Steering Your Team with ServiceTitan's Release Notes | Podcast Ep. 14 | Mastering ServiceTitan

Welcome to Mastering Service Titan, where we get expert advice from power users. I'm your host, Josh Lu, and today we're here with Renee Lennox, the operations manager at Service Specialties Inc. And we are diving deep into the topic of release notes. I'm super excited to have you on and thank you for being here.

Yeah, thank you guys for having me. I'm excited to share some things that we do to work.

Before we jump in, can you tell everyone how you got a guitar pick last night?

Well, Service Tit threw a banger of a party last night and the last guest was Bret Michaels. Somehow I shimmied my way up to the front row and at the end the guitarist and the bass players were throwing their guitar picks and somehow my five' one self was able to catch one. So here we are.

I was telling you before we started recording, that's probably the coolest piece of swag you could ever get at Pantheon. So super cool that you got to get that.

Yes.

So let's dive into release notes for those brand new on Service Titan. Maybe they don't even know what release notes are. Can you share what are release notes?

Yeah, one, I think kind of game changing thing that Service Titan does is they have regular updates. A lot of softwares, the one that we had prior to Service Titan, I don't even know if I ever actually saw an update. So a little archaic. So having the constant updates from Service Titan is again, you just know that they're always evolving the product but with that you need to be informed of those updates. So Service Titan came out with their release notes. There used to be release notes monthly. I think within the last year they kind of changed it over to seasonal updates. But it's just a document that they came out with that just goes over all of the nitty gritty things in the updates for that season. Whether it's a big update or just small tweaks, it just keeps you informed of what they're doing to the product, what's coming out so that you can be ready when those updates do come out.

Yeah, it seems pretty important to stay on top of of release notes because if not, some changes might happen or there's just a bunch of new stuff that you're not taking advantage of. What are some other reasons why people really should stay on top of those release notes?

It's very easy to be behind if you're not paying attention to the release notes. There's a lot of nitty gritty, like I mentioned updates, but there's also really big Updates and the last thing you want to do is set your team up for failure. So if those release comes out and they haven't even seen what it's going to look like, they might log on in the morning and it's a completely different look. If it's one of the major changes or the button might be in a different spot or maybe it's instead of outlined in blue, now it's outlined in black. No one likes change, but being prepared for change helps your team be way more successful.

Yeah, let's dive into some of that preparation process. I've heard you have a very refined process when it comes to release notes and managing that change. So when you first hear about that a new release notes or a season of changes is coming, what's the first thing that you do?

You want to have a point person in your office. For us, that's myself. You want someone that knows majority of your business so that they know from the release notes not everything's going to apply to you. We don't do commercial, so the things that are related to commercial don't necessarily apply. But you want to make sure you have someone that understands all the aspects enough to get the information to the right people. It's like the bystander effect, right? If you think everybody's looking at it, no one's actually looking at it. So you want to have that accountability to one person go through the release notes, say okay, this piece, our accountant needs to know about it. This piece, our CSRs need to know about it. This piece, our operations manager needs to know about it. So having myself or whoever that point person is that knows enough of the business or knows who the right people are to get the information to. That's the first step is signing that person once the release notes come out, having the person go through it, look at again, what, what applies to your business, what applies to your company emailing those people and say, hey, this piece is, you know, really important. Make sure you look at it, It's a coming up, tell them to go into the next account and then hopefully your managers are equipped with being able to tell the team if it, you know, needs to dial down further. The other thing is Blue Collar Nerd has amazing videos. He does a very high level video with every release. So you can kind of at least start there so that you know again those major changes and maybe even those like just slight changes but they make big differences that people are requesting.

Got it. So first make sure there's someone assigned or else no one's Gonna do it?

Yes.

And then second is you're starting to let people know and divvy out what are the things that are going to impact our business. And then from there, what happens from.

