Spring Scheduling: How to Optimize Dispatching for Summer Success | Podcast Ep. 82

that's an awkward conversation to have, but it's a necessary conversation for your CSRs to have. Would you mind if we moved your maintenance to X date? We'll give you a $25 coupon. Just remember, like, yeah, you're going to lose $25 off that maintenance, but you're going to make so much money off of the demand calls that are coming in that are high value.

Welcome to Mastering ServiceTitan, where you get expert advice from power users. I'm your host, Josh Lew, and today we have Paul Balesis back on the podcast. He's a growth marketing manager here at ServiceTitan. and we are talking about a very timely topic about not only maximizing the spring, but also preparing for the summer. Last time we talked about marketing. This time we're gonna talk a little bit more about scheduling and dispatching and how to optimize there. So Paul, welcome back to the show.

Thanks for having me, Josh.

Can you set the context again? We've got spring, we talked a little bit about marketing and how you adapt and shift your strategies for marketing. What does spring bring in terms of challenges or opportunities for scheduling?

So when you remember we were talking that you're coming out of the shoulder season, you're coming out of January, February, beginning of March, where you're just looking for that demand. Spring is really, really where you get to start unlocking the floodgates of your maintenances and your memberships, where you're trying to get them on the board. So strategically, you're trying to schedule these in like towards March, going into April, going into May. But you have to be thoughtful because the more maintenances that you have to get done, the more you need to try to get done in that short period of time. So that way it opens up your schedule to capture those demand calls. And new customers during the summer. So that's your main challenge is like, how do we fill the board with as many maintenances as possible this season so that way we're setting ourselves up for success going into summer season, right?

And last time we talked a little bit about the outbound efforts and some of the efforts to start to get those maintenance calls on the schedule. What's the next step? Like, you're starting to get them on the schedule. How do you optimize your schedule to balance both packing it in with those but also leaving time for some demand and then weather changes and then summer? So, yep. How's it all work out?

It is a complex puzzle, like half scientific, half weather, half gut feeling. But with the ServiceTitan technology that we have, we make it a little bit easier on you too. So let's take one instance, adaptive capacity. So a lot of times people before, they used to just, you know, do outbound. However we can get that person with a job on the schedule, we'll get them on as soon as possible because we got that call. That's not necessarily the best way to do it. Yes, you want to keep the job board full, but with adaptive capacity, what you can do is basically put in certain restrictions for certain zip codes. So let's say you're able to do— you're only able to schedule these zip codes, and with adaptive capacity on the board, the CSR won't be able to book those zip codes any other day. So maybe we only want to do those zip codes Thursday and Friday of this week or a certain week or whatever. Then you're able to book those jobs in that neighborhood just those days, and then the technician or technicians that are going out to those neighborhoods, while they're driving a lot less time, So they might not be going 30 minutes in between each job, they might be going 5 minutes. So that frees up a good amount of time for them that they're on the job and they might be able to get an extra job or two done per day, which when you compound that against how many days that you're working, how many technicians you have, how many maintenance memberships you have, you're looking at saving yourself a lot of time. So that's just like talking about how can we be more efficient with our time. In addition, as you're starting to get more into your Aprils and your Mays and then further into June, obviously what you need to do as a contractor is you need to be looking at the weather. Predicting when you're seeing that first temperature where the people are going to turn on the HVAC unit. Usually we've seen that historically above 80 degrees, but you also have to look at humidity levels too, because humidity can also drive people to be uncomfortable. And we know HVAC, what it does is it essentially sucks the humidity out of the home. So you want to be looking at those and then have a good gauge about like a week, 5 days maybe back prior to that day. You need to start shifting the job board, getting those current maintenances, starting to reschedule them. And what that kind of looks like, and that's an awkward conversation to have, but it's a necessary conversation for your CSRs to have. And that's some training that you also need to do with them. And it's just very polite conversation like, hey, are we able to move your maintenance to, you know, we see some hot days, we want to be able to take care of some customers on those days because we know they're going to have HVAC issues. Would you mind if we moved your maintenance to X date? We'll give you a $25 coupon. Just remember, like, yeah, you're going to lose $25 off that maintenance. but you're going to make so much money off of the demand calls that are coming in that are high value. So those are a couple of things to think about when you're entering those, that season. So really just like, you got to have your pulse. I remember when I was doing the marketing, I would look at the weather probably like 10 times a day just to see like what's coming, what's not, and where the huddling stands. And it's just like you're a conductor of a symphony almost. So you got like, as like a general manager, marketing manager, as an owner, you need to predict what's coming and then need to coordinate across teams of how you're going to execute. And right now that's where you start planning this kind of stuff. We would have a playbook. We've talked about this in the marketing episode a little bit. We would have a playbook of what we would activate 5 days before that first day above 80 degrees. Well, that's just marketing. You as a contractor need to have a playbook of like, what are you going to do with the schedule? What are you going to do with the schedule? Are you going to do the dispatchers? What are you going to do with the CSRs? What are you going to do with your customers? So you need to be planning accordingly and that plan and prep starts now.

