Sneak Peek at Revolutionizing Call Centers for the Trades | Podcast Ep 28 | Mastering ServiceTitan

Contact Center Pro works with not just one single instance of Servicetitan, but all your different instances of ServiceTitan to make it really easy to consolidate your call center in one place.

Welcome to Mastering Servicetitan, where you get expert advice from power users. And today I'm joined by David Hoffman, the senior director of product management here at Servicetitan. David, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me.

Yeah, I'm super excited about this. Today we're talking about big topic Contact Center Pro. Everybody's been keeping an eye out for this. And before we jump into what it is, can you talk a little bit about some of the challenges that we see in the trades and what we've been hearing as to what led to us creating this new product?

Yeah, I think one of the first things that we saw are the consolidation in the trades. Many of our customers have more than one instance of Service Titan they're running. So when they go and consolidate, they usually want to consolidate their call centers and have their CSRs answer the phone for multiple brands within their org. So we wanted to develop a solution that works across Multiple instances of ServiceTitan, make it easier for them to handle that at scale. I think the second thing that we saw is calls just aren't the only way that customers are interacting with businesses. We see a lot of SMS now is a big way chat, different sorts of chat through social media sites, Q and A, through Google reviews, all these different channels in which you interact with your customers. It's not just phone calls anymore. All those different ways are spread out amongst all kinds of different products. And we know that can be difficult for our customers. The last thing that we're seeing a lot of is the emergence of AI in the field. So with AI, there's a million different choices. Not all of them are deeply integrated within Service Titan. So while they could answer your call, they're not able to give the type of information. The simple things to be able to handle give a good customer experience to your end customer. So those are the three main challenges we're seeing right now.

Gotcha. Thanks for painting that picture. It sounds pretty complex, especially if you think about a bunch of CSRs now merging under one roof. Then you layer in SMS, you layer in chat, you layer in review site or a Yelp thing. That sounds like a big mess that people are trying to clean up. So what exactly is Contact Center Pro and how does this help solve that?

Contact Center Pro works with not just just one single instance of ServiceTitan, but all your different instances of Servicetitan to make it really easy to consolidate your call center in one place. Even if you're just a single tenant, it's still a really good experience. Within Servicetitan, it's a new system from the ground up that's going to, you know, handle all your phone calls from end to end. It's not an integrated solution like Phones Pro and Dialpad. It's a from scratch solution and calls are just the beginning for us. Like we're going to be having a universal inbox that's going to have SMS and all your chats, reviews integrated into one place and you'll be able to have, you know, routing so that your CSRs can handle all those. And then it's an AI forward tool so, you know, virtual agents and different AI features are front and center for Contact Center Pro.

Gotcha. Sounds like Contact Center Pro is a pretty massive update to our Pro lineup. Maybe we can dive into some of these features specifically. The first thing that you mentioned that intrigued me was the Universal Inbox. Can you talk a little bit more about, you know, people open up their screen and they look at Universal Inbox, what are they looking at?

So they're going to see all their calls. So if they're getting any calls coming in, it's going to be in that single place. They're also going to see all their follow ups, any sort of, you know, task, any sort of virtual agent, follow up all in one place. So if an SMS conversation comes in, they don't have to switch to another screen. It'll all be there. And the cool thing about Universal Inbox is that you'll be able to route to different queues. And so if you have a set of CSRs that you only want to be handling, say digital, you can put them in a queue and route all the messages there. Or if you want to spread it out across everyone, you can, you can manage it that way. So it's not just one big inbox of messages where it's chaotic and you're having to have people go in and out of there and check it all the time. They're just getting assigned tasks in their inbox.

Gotcha. I think anyone I've gotten to visit a shop once and I think I was shocked by like how many tabs people have open all the time.

So yeah, they rotate between them to see like, did I get a message in the email, Did I get a message from sms? Did I get a, you know, is there a review I need to respond to? And so really it's about consolidating all those tabs into one place.

Wow, that's amazing. Is it hard to set that up? Like, how do you pull all those sources into just one screen?

Right now it's just called. And we're. We're soon going to have sms, but the idea is really, it's going to be like synchronous stuff. So all your calls are in one place and then asynchronous tasks. So we're going to put all of those into the single inbox but then we're going to have the different types and so it should be pretty seamless. There's really not that big of a difference between say a review response. That's not something you need to answer in real time that you could take a couple of minutes to respond to that and an sms. Right. We look at it as their conversations with your customers and we want to give you a consistent way to have that conversation.

Right. Just various contact points through various channels. One place to have to interact, I guess.

Exactly.

Can you talk a little bit about the manager assist before we start recording? You were mentioning it's using AI to train and help improve CSRs. That sounds pretty innovative. Can you share how it does that?

