In a tight and stressful economy, service businesses seek to get the most out of existing resources to maximize results. From job booking and operational efficiency to technician performance and customer satisfaction, it’s more important than ever to lean on ServiceTitan automations to help streamline processes and grow your business.
ServiceTitan automations allow you to do more with your data — resulting in more booked jobs, maximized profits, and new levels of efficiency for your teams. In a recent webinar, ServiceTitan Industry Advisor Angie Snow and Jim VanHorn, a CPA and owner of Home Climates, explain:
5 ServiceTitan automations that help maximize job bookings and efficiencies
How to save time and increase productivity with Titan Intelligence
How to get the most out of your teams, including CSRs, dispatchers, and more
Setting the agenda, ServiceTitan Senior Product Marketing Manager Josh Lu says the webinar’s goal is to explain the why, what, and how of automations:
Why automate? “We want to drive efficiency. What market conditions have shifted and how do we respond to those shifts?”
What to automate? “We share the top five automations to get set up now before the busy season.”
How to automate? “What's next? “The real important piece is how to do these things and to take action,” Lu says.
Why automate?
As a growth-oriented business owner, you’ve made the investment in ServiceTitan software. Now, get the most out of your investment and utilize the software’s full functionality by turning on as many automated features as possible.
“One of our goals at ServiceTitan is to help you do more, and become more efficient with less time, less energy, and less effort,” Snow says. “Setting up automations in ServiceTitan can help you save time, drive your growth, streamline your workflows, and just overall make it easier for you to run your business.”
Amid shifting market conditions, ServiceTitan surveyed more than 1,000 residential service contractors from across the country to examine industry trends, pain points, potential risks, and keys to future success.
The service industry survey, conducted in late 2023, showed:
70% of contractors feared a recession
49% of contractors named labor shortage as the biggest inhibitor
29% of contractors planned to increase technology use
“On top of that, we're also seeing average tickets are down, more people are opting for repair versus replacement,” Snow says. “We've had to shift the way we do things in our business.”
Last September, VanHorn says, he noticed a major shift in his business “from replace to repair,” and that trend has remained predominant in 2024.
“Our customers, more than ever, are interested in maintenance,” he says. “We're having a lot of success with maintenance right now, like coil cleanings and blower cleanings, to improve efficiency, extend the life of the systems, and try to prolong that replacement as long as possible.”
To help you navigate changing market conditions and get the most out of your ServiceTitan account, consider the following top 5 automations for less stress and better efficiency.
What to automate?
Many automated features empower your core ServiceTitan account, while others enable a suite of Pro products that can help you do even more. This recap highlights 5 ServiceTitan automations (core and Pro), and readers can learn more by downloading the free guide, Automation Essentials: 10 Ways to Drive Growth & Save Time with ServiceTitan.
1. Reserve with Google
Today’s customers want an easy way to schedule appointments with you, and turning on the Reserve with Google automation feature is one of the easiest ways to make that happen — and you can do it today as a core ServiceTitan user, Snow says. VanHorn says he turned it on recently, and it took less than five minutes.
The only requirement for setting up Reserve with Google is to create a Google Business Profile, if you haven’t already done so. Then, you simply walk through the following steps:
Review and accept authorization form
Connect your accounts
Set default as Job Type Matching (to match correct job type to booked call)
Set availability (hours of service)
Set service area (drive time for technicians)
“After you get this integration all set up, ServiceTitan will help you automatically create a Reserve with Google marketing campaign. So, when someone calls in from that campaign, you can track it in your reporting,” Snow says.
VanHorn says Home Climates, which began in 2009, already had a Google presence but no ability for customers to book online. As soon as he turned on Reserve with Google in his ServiceTitan account, customers started booking calls within 24 hours.
“It’s very impactful,” VanHorn says. “We saw results almost instantaneously.”
2. Recurring service campaigns using SMS
Recurring service campaigns using SMS is another automation available to all ServiceTitan users who seek to schedule customers with membership or maintenance agreements via text messaging. The only requirement: Make sure recurring services are set up in your account.
Home Climates manages about 1,300 membership customers, VanHorn says, and a recent demographic survey shows the company’s customer database is mostly 35- to 50-year-olds who own newer, simpler homes.
“That group in particular is into self-service, and [recurring service campaigns using SMS] has been the springboard that opened our eyes to the power of automations,” VanHorn says.
Homeowners in that age group prefer to text, he says, so Home Climates decided to try sending a text blast to all recurring customers to let them know it’s time to schedule spring tune-ups. It’s something he could do without any pro-product help.
