The Crippling 10% | How To Fix ServiceTitan's Product And Community

What's going on, everybody? It's Richard Coburger here, the blue collar nerd. If you haven't noticed by now, I'm kind of obsessed with Service Titan. I mean, I talk about it a lot and I try to talk about its successes as much as I do its failures. Maybe I don't succeed in doing that. But you know what? Servicetitan is the number one software for service companies. It's the market leader by far. So its successes are self evident. Clearly the they're doing something right. But in this video, I want to point out a major way that Service Titan can be a lot better. See, Service Titan has this habit. It's something I call the crippling 10%. They'll take something 90% of the way but then stop. But that last 10%, that's the 10% that makes the 90% usable. There's so many things that are just right there. They're so close to being really awesome things, but they just left out that crippling 10%. Let's take for example, equipment. So in the Service Titan price book you have services, you can have materials, and you can have equipment. Now, entering equipment, like big pieces of equipment. I'm from the H Vac industry, so for me it would be like condensers, furnaces, air handlers, that sort of thing. Entering in those things as equipment is very helpful because you can put in the serial number, you can put in the model number, you can put in your manufacturer warranty and your service provider warranty, and you can put in the age of the equipment. And if you sell something as equipment, all of that goes onto the account and stays with it. So from the office or from wherever you have that information, you have the model number, the serial number, you know exactly how old that piece of equipment is, you know exactly how much warranty is left on it. And equipment is what marketing pro looks at when you try to make a campaign based on equipment age. So, so if you want to send an email to people who have pieces of equipment that are, for example, five years old or older, you need equipment on file to know that. So for those reasons, it seems like it would make a lot of sense to make your packages as equipment pieces. You take the equipment pieces that go together and put them together into a service, you sell that service, boom, boom, boom, here comes all your equipment pieces and you're good to go. But then there's this crippling 10%. See, with equipment sales, there tends to be some fluctuation in your pricing. So servicetitan's pricing wizard doesn't let you price on gross margin alone, which is how a lot of H Vac contractors will quote installations. It will let you price on material cost on a markup table, so you can make less expensive materials marked up more than more expensive materials. And you can put in a labor rate so the amount of hours plus the material and your markups will equal your price. That's a very common model for service, but not so much for installation. And again, for installation, it's much more common to have a little bit of leeway in your price. And so, for all those reasons, for a lot of shops, myself and included, it's very important that the salesperson can see the company's cost on the equipment that he's selling. But there's no way to see equipment cost on the mobile side. You can, however, see the cost of materials if you have permission set up to do so. Materials also work better for purchase ordering. And so now if you want to build a price book and get the best of all those features, if you want your salesperson to see pricing out in the field, and you want the equipment to go onto the customer's file once you install it, well, then you have to do double entry. You have to have your equipment in as equipment and as material, and then tie those things together and then tie the equipment that is tied to the material over into the service. Now, ignoring the fact that that's a lot of extra work, we've also got a problem now that we're going to be double job costing. So we have to make sure that we put the equipment cost as $0, even though it's not really $0. But we have it in as material too. So we have to make sure that the cost is only on the material so that we don't double cost the building a price book for installations, which is already a pretty terrible process, just that much worse. And it's all just because of this crippling 10%. All we need to do is make it so that salespeople can see the cost of equipment on the mobile side. Another example of this is technician skills. So Service Titan has this feature where you can create skills and then assign those skills to technicians. And then in your job type settings, you can assign certain skills to certain job types. So you can say, for example, this job type no cool, requires the skill set troubleshooting. The goal of this feature is clearly to make it so that your dispatchers don't accidentally assign the wrong tech to the wrong type of job. But you only get warned about a mismatch in skill in one very specific scenario. When rescheduling a job by dragging and dropping it on the dispatch board, that's the only time you'll get that pop up that says, hey, this technician doesn't have the right skills for this job. It's almost as if this was built for a different feature, something that would book jobs for you that you could then rearrange if you wanted to. But I digress. So much of this feature is built out, it just needs to warn you when you manually book a job in the first place. By just doing that one little thing, we take something from useless to highly useful. And listen, I don't consider myself a programmer. I mean, I know enough to be dangerous, but I. I'm not a programmer. I don't really have a great grasp on the amount of resources it would take to actually pull these things off, but I just can't imagine it would take great resource allocation to make these little changes. Like I said, it's only the crippling 10%. 