The 20% Advantage: Scaling Smart with Scheduling Pro and Dispatch Pro | Podcast Ep. 53

And think about that. That's 20% of your job. So if your company, a bigger company and you're running 300 calls a day, I mean, to not have to worry about 20% of them is absolutely phenomenal.

Welcome to Mastering Service Titan, where we get expert advice from power users. I'm your host, Josh Lu, and today I'm joined by Jesse Karlovitz, the call center manager at Bonfi Plumbing and Heating. And we are going to deep dive into a really cool topic of Scheduling Pro and Dispatch Pro and especially how they work together. And so my first question for you is maybe in your own words, how would you describe Scheduling Pro and Dispatch Pro?

Life saving, I think is the best way to say it. No, no, they are. They're fantastic tools. It's really about working smarter and being able to help your business scale and not necessarily have to add a ton of overhead. Were really two of the big things that they did for us and have really helped us out in that aspect. And also being able to meet the customer where they want to be met. We're coming into a day and age where it's not always easy. Although we have our phones in our hand, not everybody wants to pick it up and make that phone call and wants to talk to somebody. So being able to go online and be able to book and schedule online has been. It's been a great asset for us. Us.

Gotcha. And then before Scheduling Pro, were customers able to book online or did they have to just send an email or.

They have to send an email or a text in.

Okay, and then what has the biggest difference been now with Scheduling Pro?

Believe it or not, roughly 20 to 25% of our jobs that get booked now get booked through Scheduling Pro.

Wow. Okay. And what do you think's the biggest difference between Scheduling Pro versus, like, other booking widgets or, you know, how like websites, they can like, customize a bunch of stuff and make forms and whatnot? What's the biggest difference between all that and something like Scheduling Pro?

It's directly inside Service Titan in so many aspects. So it reads our capacity availability based on whatever job types, skill sets, whatever we have set, whether you're on ACP or adaptive, it works with. With all of that, which is amazing. And so we're really being able to give our customers some. Some great advice. But also, also because it's a Service Titan product, it worked talks so well with Service Titan and we're able to book a job just as if a customer service rep booked the job. We were able to customize questions that we asked and job types that we're using and things like that.

Gotcha. And when you guys first got Scheduling Pro, it sounds like there's some setup, especially with the custom. You know, when you can customize something so much, maybe there's a little bit more lift in terms of setup that you have to do. Do you have any advice for people who are maybe new to Scheduling Pro on how to get that set up properly?

You know, the biggest advice that I have when it comes to Scheduling Pro is starting small. So what I've Learned throughout my 5 year journey with Service Titan is if I can set it up very basic in the beginning, learn how it functions, how it's going to work for us, and then advance it from there. It seems to be the best avenue for both us and our customers. So when we started with Scheduling Pro, you have to map the calls and stuff on the backside. It sounds really scary. It took all of like five minutes. When I set it up the first time, it was not. Once I figured it out, it was super intuitive, which was fantastic. But we actually set them up just to come in with like it was a job type designated just for Scheduling Pro. That was whatever trade it was. And then we would go, okay, are we getting the right information? Are we asking the right questions? And then once we were confident with that, we started mapping them to the specific job types and then we'd look at those and make sure that they were good and accurate and we were good to go from there. We were looking at being able then to enable them in Dispatch Pro. So it really helped a progression to go really small at it.

If I'm hearing this correctly, when you first started, you just had it, say a plumbing job or an H Vac job, and that was it.

That was it.

Wow. Okay. And so when a customer first booked it and it was just plumbing or H vac, then did you guys have to follow up with them to get some more information or confirm the job after that, or.

Yeah, in the beginning we would have to call and ask the customer some information and things like that if it didn't come in with enough information. But that's what helped us understand what questions we had to put on the front side and really trying to make it, I call it the iPhone effect, where it was big icons, very little things to pick from, and how to make it as quick, easy as possible for the customer. Because if it's more than five steps, you're going to lose them. So if your grandma can't figure it out it's not going to work.

Yeah, that makes so much sense. And that's such a good, actionable takeaway, I think for people getting started with Scheduling Pro is, yes, there's a lot of customization, but maybe hold off on those until you're ready.

Until you're ready.

Okay. And now you also mentioned Dispatch Pro. So how does it work with something like Dispatch Pro?

Once we were comfortable with it, we were able to say that these. So it says it's a third party booked job. It's not booked inherently in the system, it's booked outside and pushed through into Servicetitan. And so we were able to say, okay, now allow third party jobs if they're one of our Dispatch Pro enabled job types to go ahead and come in automatically enabled. So what we were able to do is be able to say, now that we know that it was mapping correctly, we had all the right questions. We weren't having to call customers back all the time. They would show up at the bottom of the board and then when Dispatch Pro shuffled in 10 minutes, they'd automatically find their way up to the top.

