For years, Kathy Halvorsen accepted the fact that her computer screen would sometimes get a little glitchy.
That’s because the controller at Western Mass Heating, Cooling & Plumbing was using four different kinds of software, simultaneously, every single day.
“(My screen) would get frozen,” Halvorsen said. “Especially if (I was) on a Zoom call…(I’d get an alert that said) ‘Low resources,’ and it’d sound like (whoever I was talking to) was talking in (delays) and the screen would freeze. I'd have to wait for it to catch up.”
This was annoying. But the commercial and residential shop in Haydenville,Massachusetts, relied heavily on all four of those softwares to keep the business running. One was for scheduling. Another was for accounting. There was a separate software for service calls, and another for payroll.
But gaps remained. For example, none of the software had preventative maintenance agreement capabilities. They also used too much paper and had limited reporting capabilities.
Finally, in early 2024, Halvorsen realized how absurd it had all become.
“We were paying all this money for (four) softwares, and we were still doing workarounds for (different) departments just to get (everything) to work,” she said.
“Even the owner was like, ‘There's got to be an easier way.’”
Goodbye workarounds
Western Mass went live with ServiceTitan in June 2024, and saw an immediate impact.
“Just from ServiceTitan, we were able to eliminate our four other softwares,” Halvorsen said. They also eliminated the workarounds that had become commonplace at their shop.
Take preventative maintenance agreements (PMAs) as an example. The shop’s previous customer relationship management (CRM) software did not have a PMA module. That meant Halvorsen and her team had to keep a manual and meticulous spreadsheet to track their PMAs.
“We had one (spreadsheet) for fall, one was for spring, etc.,” she said.
Every time their techs did an install and/or maintenance, Halvorsen and her team had to schedule another maintenance call for a year later on the spreadsheet—and continuously monitor those dates.
“God forbid if anybody (on our team) left or nobody knew what the spreadsheet was—that was (the only place) where we were keeping track (of PMAs),” Halvorsen said.
This tangled system sometimes led to missed appointments, or forgetting to send the customer the actual PMA.
Another workaround was reporting. In their previous software, Halvorsen said it was difficult to get accurate job costing reports such as budget vs. actual—so the office manually calculated that data on their own.
“There was a lot of picking things apart, double checking it, breaking it down more, adding in lines, more formulas—and that just opens up a lot more opportunity for error when you have manual entry going in all the time,” Halvorsen said. “Getting those profitability reports was brutal. Absolutely brutal.”
The switch to ServiceTitan changed everything.
“We needed something that was a little bit more robust, that had great reporting and we could have (all) departments on the one platform,” she said.
‘Quit cold turkey’
It’s easy to get stuck in a bad routine, especially when you don’t know it’s a bad one in the first place.
That’s how Halvorsen felt when she was balancing four different softwares at once. She knew it was arduous, but at the same time, she didn’t know of a better method—until she started using ServiceTitan.
“It's invaluable,” Halvorsen said. “(ServiceTitan) has saved me so much time in workarounds. (Everything is) just so much easier now.”
Western Mass is profiting from the switch, too. For example, Halvorsen said the shop has been able to convert more bids on ServiceTitan—simply because “the project platform is just a lot easier to read with customers,” she said.
As for the cost? Halvorsen said ServiceTitan was slightly more than the four previous softwares combined.
“But I think the value of it and the functionality of ServiceTitan far outweighs all the other workarounds we were doing,” she said. “It's just so much more efficient than how we were doing things, and I think that it's even more beneficial.”
It’s only been a year—but Halvorsen can’t imagine going back.
“We quit (those four softwares) cold turkey.”