90% of the work is already done. One more example, job confirmations. Job confirmations are so close to being really useful, they change color on the dispatch board so your dispatchers know when a job's been confirmed. Your client can now text C back to confirm and it will automatically do it. But there's no indicator on the mobile side for the technician whether a job has been confirmed or not. So as it stands today, this feature actually leads to a less efficient workflow. Because whereas before your technician would just call the client and see if they're ready for them, now the technician needs to call the office to check with them to say, hey, is this job confirmed already? And if not, then they need to call the client like they would have done in the first place. That's an extra phone call. That's not saving us time. Crippling 10%. All we need to do is make it so that the technician can see whether a job's confirmed or not. And you know, it's not just product stuff. I see this across Service Titan as a whole. For example, I remember a couple months back I posted in the Service Titan Mastermind group saying that all of my Marketing Pro emails were going to spam. And I was kind of upset. I was like, I don't understand. It's like this feature is totally useless if all the emails go to spam. And other people were chiming in. Yeah, me too, me too. People were coming in with theories. It's because they don't have this certification. It's because they don't have this thing that makes it not go to spam. And I remember later that night, I got a text message from somebody who worked at Servicetitan. I'm not gonna name names, but somebody who works at Servicetitan sent me a screenshot. It was a screenshot of an internal Slack conversation. So a conversation that was happening in Servicetitan through text. And it was like, somebody at Servicetitan saw my post, screenshotted it, put it in Slack, and they had this conversation about it. You know, is this something we're aware of? And somebody came in, they were like, yes, we're aware of that. It's only happening with test emails. So if you hit test email, that'll go to spam, but it's not affecting the regular emails. And we're aware of it and we're working on it. And so the person took the screenshot and they sent it over to me just to let me know that people have seen it and that they were working on it and that it really wasn't as big of an issue as I thought. And I was like, great. Like, that's. That's amazing. It's only affecting test emails. The actual campaigns aren't being affected. They're aware of it and they're working on it. Fantastic. Tell the people. Nobody went in the Facebook group and said what they said in their internal Slack. They just let the reputation of Marketing Pro suffer. And you know what? That was a couple of months ago. It seems like that test email thing is still happening. And just today, I saw another thread about this same thing, and again, everybody just started chiming in. Me too, me too. Marketing Pro sucks. How can they sell this? Blah, blah, blah. And again, the reputation of Marketing Pro was just left to suffer. I mean, I understand the problem. Nobody internally at ServiceTitan wants to stick their neck out and put in a response because it's none of their jobs. So if they say something that they weren't supposed to say, that's gonna come down on them in a very negative way, because it wasn't their place to be saying anything at all. But that's far from an unsolvable problem. Right? Just make that somebody's job. A lot of negative reputation that Service Titan gets comes from just misunderstandings like that. And if there's one area where another software is just kicking Service Titan's butt, it's in the community. I mean, take for example, Housecall Pro. Housecall Pro does not do everything that ServiceTitan does. If we're just comparing features, ServiceTitan wins hands down. But the people who use Housecall Pro freaking love it. If you go into one of the user Facebook groups for housecall Pro, the sense of community is so strong. Look at this guy. This guy got a tattoo, but it doesn't do as much. So why are all these people ranting and raving while Service Titan's community is much more cynical? Well, here's my theory. Communication. The people behind housecall Pro, specifically Roland, one of the co founders, they're all up in those groups. They're answering questions, they're asking for feedback, they're having people vote on features. When somebody has a problem, they make that person feel heard. The users of housecall Pro feel heard and they feel involved. You get the general sense when you go into those groups that the voice of the user really matters. And I'm not saying that the voice of the user doesn't matter to Service Titan, but it's not communicated nearly as well. Service Titan's not perfect. And you know what? That's okay. Nobody expects it to be. But people need to feel heard when somebody's super pissed up in a Facebook group saying how this feature or lack thereof is causing them hours and hours of pain and headache and problems. You don't have to fix their problem tomorrow if that's not possible. But they need to know that you hear them now. My goal in making this video is not just to rag on Service Titan. I love Service Titan. I am team Service Titan all the way. I just want to shine the light on some of these deficiencies and say, how can I help? Seriously, Serviceitan, if there's anything I can do to help fill some of these deficiencies and make the product better and the community stronger for all of these hard working contractors, let me know. Anyways, that's all I got for today. Have a good one. Peace. I hit my fingers on the desk. It kind of hurt. Sam.