Got it. Okay. So at first the Scheduling Pro jobs would just get booked on the calendar and then a dispatcher would still dispatch it. But then once you guys are comfortable, you let Dispatch Pro take over. So what you're telling me is a customer can book a job online and then it gets automatically dispatched and a CSR or a dispatcher didn't have to talk to them for that job.

Correct.

Which is insane.

It's awesome. It's. And think about that. That's 20% of your job. So if your company, a bigger company and you're running 300 calls a day, I mean, to not have to worry about 20% of them is absolutely phenomenal.

Yeah, that's crazy. So with Dispatch Pro, I feel like there's a lot of fear and hesitation, especially from the dispatchers themselves, on how it's going to impact their jobs or just change their day to day workflows. What were the conversations like with your team in preparation for Dispatch Pro?

It was really being transparent with them and being upfront and honest with them and letting them know that this is, you know, AI is a scary thing. Everybody thinks it's going to come take their job. Hopefully it's not gunning for mine, but it was just really helping them understand how this was a tool for them to use to help them focus on the things that really mattered. You know, when you're an H VAC company and you're running maintenance calls, there isn't much difference in a five year old maintenance. Like you got a three year old, a four year old, a five year old maintenance call. There's not a ton of difference, right? And when you get a, that return, like the repair call that comes in and you, you know, nine times out of ten you're going to go to your best guy. Well, your best guy's already full of calls, right? Because he's your best guy. So you have to place that call on him and then you have to, then, well, all those were obviously good calls. So now they're going to go to your second best guy who's probably full and so on and so forth. And then now you have to figure out, okay, so now that I know their calls, what's the right drive order to get sure that we're maximizing drive times, right. And so what it allowed my dispatchers to do is not have to make a hundred clicks just to place one call. They were able to focus on the ones that really mattered, focus on those moneymaker calls, those repair calls that came in and not have to worry about things, things like putting them in the drive time order and shuffling the calls around and looking at them in the view technician route and trying to figure out where all the maintenance went. So it was just really helping them see, it was a way to help them do their job faster, better and to be able to focus on the things that mattered and not necessarily the tedious tasks.

In the preparation for Dispatch Pro, did you have any dispatchers kind of like push back or like really afraid of it and not want to switch over?

Oh yeah.

And what, what did they, what were some of the things that they would.

Tell you that they knew better? It's interesting because I will say even myself, like there is one guy that I was like, he's the best guy. He's absolutely phenomenal. We're going to send him to everything. And Dispatch Pro doesn't just look at one guy's tech score, it looks at that guy's tech score for that specific job type. So it's down to the nitty gritty of the actual job type. What was interesting is that guy did great on certain calls, but don't send him to a faucet. He's not going to do anything with a faucet. Or I have H Vac selling techs and it helped me realize that one of them could never get past the, once the equipment hit 15 years old, he couldn't get past that. I'm just Going to let it live forever.

Oh, interesting.

But you've sent him to anything 10 to 14 and he'd knock it out of the park.

Wow.

So those are all things that before we were very general and it helped us really understand and it helps bring to light a lot of numbers and guys that you didn't think were maybe necessarily your greatest techs were for certain job types.

Gotcha. So, Dispatch Pro, it's been a while since I talked to the technical team to try to understand exactly how it works, but to me it seems like it does like a ton of math. It looks at the history of all the job types, all the technicians, maybe even recently who's doing well at certain things, and then it calculates all that, and when new jobs come in, it recalculates. Is that kind of how it works.

Or a hundred percent how it works? Yeah. So it looks at them by job type and then you get to set it. The nice thing is you get to set up some of these controls. So you get to decide, do you want to route technicians in a circle back to home? Do you weigh revenue more than distance? Like what makes more sense to you and your business? And it's kind of a sliding scale. You don't have to pick one or the other. You can say, well, we're going to little more heavy this way. And then also when it decides on what it wants to look at for how much history you want it to look at, when it's comparing the history, you can decide do you want it to weigh short term versus long term or heavier or vice versa. And once you get your calculation set, it does math equations for hundreds of technicians in seconds.

It's crazy.

It's awesome.

It's cool to hear the adjustments that you can make if you want to weigh it on revenue or more on drive time. How long did it take you to make those tweaks? And are you guys still tweaking along the way?