That makes a lot of sense. So maybe the CSR training, some of those reschedules, some of those talk tracks, maybe your strategy for what kind of coupon in what situations. You gotta do to, to prepare so you're not reactive, uh, when those changes come. I like that tip about adaptive capacity and the zip codes. Do you think during the spring maintenance season, instead of purely dispatching for dollars, you're more trying to optimize routes and save time? And is it just a completely different dispatching approach of who you're gonna assign to which job?

So a lot of times we say dispatch for dollars, and that makes a lot of sense. I think when we think about dispatching in the spring maintenance season, you can dispatch a little bit more for efficiency. But that being said, because you're going to be in those zip codes, you already almost put that parameter in place with adaptive capacity. And then you just, especially if you're using something like DispatchPro, where it's automatically telling you this technician is the best at some of these maintenance jobs, you already send that technician in that neighborhood, go to town, be a rockstar in that little zip code on that day, and you just hit as many maintenances as you can. And maybe that technician isn't more efficient on the maintenances, but also is producing that extra revenue. Maybe they're super good at selling indoor air quality when they're on the job. You're using all these tools to just help yourself be more successful on every single job.

Yeah. And speaking of DispatchPro, there are some new features and customizations for you to kind of throttle its approach, right? You can kind of like control the AI. Do you want to maximize revenue or is it more about saving time? Am I getting that right? Or?

Yeah. So you can actually, on a different, on a spectrum, actually, you can have it if you want to focus more on revenue or if you want to focus more on drive time and efficiency. And there's some like gray area in between where you could be like, maybe like I want to do a little bit of drive time, but like I still want to focus more on the revenue side. So you have this customizations and once you make that change, you can do that for a couple of months if you want to and see the impact that it makes. Maybe test out being more drive time focused during maintenance season and then maybe throttle it over on the other side when you see that first warm day coming up and you want to focus on the revenue side of things. So test it out. I mean, AI is meant to be played with. It's meant to be tested. and you might find that you have good success. Yeah, would totally recommend just trying different things out. And then also, I mean, if you're using DispatchPro and you're, uh, you dispatchers, we have the assist mode. So maybe you don't even have DispatchPro right now. Maybe now's the season to try it out and just where it gets a job recommendation to your dispatcher, they're able to accept or reject it. They keep their finger on the pulse, but they're not having to make all these mental calculations of, oh, where's John in this neighborhood? And is he gonna be great over there or not? And what type of job is he good on? No. DispatchPro shoots it over to you. You can say, yeah, I know John is going to be really good, or maybe Peter's better at these jobs. I'd rather reject that one and choose him for these. It's giving you the knowledge that you don't have and then bringing all that data all together, presenting you with a really nice answer or result. And then you still have that human connection where you're able to just have that oversight and accept, reject.

Yeah, the oversight is a huge— or like that accept, reject is a huge update to DispatchPro. I think when it first launched, it was like Dispatch Pro is gonna automatically assign all the jobs, reshuffle the board every 10 minutes or so. Now it allows you, it'll recommend what it's gonna do, and now there's still a human in the loop where they can decide and you can slowly get more accustomed to its recommendations. So huge update. I think not a ton of people know about. Are there any other, uh, Dispatch Pro, like new updates or features that we should know about that maybe we missed?

