The Old Customer & Location Page Is Leaving, And The New One Got Even Better

What's going on, everybody? It's Richard Coburger here, the blue collar nerd. Thank you all for coming. We're gathered here today to mourn the loss of an old friend, the old customer and location page design. Well, I'm not done just yet. Just stay in the afterlife. It's okay. Old design served this community for about a decade, and despite its many, many flaws, it was reasonably liked by some. Why is this eulogy so mean? Only dreams now. Oh, okay. And while old design has moved on, gone from this plane of existence, never to be seen again, we need not be sad because there is good news. The new design is way better. Celebrate good times. Come on. Yes, it' true. The old version, the legacy version of the customer and location page design is being sunset. In other words, it's going away. And this is happening in the very near future. Now, the majority of you are already using the new design. And so for the majority of people, this change is going to be irrelevant to all of those people. You're welcome to stick around. You might still learn something about the new design that you didn't know before. But this video is not really for you. I know that there are a handful of people watching this video right now who are upset and they've already scoffed at my claim that the new version is better. And they're already formulating their angry comment in their head. Hello, welcome. I'm glad you're here. This video's for you. Make a deal with me, that person. Just give me until the end of the video to convince you. I promise the new version is a lot better than you think. It's me. It's bcn. I'm in the community, I'm in the Facebook groups. I see the comments and I haven't seen a critical piece of feedback about the new design in probably the last five months that hasn't been over, already addressed or is about to be addressed in the next update. So let me show you what we've done. But before we do that, I do just want to address, as of the time of me recording this video, there was a recent update, ST67, and that update broke the ability to edit contacts on the legacy screen on the old design. And I've seen some people speculate that that was done on purpose in order to push people into the new design. No, that's not the case. That is just what happens to legacy features and designs. It's to be expected. It's inherent to something being legacy. Legacy means that it is obsolete. And as the software around that obsolete thing changes, there's going to be incompatibilities over time. This is sometimes referred to as degradation. And it's just what happens to things that are legacy. That's because with any piece of software, a single line of code can have cascading effects. It can break all sorts of things, which is why there's QA or quality assurance. But when there's a new design and then the legacy version sticks around for a little while now we've got this fork in the road. So as things move forward, as the software around changes, QA resources aren't allocated to the legacy version. Why not? Well, because development resources also can't be allocated to the legacy version. Meaning if quality assurance finds that something did break, well, so what? There's no development resources available to fix that. Why not? Well, think about it. If there's two versions of something and you're allocating resources to both, then then essentially you are running and operating two softwares, which is twice as difficult, requires twice as many people, and is twice as expensive and is therefore unfeasible. So legacy things just kind of stay the way they are. Now that's not to say that a bug that happens in the legacy version will never be fixed, but it just won't be prioritized. It's not considered an emergency or anything, because legacy things breaking is just part of what happens to legacy things. And this is true for software in general. This is not like a service titan thing, which is why I've spent this much time talking about it. I just think it's a helpful thing to know out in the world, which is increasingly filled with more and more technology. But okay, with all that said, why was the legacy version left there at all if that's the case? Well, that was to provide a period of time to collect feedback. You know, when you switch from the new design to the old design, it asks you for feedback. It was to collect that. And just to be clear, it's not like this step is the first time that any customer feedback is collected. Far from it. Before anything is built at all, ideas are collected from previous customer feedback. Then customer interviews are performed to make sure that what serviceitan is thinking is in line with what customers are wanting and needing. Then some things get built. There's more customer interviews to collect feedback on what's there so far. Then eventually things get to a pretty done ish state, and then there's a beta test done where a bigger group of users will try it out for a while and provide feedback and after all of that's done, then it rolls out to everybody, all the service Titan users, but all the service Titan users is a bigger audience than the interviewees and the beta testers. And so for something like a major design overhaul for a core page in the product, sometimes the old design, the legacy design, might be kept around for a little while just to be extra Safe. That helps ServiceTitan ensure that any major and legitimate pieces of feedback can be addressed before the old version totally goes away, which at this point has now been done. So let me go through some common complaints in the past about the new design and let me tell you what's been done to fix that. All right, so here we are on the new design, and as you can see at the top, we've got this customer summary section with these cards inside of it. And one piece of feedback that we got was that not everybody wanted to show these lifetime revenue and average job total cards. So if that's you, those can now be disabled. To do that as an admin, we're going to go into Settings and then operations and customer. And then there you'll see these