Yeah, we still make tweaks all the time. We'll make adjustments to our drive times a lot. So when we'll get into like, I'm from Minnesota, so we get lots of snow, so when we get snowstorms, we'll make that drive time adjustment down and weigh it heavier on drive time versus maybe right tech, right call just so that we can get in to more of our customers and not be on the road so much. So once it's set, it's not like it's set in stone. You get to make the adjustments that make sense for you and your Business.

That's the first time I heard about the snow situation because like that could block people even from getting the jobs done. It sounds like. So you want to prioritize. Let's just make sure everyone gets taken care of versus maximizing. Wow, that's really interesting. Now I know with Dispatch Pro, you know, like all the Pro products, there's quite some setup. Did you guys have to change your job types and all that in the beginning?

The one thing I will say that we did with Dispatch Pro and I tell this is, you know, whenever I talk to people that are going on it, I give them all the exact same advice. Go very, very granular on your job types and go very broad on your skills and add skills as you go. Because it's looking at the job types, it's looking at them on a job type level. You know, we had just AC repair, but going to a two year old AC repair is a lot different than going to a 20 year old AC repair. And so we had to decide what were some age ranges that we felt were comparable, that we could group together so that we could really make sure that we were maximizing all of our opportunities. And then we went very, very broad on our skills and kind of stepped into it and set goals for ourself that by the end of this week we want to be 5% more utilization. By the end of the next week we want to be 2% more utilization. And then coming together and going, okay, what calls did you hand place this week and why was that the right decision? Did the system make the wrong decision? And if it did, what can, what guardrails can we put in place to help it do better? So those are kind of my big takeaways when it comes to Dispatch Pro.

Okay, gotcha. There's two things I want to follow up on. One is the, the skills and the job types. And the second is that utilization piece because I know everyone wants to increase their utilization, but it can be a journey, I guess, to get there. So on the job types, let's maybe talk about just H Vac for a second. How did you end up splitting up your job types and then what are some examples of skills that you used?

Absolutely. So we split our job types up. The first thing we did was maintenance versus demand.

Okay.

And then when we did maintenance versus demand, we then broke them out to be in groups. So we grouped them by age. So like our air, our air conditioners are like 0 to 5, 6 to 9, 10 to 14 and 15. Plus we grouped our technicians, then their Skills were kind of grouped by. So they all had levels. So one technician. So, like, we would give them up to their highest level, and then we give them one below that just in case we weren't full of calls. We wanted to make sure that they got opportunity. And so that's kind of how we started. And Dispatch Pro looks at skills, not business units. So that was the other thing we had to do, was to create a business. A skill for each of our business units.

Right, because you guys have H Vac and plumbing.

H Vac. Plumbing and electrical.

Oh, and electrical. Okay.

Yep.

Wow. And then on the utilization piece. So when you guys first launched Dispatch Pro, I'm sure there are some people that were just, like, overriding Dispatch Pro, and it must have been a process. So what. What was that first conversation like? Maybe you're like, one or two weeks into Dispatch Pro, a lot of dispatchers are overriding. How do you have that conversation without, like, blaming people or, like, you can't argue with numbers.

So when somebody would come to when, you know, we'd sit down once a week with my dispatchers and ask them, like, what calls did you override this week? And why? So we would have them say, well, I overrode this water heater. It was on Bennett, but I wanted it to be on Brian, and Brian made more sense. Okay, so, well, why did Brian make more sense? And then it was, okay, well, let's look at their numbers. Bennett's A level is. Is second on the list and Brian's four. So, no, it didn't make a bad decision. It made a good decision. Right. And believe it or not, even having that same conversation with service managers was something that we had to. Because we had to get them to believe in it too. Right. Because they had to be able to talk to their technicians. Because our technicians don't want a robot placing their calls. It was just being really transparent and falling back on numbers, really. Using. There's a Dispatch Pro Tech Score report in Service Satan and utilizing that. So whenever somebody came to me and was in, you know, a service manager or something and didn't like the. Where it was, I. That was always my default. Well, let's pull the report. Let's see what the report says. Because it really. It's based on the numbers. It's conversion rates, it's average sales, it's average tickets, it's, you know, options, prop, opportunity, all of that. Different things. So. And when you weigh all of that together, you know, and the facts are the facts, right?

It just ends up to Be. It's just math. It's nothing personal.

Yeah, nothing personal. It's math.

Right. And what is that report called and where do people go to grab that?

Yes. So it's just in the report section. It's not a legacy report, it's brand new. Okay. And it's Tech Score Dispatch Pro. Tech Score.