So one of them that's pretty cool is the Dispatch Pro console. So what it'll do, dispatchers, as you know, are just, they probably have one of the most stressful jobs in the trades and they're just coordinating so much. They're like your quarterback. What this does is like a part comes in, you'll be able to see that as a dispatcher. It's just task management essentially for dispatchers, task management, prioritization, a red task come in, you know, you need to get to that immediately. That could be a customer calling in that they need to reschedule their job that was supposed to start in an hour from now. Or you have like some medium level tasks comes in, might be more routine things or tasks that are just you can get to that tomorrow or the next day. It's not gonna be critical to the business and keeping operations moving today. So that's a new one that has come out. We also have the supervisor console that just came out a couple months ago, and that's really gonna allow your dispatch supervisor, your operations managers, even your owners, just be able to track on a daily basis how efficient your dispatchers are dispatching, what type of results are they hitting. It's really hard to put KPIs to dispatchers or key performance indicators. It gives you a little bit more of a pulse on like, How are they dispatching? How much revenue are they helping you drive? What, you know, what are they doing?

So yeah, those are two, uh, Service Sign tips that you can use in this time. There's the Adaptive Capacity, which is a core feature, and then we've got Dispatch Pro, some of the new stuff there, pro feature. I know we also teased at the last end of the last episode some new Scheduling Pro features, which I would love to cover today and how they can maximize, uh, spring with those new features.

Yeah, the Scheduling Pro team is kind of crushing it because as we know, Everything's changing in the way consumers want to engage with the company. I know for myself, I had to call today to have a pest company come to my house and I was like, I really have to call? Like, I don't want to call. I like being able to schedule online. That's my preference. A lot of people like to be able to schedule their own particular way. So what SchedulingPro is doing right now is yes, you can schedule online as a new customer. You can also schedule your recurring service visit online now with SchedulingPro and it'll recognize you as a recurring service visit. It's going to give you those recommended dates. It's pulling all the capacity data in and requirements from Adaptive Capacity. So you're able to do that. In addition, you're now able to add payment information like a credit card right there on Scheduling Pro, which is very easy. So one, your technicians are gonna spend less time in the home collecting that information. Every minute counts when it comes to your technicians. They're one of your finite resources, so you need to make sure you're using it wisely. In addition, your CSRs are not having to go, or your accounts payable or receivable department isn't having to go track down that customer, call them a million times and just play phone tag. And your business books are staying up to date, which is also good for you because you can track revenue coming in. Some other things that are actually really cool, dynamic dispatch fees. So think about Uber. Well, let's say you're going to a sporting event or a music concert. Those fees go up and they throttle up because there's so many people, there's so much more demand coming versus a time that's really not super busy. That's going to be a very cheap Uber ride. So what we're able to do now, let's say you have a certain job type that you really want to capture. For instance, an air conditioning system has broken down, it's 90-degree day and it's 20 years old, it's on its last leg. You 100% want that job. So you're able to say like, we're going to throttle that dispatch fee down because we absolutely want that customer. Let's say your normal dispatch fee is $125, maybe you're charging a $50 dispatch fee, maybe you waive the dispatch fee. You're just like, we want that job because we know it's going to be a $20,000 system replacement. Who cares about $50? You're able to do that. Versus let's say it's again same situation, 90-degree day, someone that has a brand new HVAC unit that wants to just get regular maintenance done on it. Well, you don't want to have to go do that that day. That's where you want to get— take care of like the new customer. So you can maybe just have the dispatch fee go up a little bit. Maybe it goes up to like $150 or $200 for same-day service. But then the day that you actually want to do it without telling the customer you want to do it that day, maybe it's next week and you realize there's going to be a cool down a little bit. You can have the dispatch fee be a little bit more reasonable price, like your typical $125 or $100. So then it just entices the customer and empowers the customer to choose what they want, and it keeps the choice on their behalf. And then they can choose the date. Usually you can gear them in the right direction. So that's, that's a really cool feature that I think once contractors start taking advantage of something like that, it really just helps you control your schedule, but while empowering your customers to control their schedule too. So it's a win-win essentially.

Got it. So it's dynamic dispatch fees and it's based on job types. Is that how they set it up?

Job types, capacity, zip codes. It, it goes based on your rules, trade, anything like that.