There, it's just again staying on top of it. So myself, I am in charge of the call center. So if anything applies to the call center, then I would take those. I may screenshot. I'm going to go into next, look at it myself. I need to understand it to be able to train my team on how to understand it or what's coming. I'll go in and say, okay. When the big change of the location page happened, of how it looked, I wanted to make sure that because of a major change, I put everyone's eyes in front of it. If it's something smaller, it might just be a screenshot with an email, but something big like that. I'm requiring the team to go in, hey, I need you to watch this video that blue collar nerd came out with or I want you to go in and tell me which buttons you clicked for this so that they have accountability, that they're learning it and understanding it before the change comes out. And that's one of the great things. Again, with our older software that we were on over seven years ago, there was no practice account. So if they didn't do updates, but if there were updates, you wouldn't even have anything to practice on. So service typing, providing the ability to practice things before they happen again, it's that change management. Nobody likes change, but the more prepared and the more comfortable you can get people before that change happens, it's going to be way better for your business. You're going to have less frustrated employees, but you have to use the information that's given or you are going to have those pain points. People are going to log into their mobile device and say, what is this? There's a new button and you're going to have those phone calls come in. So it's really a way to make sure your business is set up for success when those changes come out. It's a blessing and a curse sometimes for those updates because they're coming whether you want them to or not. Most of them are not an option. So you have to set it up for success and the releases are a way to keep you updated before that happens.

Yeah, I remember when I first joined Service Titan, the first launch that I was given a product launch was appointments. Do you remember that?

Yes.

Can you talk a little bit about that change? Because I remember that being like A huge change like every it that impacted pretty much every single user on Service Titan. When a change is that big, how do you. How do you prep your teams?

You have to prep them. You can't just expect them to log in and be comfortable with what they're looking at. When they're used to something, you know, it's hard to change. I'm going to kind of keep going back to that, but it's really hard to change. So you have to be the advocate in your business to help people through the change. And by doing that is by preparing them. So making sure you stay in the know, making sure whether it's yourself or you want your CSR manager, operations manager to know what's coming out, you just have to be on top of it and you have to stay up to date, especially for big changes like the appointment. That was. That was a big one.

Yeah, that one was intense.

Yes. And those happen. They don't happen often. I feel like there's kind of a one, level one, level two, level three, that was definitely a level three. There's a lot of level ones and twos, but those ones you might not need as much preparation for. Service Titan comes out with new features and if you don't know about them, you're never going to continue that progress forward. The Titan Advisor score obviously helps with that too. So when they do release new features, they will try to tie the Titan Advisor score back to those. If you don't pay attention to the release notes, you can kind of be like, hey, why is my Titan score not going up? And you might be able to dive in and you kind of see, oh, I didn't even know about that. But you don't know about it. It's probably because you didn't really it in the release notes. So they're all kind of intertwined and connected.

I like that connection you made with Titan Score. It's almost like the Titan score, Titan Advisor is like a little backlog to help catch things that you may have missed over time. And like, hey, there's a lot of stuff adding up now that we've added and you might be able to take advantage of going back to the next environment. So you got all your release notes, you're looking at what you want to implement. Do you have each department then like a manager in each department, then first start to test them in next. Is that the next step?

So for us, because I'm the operations manager and know kind of the internal functions of each division, I will go in and test it Myself, again, because it's not always applicable. And I try to kind of be the service titan guru as well for the company. So even if I don't have to use it every day, I still want to know that it exists so that if the person that should use it every day isn't using it, I can kind of give them that gentle nudge of, hey, you know, don't forget this new feature came out. And, you know, this might solve this pain point or might make, you know, a couple less clicks and it just makes it more efficient. It's really, again, kind of making sure the information is in the right people's hands and holding them accountable to it. If you have someone that's looking at the release notes, I would also have them maybe be your champion of your Titan Advisor, because then if those release notes come out, it's very easy to be middle of the summer, new release comes out, and you're like, yeah, that's a great idea, but I just don't have the time for it right now. Like you said that Titan Advisor Score is kind of like that backlog. So, okay, I didn't use this. Now it's starting to, you know, I have a chance to breathe. Let me go into Titan Advisor. Oh, yeah, okay, that came out. And it just holds you accountable. So that's another thing I look at. And, you know, if I'm going through the accounting section, I might say, oh, it looks like we haven't implemented this fully, or, you know, we're not hitting that percentage as high as we want to. And I might again give that gentle nudge to the accounting department or if it's a report that we're not pulling, I might dig a little deeper of, hey, you know, what benefit does this report have? And again, it ties back to the Titan Advisor and the release notes that come out.

