Support & Success Update W/ ServiceTitan Co-Founder Ara Mahdessian

What's going on, everybody? It's Richard Kohlberg here, the bootclaw nerd. I'm back out here in Glendale, California, this time with other co founder Ara Madissian. Ara, thank you so much for being here.

Thank you.

Thank you. Back in December, other co founder Vahe and I, we filmed a video talking about some changes that were happening to success and support, kind of the reasoning behind those changes. And in that video, we promised that we would be touching base and following up every few months. We are going to be touching base with everybody on this. We're going to be making videos kind of like this to just touch base every couple of months. So I wanted to make sure that we fulfilled that promise with this video that we're doing here today. Now, just to set future expectations here, we do have kind of a new event that we're doing. Approximately quarterly is what we're aiming for called the Service Titan Town Halls. And those are the events where we will be from this point forward. Kind of touching base on this particular topic of where things are with success and success support, as well as topics with what's happening with the product.

Right? Absolutely.

So keep an eye out for those. You're going to get emails whenever those are coming up, as well as we're going to post them in all of our other channels, things like Community and the Service Titan Masterminds group on Facebook, places like that. Now also point out that the Service Titan town hall that we've already done, we've already done one and that one is recorded.

Yes.

I don't want to spend a lot of time today going into the exact same stuff that we already talked about in that video. So I'll direct everybody to their recording of the first town hall. I'll put a link in the description down below. It's a public link. Just click on it. You should be able to access it now. Actually, before the town hall, you posted a video to multiple channels, Just kind of talking directly to the camera, heart to heart with our customers, talking about some commitments that you're making. And in that video, you mentioned that some of the changes that were planned were going to be out by May 15th of 2023.

So by May 15th, we will implement the first phase of the internal changes and metrics that are necessary to improve our resolution satisfaction rates moving forward.

And as we record this video here, it's May 17th. So what's out? What's available right now?

Beautiful. Well, in that video, I mentioned 10 things that I'm committing to improving at Servicetitan that'll improve the experience customers get both in support success and their experience with the product. I explained first and foremost providing a better support experience or service experience. Start with just reducing the amount of help we require customers to get to properly use Service Titan and get the benefits out of Service Titan. So the first step is just making the product way more intuitive to use, way more turnkey so that customers don't need to get help in order to do basic things in Service Titan. So areas like accounting, inventory, memberships, so on and so forth, these areas drive a lot of support demand. We're going to make the necessary improvements in the product itself so that customers can have a way more pleasant and productive time using the product in these areas and require less support. So that was the first one. We've been making those improvements and we'll continue to make those improvements through the following quarters. Second, we mentioned that we will share publicly our product roadmap so that customers are aware of what are the main areas of the product that we're going to continue to improve and we share that at the town hall. Third was that we would engage with customers on a much greater scale moving forward through these town halls. So we did our first one just a couple weeks ago and we'll continue to do those quarterly. It's like one of the best ways I've spent time with customers, hearing all their feedback both in the chat as well as the pre submitted questions. Fourth, if we cannot prevent support cases from popping up through the product, we want to make sure that customers also have the ability to very quickly find the solutions to their problems themselves. So this is all about improving the self service experience within Service Titan. So we have already made improvements to the Help widget so that it can surface better answers and much higher quality content for a customer that is having a particular challenge. We're continuing to expand the content. We've also expanded the Service Titan Certified Administrator program. So the companies and the fellow users of ServiceTitan that have gone through the Service Titan Certified Admin program have raved about it. Because now you have an in house expert that knows almost everything there is to know about Service Titan. You can resolve issues much more quickly. You can get much higher utilization of our capabilities and hopefully see even greater results in your business. So in the past we were limited by how many we could certify. Now we can certify far more. And all this is completely free and you can register for it in the community community.servicetitan.com after that if we couldn't prevent the problem in the product. If we couldn't provide a way for someone to get self service. We wanted to make sure we were providing a great experience for our team to provide great service to the customer. And that started first with having SLAs and making commitments to customers as to how quickly we want to respond. So we've now published our SLAs. We want to respond on the phone within three minutes, we want to respond on chat within three minutes and we want to respond on email very quickly as well at the latest if we're slammed within one business day. So those SLAs are now published. We've already done the internal work to track our commitment against these SLAs and I'm very happy that already we are meeting and exceeding the SLA over 90% of the time across these channels. And I'll be continuing to monitor our performance against this week over week, month over month, because I wanted to improve every single week, every single month until customers get the experience they deserve.

Can I just, I want to make sure I understand an sla. So an sla, that stands for Service Level agreement, right?

That's right.

And that's essentially a commitment of what you just laid out. Like these are the metrics we want to hit. So that's the metrics that Service Titan is measuring and holding support accountable to.