Okay. Makes sense. Last time, just piggybacking off the topic of last time, we talked a lot about the different marketing strategies, tactics, how they shift during the season. Are you putting that scheduling link for your members to book maintenance so that way, you office doesn't have to call them or—

100%. So you're putting that link in everywhere. I mean, the average consumer wants to book online these days. You're putting that link everywhere. It also saves your CSRs time. But in addition, what we do have now is we have a couple of really cool AI-based tools like AI voice agents that are able to handle these types of calls as they come in, be able to book the same way Scheduling Pro would, the same way your CSRs would. Again, you're just amplifying the amount of ways customers can book with you. And the consumer is usually okay these days with the AI voice agents across different companies. I know I talked to one the other day and it worked out just fine. I didn't have a problem with it. Honestly, I got help faster than I would if I had to wait on hold to talk to a human to do a very simple task for me. Scheduling a maintenance is not a difficult task. AI voice agents can handle that very easily while your CSRs can focus on providing better customer service in other areas where they're more valuable. One of the things I forgot to mention about SchedulingPro is that they're able to have full AI-based SMS conversations. So customers are able to text with an AI agent and they're able to book a job purely through text. It's a really convenient and easy way and feels very natural conversation flowing. Instead of texting your friend, you're texting Scheduling Pro and you're just able to book your appointment, whatever that might be. It knows your full schedule, your availability, the job types, because it's all fully integrated in ServiceLight. It's all native, so it knows everything about the customer and about your business. So it's very easy to do that. In addition, What SchedulingPro does, so let's say someone goes and starts booking their job, they, you sent them an email to that link, they went online, they started trying to schedule and maybe somebody called them and they just got distracted and they started doing something else. It all hap— it happens to all of us. SchedulingPro sends that user a link, a conversation, a text where they're able to just sit there and rebook. And we've seen contractors 2, 3x the amount of bookings that they're having just because of that simple interaction where Yeah, something happens. It happens to everybody. We send them a follow-up link and then they're able to book their job very easily. So there's so much that's been coming out the past couple, I feel like weeks, months, weeks, but it's really all meant to help contractors widen the funnel, capture more leads, re-engage customers that might have dropped off, and ultimately save your team time and be more efficient with your resourcing.

If I'm a customer and I'm having an SMS conversation for booking, What is that experience like? It's different from going to your site and booking online. Is it like an outbound thing that you do?

Or let's say you have a campaign with MarketingPro and you send an SMS text and say, hey, you can book online or you can just reply to this text message right now. And the customer is just like, oh, okay. So they just start texting and they're like, yeah, I'd like to book a job on this day. Do you have any availability in the morning? SMS agent has all the backend service site and data, has that full conversation right there with the customer. Hey, yeah, we have some time. April 22nd, 8 a.m. to 10 p.m., or you could choose 10 p.m. to noon as arrival windows. Customer's like, no, that date doesn't work for me. What about the 23rd? Agent checks. Yep, 23rd works. We have 8 to 10. Would that work for you? Customer: Yes.

Okay.

Agent: Yes, we have everything confirmed. We'll see you that date at that time. So it has a full-on, very natural, engaging conversation.

Similar—

think about it as like a chatbot on your website. People used to use chatbots all the time. They still do. They're still good to have there. This is just putting that into your phone where we all are. We all are texting. Text messages have great response rates or open rates. So it's just, again, another way for your customers to be able to do business with you in a convenient way for them.

Gotcha. And that's part of that new update. The SMS booking is through Scheduling Pro, not Marketing Pro.

That's through Scheduling Pro. But when you integrate the two together, I mean, talk about synergy. You can't beat it.

On a lot of the webinars and podcasts we do, I think most ServiceTitan customers are on Marketing Pro. It's like a vast majority of our customers. I always ask them questions like, what's the next Pro product that you should get? And I feel like every time people say like, if you don't have Schedule Pro, that's the next one that makes the most sense. Would you agree with that?