Okay, cool. So you met with your dispatchers. Any jobs that they override, you say, hey, let's just see what dispatch Pro decided and why. You pull up the Tech Score Dispatch Pro text or report and then can you see that it kind of clicked for the dispatcher at that point?

Yeah, you can, you can start to see it, right? Because I mean it's, it's right in front of their face. But being open to them too, like when they were moving calls in the beginning and it did make sense, it was okay, do we need to add a skill then to make sure that this goes on the group of people that it should go on? Being open minded and taking in their feedback helps also them kind of swallow when they have to believe in the system too.

That makes sense. Okay, so it sounds like the first few weeks you're just genuinely curious why dispatchers overrode the call because there may be a good reason for it. And that good reason might need some adjustment to Dispatch Pro or hey, the math is right and you're helping them to distinguish when is a good time to override versus not override.

Yes.

Okay, how about nowadays? Are they still overriding and are there good reasons to.

Yeah, I think you're always gonna override. It's never gonna be a hundred percent utilization. It's designed to assist you in doing the job, not necessarily do the job for you.

Right.

And it's making sure that you know how you want it to work for you and what you want it to do. And so right now, you know we have tech generated leads, right. And it doesn't matter what industry you're in, it doesn't matter how big your company is, a tech generated lead is gold and you want to get to that right away. And so sometimes you don't. We don't have the time to wait for the system to refresh because it refreshes every 10 minutes, which seems really fast. But when you're sitting there trying to get it on a technician and you need to get them dispatched, 10 minutes is everything your competitor could be in the house at that point. Those are instances where they'll have to override or when there's not a lot of technicians on when we're running on a weekend. We'll maybe have one electrician that's working that weekend out of all of our electricians. And it's not going to like the drive type. So we're going to have to override. And sometimes it's like that just does not make sense. We have to. But our utilization is typically around that like 65 to 75% mark.

Oh, wow. Okay. So 65 to 75% of the jobs are the technician is assigned by Dispatch pro.

Yep.

And then the rest are handled or overridden.

Or overridden.

Okay, got it. And that's great to set expectations for people listening. It's not like Dispatch pro is going to come in and just fully take over. Automate all your dispatching. We definitely need a human in the loop. I am curious, with a majority of the jobs being assigned by Dispatch pro for dispatchers now, what is their day to day or how is their day to day different now than before? Like, what other things are they working on?

We're finding a lot more write tech. Right. Call situations. What we're able to do is we're able to dig into the jobs we're able to see. Should this have been set up as a warranty and it got set up incorrectly or have we been to this person's house before? Do we have open estimates? Should we send that technician back? Like, they're spending a lot more time really digging in to the calls that matter and making sure that we are. We are really getting the right technician. They're updating the skills if they need to, making sure that the skills are correct. Things like that. Versus before, it was more just trying to put the puzzle pieces together in the best way possible. And I mean, when we have, I think 35H vac technicians and they're running four to five calls a day, that was a lot for our dispatchers to have to like. There was no time to dig in between update calls and contacting customers and helping technicians. It was like a free for all.

Right.

This is taking that off of our plate.

Wow. Okay. So previously it was like just getting the jobs on the board and making sure the day runs. Was taking up their whole job, basically.

Yeah. And just basing everything based off of a job type.

Okay. Everything with base off job type. They're just trying to make it all happen. And nowadays it sounds like the freed up time allows them. You said to kind of dig into making sure every job's really taken care of in the right way. Wow. Sounds like a huge change.

Yes. It's been. It's been definitely an adjustment for them.

Yeah. For people who have just one Scheduling Pro or Dispatch Pro, what's the biggest benefit of getting the other?

The biggest benefit of getting Scheduling Pro is going to be the. You're opening up a brand new avenue for your customers, and you're probably going to get customers that you wouldn't necessarily have gotten if you didn't have that. And then when it comes to Dispatch Pro, the biggest benefit for us was being able to scale our technician size without having to scale our dispatch size.

Wow. That makes a lot of sense. Okay, last question. If Scheduling Pro and Dispatch Pro sadly disappeared till overnight.

Yeah.

And tomorrow you had to go back to the office, how would. How would that feel?

Scary. Very, very scary. I would have to be instantly hiring a lot more CSRs, a lot more dispatchers, and I would probably lose a small customer base.

Wow. Okay. So it's made a huge impact for your business.

Huge impact.

Okay. I'm so glad it has. There's a lot of updates coming for Pro products. Super excited to have you here at Pantheon, and thank you for coming on and just sharing all your wisdom with our audience.

I appreciate you having me. Thank you.

Thank you.