two toggle switches to turn off the lifetime revenue card and or the average job total card. By the way, this is also where you can adjust the threshold for what's included in the average job total. So for example, you could put your dispatch fee in here and then any jobs that just had the dispatch fee or less wouldn't be counted towards the job total. Let me just toggle these both off just to, you know, prove that it does do what I say it does. Okay. And now those two cards are no longer visible. Okay, now this new version is much more customizable than the old design. For example, you can collapse sections and you've got these report like tables where you can do filters and change the way that things are sorted. But initially when the design rolled out, these changes weren't sticky, meaning if you refresh the page or if you navigate it away, everything would reset to the default. That's no longer the case. Any customizations that you do are now persistent. So if I collapse invoices here, invoices is going to stay collapsed as I navigate around unless I decide to expand it again. If I want to change the way that my invoices are sorted so it's Newest to oldest vs oldest to newest or vice versa, whatever, then that change is going to remain until I decide that I want them sorted differently. And these changes stick per user, so every individual user can have their own setup. Now Another piece of feedback that we got when this first rolled out was that even though there was more information, which was good, there was too much horizontal scrolling, which was bad. For example, here in my payments table, I've got to scroll horizontally to see the columns that are over here. We also got feedback that it would be nice if you could move the columns that are more important to you, specifically over to where they're easier to get to. So as of the ST68 release, you can do both of those things and you can also lock columns. And I'll show you what that means in just a minute. So let's see, I'm looking at this payments table here, and I've got to do some horizontal scrolling and I don't like that. And I don't need all of this information anyways. Well, I can click Edit columns right here, and then I can choose what I do and don't want to see. Let's say I don't want the authorization code. Maybe I don't need the refund status. Maybe I don't need, let's say the type or credit available applied status. You get the idea. You can hide the things you don't want to see. Plus, let's say invoice number was really important to me. I need to look at that all the time. I can move that up so that it's the second column instead of the last one. And maybe check number. Sometimes I need to see that, but not always. So it's no big deal if that one's last. Okay, let's hit apply. And now those extra columns are hidden. Now, I did leave enough to still have some horizontal scrolling because I want to show you what locking a column does. So maybe payment ID is really important information to me. But when I scroll over, well, then I lose that and I can't see it anymore. Well, if I go to edit columns and then I hit this lock icon next to payment id, I'll say apply. And now as I scroll, that stays in place so that I can still see it and reference it. Plus okay, let's say that this is all the columns that I need, but I still have to horizontal scroll a little bit. I still don't like that. Well, both of these sidebars, this navigation bar here, and this customer details pane, both of those are collapsible. So I could go like this and like this. And then now everything fits. We're using up the whole width of the screen. Plus, what's really cool about the left navigation bar is that you can Leave it collapsed. And then just when you move your mouse over to the edge, you can, it shows up for you so that you can move to where you need to move to and then move away and the bar just automatically collapses itself. We also got feedback that the modal versions of the customer and location pages, those little pop ups that show up on the call booking screen, initially those showed up too small and it was kind of hard to use them. It was very narrow and so you had a bunch of horizontal scrolling to do. So as of release 67.3, that modal is now much bigger. And by the way, what I was saying before, how any customizations that you make to the customer and location pages are persistent, they're sticky. That also applies to this, this modal, this little pop up on the call booking screen. So however you have your screen set up, it's gonna look that way here as well. And hey, take a look at that. You can now see and edit which contacts have notifications enabled for them at a glance. And that was another piece of feedback. Previously that information wasn't as easy to see and edit. And if it's a cell phone, you're able to easily initiate a chat from here as well. And just FYI, you're not gonna see those bells in all of my screen recording footage for this video, but they will be available everywhere. It's just that I'm using different test environments that are running on different. But for you, once you get the release that'll be available, doesn't matter if you're looking on the call booking screen or the customer location pages by themselves, Whatever. Okay. Finally, the last piece of feedback that I've seen come up multiple times is that some people feel that this page looks cluttered. And I can understand that viewpoint. It is very dense with information for sure. But keep in mind, as of ST68, you can hide columns that are irrelevant to you. You can collapse both the sidebars and individual sections that maybe aren't relevant to you and all of those changes that you make are persistent. For example, let's say that the main thing I use the customer page for is just reviewing photos. I just need to look at the photos that are uploaded to this customer and everything else is just kind of in my way. Fine, I can collapse literally everything else. Collapse, collapse, collapse. And now this is my customer page. It's just the information in the header and photos and videos. That's it. That's the only two things that are here. That's the