Yeah, 100%. Back in the day when I was doing the marketing, we had a contact us form. I feel like half of the leads from that got lost and I was like trying to play catch up and I was like, pinging CSRs like, hey, can someone follow up with this? Like, what happened with this? Attribution wasn't there. And it was just a very poor user experience. Now when we got Scheduling Pro, it really changed a lot of things for us and we were able to finally see how many customers are coming in through online booking and we're able to track if there are any drop-off points where we can optimize our scheduler. We would have those customizations. It's built for the trades. It's not just a very generic scheduler. It's integrated in ServiceTitan. And now it's just not online scheduling, it's SMS texting. It's following up with the customers that might have dropped off. It's doing all these things all in one. It's capturing your payments. It's dynamic dispatch fees. It's a powerhouse. It's a workhorse of an online booking tool.

What do you think is the biggest difference between— I feel like there's like some levels to it. Like Scheduling Pro is like super advanced. It's awesome. We're adding more and more to it. Sometimes customers are confused at what Scheduling Pro does versus something like a Reserve with Google or just like a book online button on your website. Like some of the other core features. What do you think are the biggest differences, uh, there?

Yeah, I think like just having a book online button. I mean, you have to have something, but it's more of like just a simple contact us form. Like I was saying earlier, it's a contact us form in disguise where you're just putting that information in. It might be going into ServiceTitan, it might be going to your CSRs, but it's not providing the customer with the experience they're necessarily looking for. And it's not providing your business. It's really not creating any sort of efficiency for your business. So you might have online booking, but do you really have online booking versus a scheduling pro where you're really just fully integrated, providing good customer service to your customers, providing streamlined operations for your business as well. Reserve with Google, also very similar. Scheduling Pro actually integrates with Reserve with Google. So you're able to have the full booking experience through Scheduling Pro, just even through Reserve with Google without the customer even entering your website, which is pretty cool. But if you go traditional Reserve with Google-based, again, very simplified, non-integrated booking process. So great job, you have an online booking button, but you're not even halfway there. You're like a quarter of the way there. You really need to take that full step on behalf of your business and on behalf of your customers to be able to provide the best booking experience. Because one of the other things that we're noticing, especially in the Spring Benchmark Report that just came out, is that customers are expecting great customer experiences right now, and they are willing to switch providers if they don't have that. So if your customer's coming to you, the first interaction they're having with your website or with your brand, especially a new customer, is booking a job. So are you going to make that customer jump leaps and bounds to try to book that job? No, that's very difficult. Even I'm a customer of this, of this other business, and I had to call to make an appointment. It was so frustrating. I was just like, I had to put my work down. I have to call, like, come on. Like, why can't I just do this online? If you're having that interaction with the customer, They're eventually going to, if you're not providing the best possible service, they're eventually going to move on and go with somebody that is able to provide that same level of service that you provide while providing exceptional customer experiences.

It sounds like there's like a surface, like there are levels to the scheduling. Basically, there's like the surface level. You can have the button, you can have the form thing, but does it truly integrate with your capacity? Are there options to dynamically throttle your dispatch fee and incentivize the right kinds of jobs that you actually want? Are there ways for you to follow up with abandoned cart-esque communications to book those things? Are there all the SMS? So you're just layering in all these other ways to reach out and get the jobs booked.

And think about that. Once you set all those up, those are just automated. I mean, you can just sit back and capture the jobs. It's like, set up the Marketing Pro, it's automated. Set up Adaptive Capacity, your capacity is automated. Set up Scheduling Pro, automated. AI Voice Agents takes like 15 minutes to set up an AI agent. That's can handle inbound calls and you can handle, have it handle the maintenance calls that are coming in automated. Okay. One day it takes you a whole day to set all this stuff up and it probably saves you hours upon hours upon hours of work, not just for you, but for your entire team.

Are there any, um, people listening who you think should not use Scheduling Pro or AI Voice Agents?

I think that's a definitely a fair question. I think if you're more on that construction side, you're not necessarily handling a lot of those inbound calls. Construction's a lot about relationships, even on the commercial side, to a certain extent, it's a lot of relationships. Building, and you might want to have a fine-tuned relationship and more of a personal interaction with that customer. So I would say is like, definitely think about that. That being said, a lot of the, a lot of companies that we have worked with in the commercial side, in the commercial sector, new construction, they also have a residential component. And I think that's where it kind of comes in where you can set up some of these AI-based agents or scheduling pro stuff to mainly handle more residential. Because you want to make sure anything that's coming in on the commercial side, you're having, you know, a representative of your team pick up, or if it's an existing commercial big account, you want to make sure you're having that one-on-one interaction because there are some times where it is very important to have personal one-on-one connection.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So it's really picking the right tool for the right job and different job types and just making sure it's all taken care of the right way. So yeah, that's good to know that, you know, if you're maybe like 90% commercial construction, You can still throttle the AI voice job type for just your residential jobs or something like that.