So a lot of, you know, second chance leads where it listens to the call and will. We'll let them, the manager know if we could think it was a lead that was mistakenly or, you know, classified incorrectly. So that's, that's sort of the beginning of it. But we're going to get into other things where it's going to analyze the calls and score them against a QA scorecard. Relying on CSR managers to give feedback to their CSRs, you know, after, after being able to, to listen to the call and qa. It also things like, you know, auto classification, so listening to the call and giving suggestions to reclassify it if it was classified incorrectly. So a lot of different features there for manager assist.

It's cool to see where, how LLMs and AI like what value we're starting to create from these new AI tools. And this seems like a perfect use case. So it's kind of listening in the call live and then assessing how it could be classified. What like a sentiment is and maybe if they miss this lead and they need to get it back and all that. All the.

Yeah, so that's more into the. Our agent assist. So the agent assist is going to be a live listener that's going to help, you know, keep the CSR on track by showing how they're doing against A QA scorecard and it's going to give suggestions to the CSR in real time. And, and then, you know, after the call ends, that's when we, we process the call more deeply and do things like second chance leads and go deeper into the, the manager assist features and the sentiment analysis and you know, potentially the call reason and stuff like that.

Okay, so there's an agent assist that's live helping out the csr and then after the call is recorded, the manager assist will analyze the call even deeper and then surface other opportunities from there.

That's where we're going. It's not, it's not all done yet, but these are the things that are going to roll out for the next year.

Okay, very cool. I'm glad we're getting a sneak preview here on the, on this podcast episode. And then lastly, you mentioned virtual agent. I feel like agents is the new like hot topic nowadays with AI. So it's cool to hear that we're going to be including it in Contact Center Pro. What is a virtual agent in this, in this use case?

So a virtual agent is going to be able to handle an incoming call and book a job at a very simple level. That's what we're going towards. We actually just launched it today with one of our customers and it took eight calls last night. They're using it in an overflow or after hours use case today. Can't completely book a job, but it was able to take the inbound request and then the CSR has confirmed the job booking this morning. It's pretty cool. It's taking those amount requests and that's really just the beginning. I think one of the big problems with virtual agents today that we're trying to solve is the lack of a deep integration. We hear from a lot of our customers that job booking is great and we obviously want to get there and that's sort of the table stakes for virtual agent. But there's all these other calls that they want the virtual agents to handle. Know just being able to say take a call from a customer who has a job that day and being able to tell them what time their technician is coming. We heard a call last night that the customer just wanted to update their phone number for a job that's upcoming because they weren't going to be there that day. So having a virtual agent that's sophisticated and integrated enough to handle those types of use cases is going to free up a lot of time for CSRs to do more high value work and more outbound calling. Which is going to increase your, your job booking rate and eventually get you more revenue.

If I'm hearing this right, is a virtual agent like a AI Voice that's going to.

Yeah, it's AI Voice.

Oh, whoa. It's going to pick up the phone and have a conversation.

I guess I should have started there. Yeah. So if that was a conversation today, I can create customer records and follow ups for booking in the future. We wanted to be able to handle sort of any sort of inbound question that the customers may have.

Wow, that is crazy. The future is here. I remember years ago in 2017 when I first started working on software for the trades. It was like pen and paper or software. And now we're talking about AI voices answering your phone calls just a few years later. That is insane. Are there any other major features within Contact Center Pro that we touched on or did we hit all the big ones?

Just something else to point out again is it's something we rebuilt from the ground up. So it's not an integrated product in any way. Is something that we're really taking seriously as far as owning the quality and stability of the product. Something that we want to invest in and from a customer point of view, not have a back and forth between an integration. Us saying like, oh, this is so and so is having the issue, not us. We just wanted to own the. Own the whole thing and try to give our customers a better experience for that.

Such a good point. I'm glad you clarified that. One other note is earlier you mentioned multi tenant versus single tenant. It seems like Contact Center Pro would be really great for multi tenant. How does it impact someone if they're just a single tenant and they're curious about some of these advanced features, like is it still worth it for them?

You know, every customer is different, but I think even if you're the smallest shop, you should consider it. For the virtual agents alone. We hear from customers all the time that they're, they're out in the field, that they're, they're working more in their business than on their business. They're coming back and they're not able to answer every call. Sometimes, you know, if they have one person in the back office they can call, like what happens if they're on break? It gets difficult. And so we think virtual agents and our virtual agent solution is the answer to that problem. Even if you're really small, it shouldn't discourage you from signing up for Contact Center Pro because this will give you value. It's going to be your 24, 7, all the time CSR, especially when your live folks can't be there.

In terms of KPIs or key metrics that businesses should expect to improve with Contact Center Pro, are we looking at booking rate? We're looking at revenue, I think booking.