Renee, do you have an example of a recent change that was kind of hard to manage and any lessons that you may have learned from a recent.

One, the one I mentioned before about the location change. So the look of it, even though all the information was the same, it just looked a little different. That was one that for some reason was a struggle, I think, because the CSRs are the ones on the phone, they're your front line, and they're the ones that are staring at that page all the time. You know, management, they might not go to the location page as much, but your CSRs are, and they're the ones answering the phone, and you want them to be as quick as possible. So that One we spent a lot of time on, they had kind of that gray area where you could switch back to the old version or switch to the new version for a while, which was really nice. So Service Titan allowed that. But then eventually it was like a bar came at the bottom that said, hey, on this date, this isn't going to be available anymore. And then everyone was like, okay, Renee, what am I supposed to do here? So it was. It gave us time to change, which I appreciate Service Titan for doing, because I think they realized how many people are in that screen and how often they are giving us the time to allow that change to happen a little more naturally than forced, but then kind of putting their foot down and saying, okay, this is gonna happen whether you like it or not. At this point, it just allowed our team to have time to change. But I think that was a pretty big one. That's pretty recent.

Yeah, thanks for sharing that. I feel like the changes that happen to those on the front lines are always hard to deal with because they're seeing that screen I don't know how many times a day, thousands of times, doing things on that screen every day. And then like you said, even if it's the same information, but it just looks a little bit different. Some people are going to be pissed.

Yeah. Yep. They can throw you off. And then the people that don't use it all the time when they do see it and they're like, okay, I think I'm on the wrong page. I'm like, no, that's the same page. It's just changed. Have you seen my 10 emails about it in the last couple months? But, yeah, I kind of go back to. Change is hard. Service Titan does a really good job of providing us with the tools to be able to make the change easier for our teams, but you have to utilize the resources that you have. So it's very valuable that Service Time even has it in a very condensed form and then adds the Blue Collar nerd video on top of it. So if you don't want to sit there and read, you know, the nitty grittiness of it or maybe reading it, you're more of a visual person. Blue Collar does a really good job. The bigger changes he does, you know, breakout videos on so and just kind of hone in on those single. Like the location change or when appointments got added. He had lots of specific videos for those changes and specific, you know, specifically the release notes goes through a lot of the nitty gritty stuff as well.

Yeah. And we'll link A lot of the those resources in the description of the episode. So some people can see an example of that. Caller nerd is amazing. Shout out to Richard. And so, yeah, like you mentioned, he'll do like a release highlights video which goes over all the big stuff and then some separate breakout videos on their own to deep dive into like some of the bigger changes. Part of this, I'm getting a sense from you, is like a mindset thing. You seem to be someone who just is able to embrace change because we all know it's coming and so why scream and kick our whole way through it? And it reminds me of someone saying that we're all going to be perpetual newbies when it comes to technology. Like we're all going to be just new at things forever. IPhone comes out with something and now I gotta like swipe.

Now swipe up. There's no button anymore, right?

Button's gone.

What the heck?

And so I think embracing that mindset of like, hey, this is just, it's okay to be new at things and to find things uncomfortable because that's just the reality we're gonna live in forever basically.