Yeah, exactly. Speaking up to the contractors there, you know your business the best, you know your customers the best. It's okay to test new things and I would encourage it, but also, you know, make sure you have your thumb on the pulse of what's going on in your business and what's going on with your customers. And that's always very important to do.

We've talked a little bit about scheduling, dispatching, marketing for the spring season. Maybe you can tease a little bit or like prep a little bit preview for as summer starts to approach? How does all this change at a high level?

Summer approaches, it's the fun season. This is where you make the money. So as summer starts to approach, you need to start prioritizing job types. A lot of that looks around equipment age and what's going to be most likely to need to be replaced because rather than doing a $200, $500 service call, you want to be doing the $20,000, $15,000, $20,000 install. So you need to be thinking about that right now, and you need to be monitoring what type of tags you put in your system and how that works. So that way you can make it very easy for your technicians, for your sales team, for your DSRs, for any of the AI components that we talked about to be able to schedule the most important jobs the fastest. It's all going to be about speed to lead. You get the call, you get the booking, how quickly are you able to get out there on a very hot summer day when the job board's full? So you just need to really start thinking about that a little bit. And then you and I will definitely probably have another episode where we dive into some of them, you know, the dynamics. The summer, summer's a roller coaster. You get some days where it's like you have too many calls, you don't know what to do with them. And then it's like the next week it's like 60 degrees end of July and you're like, that's really random. Why is it like a random 60-degree day in July? Like, you know, demand died down. Like we need a little bit. So it's just like such a roller coaster of a season, but a very important season because that's a lot of times where you make, it makes or breaks your year. So something definitely to consider.

It sounds like in the summertime you got to be quick on your feet to like change strategies.

Very quick. And also like more on the marketing side, we were throttling. I mean, every day we were doing something throttling spend. This place, you know, this location, this branch needs more jobs in this realm. This branch is overbooked and this branch needs X, Y, and Z. And it was like a constant game of Tetris and just like trying to plug in the right places. And I mean, it's a lot of fun, but it's stressful.

A lot of stress comes great opportunity as well. So yeah, crazy. I'm, I'm excited next time to have you back to prepare people for the summer and we can reminisce about those days and all the different tactics that you had to run. So yeah, we'll have you back on. I think I have PTSD. We'll have to have you back.

I think shoulder, shoulder season's worse, I would say.

Oh really?

I would rather be in peak season than shoulder season.

Oh, okay.

Yeah. Any day of the week. Gotcha.

It's a cool little theme that we have going though, preparing for each season for these HVAC businesses out there, how to adapt. Because it really, yeah, things just change a lot in each season. So it's good to know.

I mean, I can't believe it's already March, you know, and I just feel like things just keeps coming before, you know, it's going to be April before, you know, it's going to be May and you're going to have to have a lot of this stuff rocking and rolling. And it always feels like in the trades, you always feel like you're on your back foot a little bit. So I think it's good that we're doing this, like helping people get ahead a little bit more because you can try to get ahead and be proactive rather than reactive. It's much better.

So Paul, that'll wrap up the spring season scheduling, marketing, dispatching, how to adapt. And then we'll have you back on in the summertime or maybe ahead of the summer to help people prepare. In the meantime, if people want to hear more from you, where should they go?

You can follow me on any social media at Paul the Pro, and I'm on Instagram, YouTube, TikTok. So yeah, just follow me. I have some just quick hitters, little tips that you have. It takes like 20 to 30 seconds. Produce a couple a week. Also talk about some different events that we have. If you go to any of our Toolbox Lives, I'm usually there sometimes as a speaker. But yeah, if you're looking to connect, please do.

Awesome. Thanks, Paul. We will catch you next time as summer approaches. And thank you all so much for listening.