll Pro that you have to pay specifically for as an extra feature. It will eventually be part of a higher tier when you're signing up for Service Titan to begin with. Now, in addition to that, and this is something I didn't see coming, but they're going to be putting out a Covid special version of Marketing Pro out, available for free to all users. So this version will be available temporarily and with it you can leverage the audience Builder to target customers with the right messages at the right time. Access special email templates to help you communicate with your customers during the COVID 19 pandemic. Run a single live or scheduled campaign at a time and reach all customers that you've worked with within the last year. So they did nerf it a little bit. It's not quite as fully featured as the full version of Marketing Pro, but it's still pretty dang capable and they're giving it to everybody for free. So, I mean, can't really complain. This is actually pretty smart on their part and we'll see more examples of it going forward. But this is a total win win. All the users get access to this for free as basically like a free trial. And, and it's going to have all the same benefits as any other free trial, which is that people start using it, they start seeing the benefits of it, they get a little bit used to it, they start liking it, and when it's eventually time for it to go away, they don't want it to go away. So it helps Servicetitan too, which that's not me trying to call them out. I think that's brilliant. Like I said, everybody wins. Now, here's another example where they're making some paid functionality free. So for three months, everybody on Servicetitan Payments Mobile Check Captures will be free. So usually when you scan in a check on mobile, there's a small fee, it's not very much, it's like a few cents per check. But hey, every little bit helps. So we super appreciate that, thank you. And what strikes me as an even bigger deal, they're making the membership renewal protection free for three months. So if you're not already aware what that is, is if you have recurring memberships, you know, memberships that get billed on people's credit cards. This is a system that will automatically update people's expiring credit cards, which basically saves your office staff from having to make a bunch of extra outbound calls to people whose cards are expired or have changed or whatever. Again, Win Win helps everybody out in time of need. Plus they're free trialing something that they might want to stick with later on. They're also going to be working with Greensky to get some special promotional included in their Greensky integration. It looks like that's going to include a true no interest and no payments option for 6 to 12 months, conversion to a 120 month fixed APR loan thereafter with no interest incurring during this promotional period. It says there's going to be four special promotional plans, so I'm curious to see what the difference is between those. There was also mention of adjustable capacity planning. This is again something that's been in the works for a little while. It seems like they're just going to be pushing out a little bit early. We'll go into a lot more detail on it once it's actually available. But service titans, you know, existing capacity planning, this version ought to be a lot more useful, especially right now when everybody's kind of working remote and not able to communicate quite as quickly. Along those same lines, they did mention that route optimization. If you've been watching the channel for a little while, then you should know what I'm talking about already. That's what we talked about with that interview with Miles. We also talked about it in the latest release notes video. So go check those out if you don't know what that is. There's also mention of better trending reporting. So better like month over month, year over year type reporting so that we can get much more clear comparisons and really get a clear picture of how all this stuff is affecting us. There was also mention of exception reporting. I'll have to clarify a little bit on that before I go too much into it though. Let's see, did I miss anything? Yeah, there was also some mention of like new templates, so marketing Pro templates and stuff to put into the dispatch texts and the emails and all of those various communications to very clearly communicate all of the efforts that Service Titan has. And therefore we have to keep clients safe during this time. If you want to see the full webinar it was recorded. I'm going to put a link to it in the description below. And like I mentioned, I'm going to be making videos on all of this stuff in much more detail as it rolls out. Make sure to subscribe to this YouTube channel. If you've not done that already. Hit that little bell so that YouTube notifies you anytime I upload a new video. And let me know in the comments below what you think about all this. Were you impressed? Do you think they missed anything? Is there more that you're looking to see? Let me know your thoughts. Like I said, it was a lot more than I was expecting, so I'm pretty impressed. But of course, we've yet to see the implementation. And you know, that's that's gonna be the hard part. Appreciate it. Stay safe. It.