And my job and that is to make the uncomfortable more comfortable. So because I kind of embrace change, I am the one to go in and be like, okay, like, I can tell this is gonna be a bigger change for the company, so I need to tread maybe a little lighter for this. Or it's a smaller change. Like I said, I'll just send an email with a screenshot. But you have to embrace change or you're going to fall behind quickly. And that's kind of the release notes is that change and service Titan will pass you by very quickly if you're not keeping up with it and you don't want to be left behind. Nobody wants to be left behind. That is really why you should have somebody always look at the release notes or the Titan Advisor to kind of keep yourself in check. You can go to Community if you're a couple of release notes behind. There's a whole section on just the release notes that you can read. So if you're again, busy season happens. We know that there is times where we're just looking at our email inbox. Continue to climb when you find that time. Go back through the last couple if you read it once. Sometimes I'm like, hey, let me go read that one again. You know, because I don't really think I found anything at that time. But maybe something did come out and I just read through it, didn't realize what was going on. So definitely visit the community. If you need to go back a couple releases, they come out with smaller releases. You can correct me if I'm wrong, but there's now seasonal ones but then there might be summer 1.2 if there's any of those smaller changes that come out too.

How about working with CSMs or support or anyone else when it comes to helping manage releases?

If you don't have that point person in your company or maybe you're not at time the same size where you have someone that you feel like knows every aspect, your CSM is someone that's going to kind of help go through those release notes. During my monthly call with our csm, she goes over high level. I usually try to read it before my meeting with her so that if there's ones that I want to deep dive into a little more or don't quite understand or even ask her like, hey, do you think this is going to benefit us or impact us in any way, then that's kind of that prep before that meeting so that she can go through and show me again on the high level side. And then once I dive deeper she can help me with more nitty gritty side as well.

That makes sense. Anything else that we should have covered that I may have missed or any parting wisdom that you want to share with people?

I'm the president of a group called Lady Titans. If you're familiar with it or not. We are a group that is for empowering women in the trades. We found that we're so much better together and stronger together and it's really just a a group to help highlight, embrace, advocate for each other. We are always accepting this free membership. There's no cost, but it's a great place. We have a very active Facebook community and we do two virtual meetings a month. One is called our Lady Titans Lounge. It's a unrecorded safe space that women in the trades can come to and just share some of their pain points. It could be, hey, I got the release notes and I don't know what this is about. Does anyone, you know, have any more information on it? Or if you have a struggle in your business that you just want to connect with someone else that may have gone through the same thing. And then we also have our Spotlight series, which is a speaker and a topic base that's recorded. You can visit our YouTube and see all our past Spotlight speakers as well. So I definitely encourage everybody to become a Lady Titan because I think we've created a really great space for women to come to.

That's amazing. There's so much beauty and power in those separate spaces to have, like, very unique conversations that you just may not be able to have outside of those spaces. And so we'll definitely link a. Put a link in the description for the Facebook group and some of the events. Do you have any highlights from, like, a past event or a past group that is okay to share? Any, like, moments that. That stick out to you?

So we did a Pantheon ticket giveaway. All you had to do was register. If you were able to, you know, fly yourself here and. And get your stay, we would provide you with a ticket. We were blessed that Service Titan gave us a ticket to be able to give away to someone. We did a random draw and had a winner, and she is here this week, and she's very excited. She even said that this was a dream come true. She probably wouldn't have been able to financially get here. So we love that Service Titan backs us to help with things like that. And, you know, with Lady Titans, we have Titans in our name. We do try to help each other with Service Titan, but you do not have to be a Service Titan member to be in Lady Titans. I think that's a pretty. A really good highlight, at least for my week this week. I love hearing that we were able to help somebody to not only better themselves professionally, but also help their business as well. Wow.

I had goosebumps when you said that. That is so cool to hear. Super happy for you. And I hope next year we can get two tickets for Lady Titans. Let's make that happen.

Yes. Make it happen, Josh.

I'm gonna do my best.

Okay.

Yeah. Thanks so much for joining us today, and we'll see you on the next episode.

Yeah.