Rate, the key ones, booking rate, abandoned call rate, revenue first. If you're a multi tenant shop, you're getting more efficiency out of your CSRs because they can all answer calls for their different brands. Right. And we're seeing a lot of great results in that space right now. Abandoned calls, missed calls going way down, booking rates going up. And then, you know, because your booking rates going and booking more jobs, getting more revenue and then with the assist features, we think this is going to get even better. So you know, with sel, tons of value there that we've demonstrated with Phones Pro and also our standalone SEL product, Second Chance leads. Sorry, using too many acronyms here. So Second Chance leads, that's going to be a big one. And then with our manager assist features, training up your CSR to do better, agent assist features, getting them more efficient. So it's really about, you know, the abandoned calls because more people are picking up than the coaching tools so that your CSRs are booking more so booking rate and which then leads to revenue. And then, you know, on top of all that is, you know, all the calls that happen after hours, all the calls that happen when all your CSRs are busy, that's where virtual agents come in and then you're not missing any of those calls. And so we really expect abandoned call rate, missed calls to go down while your booking rates should be going up with revenue.

That's really cool to hear because when you look at those metrics and how important they are to the business, it's right at that top of the funnel. And it seems like you can calculate ROI pretty easily. I forget what the metric is, but I heard with Second Chance leads, a big percentage of those customers recoup what they spent on second chance leads within the first few months or something like that. Which is really cool.

Yeah, absolutely. It's a really cool feature. Just any job could be worth thousands of dollars and if you could just get a couple of those, you're going to more than pay for Second chance leads. And I feel that way about virtual agents too. If you're booking those extra couple jobs because you're using it at after hours use case, then you're going to make up for it. And I think again, the cool thing about Service Titan is because it's all on service site and you can. And we want to be able to route by service titan data. Let's say you send everybody who has a job booked that day to a virtual agent and you get a number of those calls and they're just asking where their tech is or if they need to reschedule or something. And the virtual agent is handling that. That's going to open up your csrs to take the higher value inbound calls and book more jobs and get more revenue that way. So it's not just like the fact that it's virtual agents, but our virtual agents specifically is going to give you a lot more bang for your buck when we get there to get all these extra features that we're talking about.

Yeah, this kind of touches on the theme of how AI is impacting our lives. I'm curious from your perspective because you guys are at the cutting edge of this. How do you think about AI in the workforce and in general as it relates to CSR life? People, they might hear virtual agent and think like, oh man, that's scary. It's an AI voice it's going to replace. Is my job at risk? What are your thoughts on how AI kind of integrates with our lives?

I don't think it's necessarily my job at risk. I think it's, you're going to be doing more higher value work. Like the, the expectation is, is that like the easy stuff, the stuff that you're not around for is going to be handled by the AI and that your job CSRs are going to be doing more outbound calling, more sales type calling. Maybe you spend a little more time with a customer to give them that better experience if they're booking a big job because you know the AI is there to handle the overflow. I don't think it's necessarily a replacement. It's more of like this augmentation to help you give a better overall customer experience.

That makes sense. So let the virtual agent handle the simple reschedules, the changing the phone number, like you said earlier, booking a job.

When you're not there, stuff like that.

And then let the humans do the more complex, super nuanced stuff that robots hopefully will never replace. But yeah, sounds like I like that word augmentation in terms of who's a good fit for Contact Center Pro. I know you mentioned multitenant all the way down to the smallest folks. What about those customers who are on things like Phones Pro or already have second chance leads? How does that work? If they want to switch over to.

Contact Center Pro, just reach out to your csr. Pam. For some people, it may not be a right fit right now. It's still in early access. But for those of you out there who are early adopters and products and want to get the latest and greatest, this is probably something that you would want to check out right now.

Yeah, I definitely know there's some people listening who are. Who just like want to get in early on all the new things. One quick benefit of that is that I've talked to a lot of customers who are like this actually on this podcast. They tend to be all the power users and one cool benefit they talk about is being able to be so involved with you guys and giving feedback and helping to shape the future of the product. Can you talk a little bit about how your product team interacts with some of these early access features and just that cool relationship you have early on?

We have quite a few customers on right now. Like we, we interact with all of them quite often when in early access. A lot of the times you'll have a direct line to the product team, so you'll be able to give your feedback, make a lot more requests in a more direct way than you would otherwise. And you know, we're still evolving the product. There's still a lot of things that we know we need to add, so you get to help shape a lot of those features. Like, a lot of the features I talked about in the Virtual Agent have come about because we're talking with customers frequently. I'm on site with the customer right now, so it's something that you get a lot of access to with these earlier access things.

That's awesome. Such a cool opportunity. We'll put a link in the description of this episode to sign up for early access and then David will throw your cell phone number in there too, so they can give you a call whenever. No, just kidding. Thank you. Giving us a sneak preview. A little bit more in the weeds of each feature and how Contact Center Pro works. We'll put that link in the description like I said and then keep an eye out for updates as we continue building. So, David, thanks so much for coming on the show and we will catch you all on the next one.