That basically what I'm getting here, that's the perfect word. These are our commitments and we want to hold ourselves accountable to meeting these commitments to our customers. Got it. So that's the SLA front and then outside of that, you know, one of the other issues. So in the past, way long ago, the issue was that when customers needed help, it would take too long for us to respond. Now, thankfully, because we have hired and trained so many frontline staff, we're actually able to respond very quickly. Now the new challenge customers are facing, or a continued challenge is that in many cases the person that they talk to isn't necessarily an expert in the particular area they have a problem in. So if a customer has issue an issue with, for example, memberships, if they don't get connected to someone who is an expert in memberships, we often can't help them quickly enough. So we've now expanded our routing capability. So when a customer has a need in memberships or accounting or inventory wherever, they will get routed to a specialist in that product area so they can get help much faster outside of routing. The other thing we've done is in, in any event where we need to effectively transfer a customer from one titan to another titan, we want to minimize the amount of work a customer has to. We don't want the customer to now have to explain for a second time all the challenges that they're facing and hear all kinds of, you know, these more silly questions. So now our handoff process, very different. The first person to talk to you will actually document every single issue that you're facing in all the contacts. They will find the right specialist to connect you with. They will brief the specialist with all the contacts so that you do not need to repeat yourself. So that is also in place. Next thing is, it's not just about getting fast, responsible response times. We want to make sure you get quality resolutions. So in the past, we really didn't have a great way of knowing if you had an issue and we resolved it. You know, are you really satisfied now? We've changed our internal systems. Anytime you have an interaction with service Titan, after we close out the case, we will actually email you a survey asking you, are you satisfied that this successfully resolved your issue or not? If you say no, we will actively monitor it. We will reach out again, and we'll make sure we resolve it for you.

Great. And those surveys are live as we're recording this video. Awesome.

Yes. And the last thing is, if, for whatever reason, we are not able to satisfy you and resolve your issue, I want customers to have a direct escalation path to me to let me know what's going on so that I always have the pulse of my business and I will engage directly and make sure our customers are happy. So I shared my cell phone at the town hall I shared in the past recording. I'll share it again in the comments for this video. But customers already, anytime they lose confidence about their ability to get their issue resolved through standard channels, reach out to me. And I love nothing more than helping customers. In fact, today Gloria from Absolute Plumbing reached out to me. Thankfully, I was able to help resolve her issue. And she replied, and she's like, wow, you seem to be very serious about this. And I replied like, yeah, I'm dead serious. This is the most important thing for me. Our customer success has always been and will always be this company's number one priority and my number one priority. And just like any other business owner here or any other contractor here, if there's an issue in their business, they want to know about it. There's an issue in my business, I want to know about it so I can make sure customers get the service that they deserve. And we will get there.

Amazing. So everything we just talked about was referring to support specifically. Right. There's also success, so referring to like your csm.

Right.

In the video with Vahe, we talked about changes that were happening to the CSM model, where it was going to be switching to a pooled model that has gone into effect, at least for companies up to a certain size. Like anything, there are people who like it and people who don't. I've seen some positive comments about it, although I've also certainly seen some negative comments about it.

So have I.

What do you think? Can you, can you speak to that? I mean, there's. There's the people who don't like it seem to passionately not like it.

Yeah.

Can you speak to that a little bit?

Yeah. And frankly, I'm very grateful for that feedback. So very similar in philosophy. Ultimately, at the end day, regardless of what model it is, whether it's this one or this one, all I care about is that customers get the service that they deserve. That our success team responds quickly, is very knowledgeable, can offer helpful insights that help customers achieve their business goals. And I don't care what model or flavor it comes in, as long as we can meet those goals. Now. In the past, where we had the dedicated model, where every customer had a specific csm, there were many benefits. But consistently, the complaints we heard was that anytime a CSM took time off, anytime a CSM was promoted, anytime a CSM changed their role, or unfortunately, anytime a CSM left this company, it would introduce a challenge for the customer. Because now we would have to spend time introducing the customer to a new csm and the new CSM would have to get ramped up and they would have to rebuild their rapport and relationship with the customer. And that was the big challenge with the previous model. We hoped to address these challenges by considering a new model, a new model where we actually dedicate a team to a customer. And that way, if a customer needed help, we could forego all the challenges and make sure that we could deliver very timely, very helpful response and support through our success program to customers. Now, very clearly, and I've engaged with the same feedback, and customers have reached out to me and I've talked to them and heard their feedback.

The.

The unfortunate challenge right now is that in many cases we are not being as responsive as we need to be. And that is not okay. That is absolutely not okay. So we are making the improvements that we can to make sure that we can mitigate the challenges of the past while still providing much faster response times. And our goal is to make sure that that day comes and that day comes soon. Now if for whatever reason we are not able to deliver these things with this model, then of course I will absolutely continue to adapt and evolve and try new things until we can guarantee our customers get the service they deserve.

Great. So Ari, on the support side we mentioned those SLAs, those service level agreements where we have certain metrics that we're tracking and holding the team accountable to. Do we have that on the success side, the CSMs or are they being tracked in that same sort of way?

Great question. And yes, now we do so same SLA on emails within one business day. That is our commitment and we are actually above 90% adherence to that SLA as of today.

And when we fail on that, it's tracked like service site and is able to look and see when those numbers are slipping and buy how much.

Absolutely. Every instance where we miss that SLA we know about now, we know about now. We review it, we figure out what we need to do to take corrective action to make sure it doesn't happen again. And we focus on optimizing and improving this performance rate week over week. So I want that 90 to go to 91, 92, 93, all the way up to if we can get there, 100%. I always want big goals.

Well, Ara, thank you so much for taking the time and helping me fulfill this promise that Bahi and I made to our customers. And thank you for taking this so seriously because I know that you do.

Thank you. It's my pleasure. And like I said, our customer success has always been and will always be the most important thing here at Service Titan. So thank you and thank you to all of our customers.

Appreciate it.

You got it.

Thank you. That's a cut. Thank you so much, man.

That was great.

Sam.