only two things that I want to see. So that's fine. By the way, I'll point out that any sections that are blank, for example in here emails, has a zero next to it. So there's no emails. Those are just going to be automatically collapsed by default. And just to demonstrate the persistence for you, okay, I'm on customer Alan King here. Let's look at a different customer. Let's look at this one for example. And boom. As you can see, everything that I did is still done. Everything's collapsed, even though I'm looking at a different customer now. Okay, last thing on that point. Sometimes I see people say that information that was on the old screen isn't here. That's not true. I haven't found a single example of that being true. It is, of course, a redesign. So not everything is going to be in the exact same spot, but everything that you could see on the old design is still there on the new design. To demonstrate that, I took this screenshot of the old design and the new design next to each other and I color coded it of where things are on the old design versus the new design. So feel free to pause the video here if that's going to be helpful to you. And all of the buttons that were there are still here too. It's just that some of them are now housed under this. A more kebab menu. All right, so that's addressing feedback. Now let's talk about some of the cool features that this page has that the old one didn't. First of all, we now have this graphic in the upper left that makes it visually obvious whether you're on the customer page or the location page. This was a long running customer request. People found it very difficult to differentiate between the two because they looked basically identical before. But now let's go to a location. Now it's visually obvious. Plus we now have this breadcrumb trail up here. So I'm on Alan King under the Alan King customer. So if I wanted to go to the customer, I could just click on that and that would take me back to the customer page. We also of course have this side navigation panel so that instead of scrolling to sections like you had to do on the old design, you can just snap to whatever you're looking for. Let's say I'm going for forms, I can just snap right to it. That is of course an option there for your convenience. But you can still just scroll throughout the page like you could on the old one if you want to. There's also this handy scroll to top button here. In the lower right hand corner that you can just click to take you right back to the top of the screen. Notes have a search bar, so if you have a lot of notes, you can search for them. The big one is that you can sort and filter data to your liking. So for example, I'm looking at the jobs here and I've got all these jobs, but I only want to see ones that are completed, not scheduled. So I can just click this filter icon and click completed and filter and boom. Now I've got this narrowed down list of only completed jobs. Can't do that on the old design. Plus another piece of customizability here. Let's clear this filter. I'm able to specify how many pieces of data I want to see per page in any particular table. So I've got a lot of jobs here and I've got the setting maxed out at showing 30 items per page. But I could also say, hey, only show me 10 items per page. And then you see I have fewer jobs showing up here and I have two pages that I can flip between and that applies for anything. Let's say notes here is set default to five items per page. But maybe I frequently have more than that. I can change it to hey, show me up to 20 per one page. With the old design, you didn't have that option. Things would still hit a threshold where they would have to be paginated. You'd have to flip through pages. But it was hard coded, you didn't have any choice. Another benefit, I know that tags are important to a lot of people. Tags are here all the time now. So whether I'm scrolling down, as long as I have this customer details pane open, I can still see the tags. Whereas here on the old design, the tags are a little smaller. They blend in with these buttons and these data points. And when I scroll, I can't see them anymore. By the way, if you need to make any edits to anything that's easy, you just click this little edit pencil. You've also got an edit pencil up here that opens that same flyout. So let's say I wanted to edit my tags here. I'm going to hit that pencil and then here's all the tags that are on there. Let's take this one off and save. Easy as that. By the way, even inside of this customer details pane, I can also collapse sections if certain ones are less relevant to me. Let's see what else. I kind of feel like that covers most of it. The only other piece of Feedback that I frequently see is just. It's different. I'm not used to it. I know where everything is on the old page. I don't. I don't like it. It's just the only piece of feedback that's given. And I mean, look, it's. It's like I said in my release notes video when this new design first rolled out. Let us for a moment reminisce. I do want to point out that there is a way, okay, to switch back to the old design if you need to. But look, look here, look, look Papa Nerd in the eyes. Don't you do that just because this one's different and you don't want to get used to it. Okay, I understand. You have muscle memory. Like, you know how to get to everything that you need immediately with the old design. So for a few days, maybe a week, a new design might slow you down a little bit. I understand. I hear you. I feel you. But the new design is more powerful. And the switch to old design button, it's not going to be there forever. You have to learn to let go. And I stand by that. Just give it a little bit of time and you'll be more efficient and happier. With the new version, it's infinitely more customizable and it does more. It just might take a week or two to realize those benefits because it is different and you do have to learn. Anyways, that's all I got for today. Be sure to hit, like, whether you like this video or not, be sure to leave me a very kind comment down below and I'll catch you guys in the next one. Appreciate it. Peace.