“Let’s send that out and see what happens,” VanHorn told his team.
And the results? “It’s pretty exciting,” says the self-proclaimed “numbers guy” from Home Climates.
“We sent it to all 1,300 of our members, and within the first 24 hours we had 30 people book online and 80 people respond via text to set up their appointment,” VanHorn says. “That's pretty significant.”
While some booked through Reserve with Google, VanHorn also went a step further and added Scheduling Pro automation to his team’s arsenal of tools so customers can book at their own convenience.
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“It cut out a phone call and everybody booked online, they scheduled their own appointment,” he says.
Within 24 hours of sending out one text message, 15% of Home Climates members responded online, via text, or through calls and emails. And after seven days, online bookings increased to 90, text messages bumped to 124, and the overall reach climbed to 32%.
“Look at the number of people who responded by text. Ten percent of the membership actually responded by text to our text message about setting up their appointment. So, a lot less effort for the staff,” VanHorn says.
Recurring service text messages are super simple to set up, and do not require a Pro-product subscription.
To set up recurring service text messaging:
Make sure the chat feature is activated (you can receive and reply to texts on job booking tab)
Go to recurring service reminder campaigns (found in follow-up tab)
Select your audience
Create text message
Review, then submit
“It's functionality that already exists right in that front page, no matter what services you have in terms of Pro,” VanHorn explains. “It was a springboard to us that showed us the power of automation.
“This was a great way, with hardly any expense, to give it a whirl and see what happens. And I got to tell you, I was blown away with the 24-hour and seven-day results. I was blown away,” he adds.
With such great results, VanHorn says he now wants to leverage more automation. “That’s why we’re now exploring all of the Pro services,” he says.
3. Automate like a pro
ServiceTitan’s Pro suite of services, add-ons to the core product, automate business processes for even greater success — much like Home Climates achieved with 90 new online bookings within one week using Scheduling Pro.
VanHorn set up Scheduling Pro with intention so when customers booked their own appointments, they could only choose specific slots for scheduling spring tune-ups. With a total of 20 slots a day for five technicians, Home Climates reserved two morning and two afternoon appointments for tune-ups and required a 10-business-day lead time.
“I let those folks schedule their own appointments, and then between the people who are calling and emailing back, we work those in as well,” VanHorn says. “And that's how we balance the schedule in terms of logistics.”
He also wants to try Dispatch Pro, but says he still needs to convince his team that automated dispatching can help improve their processes.
“That's the next step for me, as the business owner. I got to get everybody else on board,” VanHorn says. “But so far, the response from the text, from the customers and from our staff, has been extremely positive.”
While ServiceTitan Pro Products require an additional investment, Snow says the investment brings powerful automations to help you save time, increase efficiency, and boost performance.
Marketing Pro helps you generate more leads and target the right leads.
Scheduling Pro helps you book more jobs by capturing more jobs online.
Dispatch Pro helps you increase revenue by sending the right tech to maximize the job.
“If you've got this high-value job, the technician who is performing the best with consistent close rates, conversion rates, higher average tickets, the Dispatch Pro system is able to learn your company, it knows your technicians, and it can match them up better than a human can. It knows the data, and it's able to do that the right way,” Snow says.
VanHorn decided to turn on Marketing Pro this month, and says he’s most excited to use its automation follow-up features. Home Climates requires its technicians to make recommendations and offer an estimate every time they visit a customer’s home. And while techs are leaving estimates, no one is following up on unsold estimates.
“Especially on my service estimates for upsell items or ancillary products, absolutely nobody was following up on those,” VanHorn says. “One of the simplest things in Marketing Pro are drip marketing campaigns that actually follow up on those estimates you've written.
“Once you've left them an estimate, now you've opened the door to send them a text message as a follow-up to that estimate,” he adds. “We want to have a drip marketing campaign that follows up that estimate three or four days after we leave it. Keep trying to water that seed and get it to sprout.”
Combining these three Pro Products — Scheduling Pro, Marketing Pro, and Dispatch Pro — with your core ServiceTitan account helps businesses reach that next level, Snow says. For instance, Dispatch Pro helps to take the human emotion, bias, and assumptions out of the dispatching equation to empower dispatchers.
“It's not replacing dispatchers. It's empowering them and helping them put the most valuable jobs on their highest-performing technicians,” Snow says.
Dispatching is definitely a pain point for Home Climates, VanHorn says.
“My service manager tells the techs the dispatcher is making the best-worst choice they can possibly make every single time. And that's literally what it comes down to,” VanHorn says. “Dispatch Pro will help tremendously with getting the right person in the right place in an unbiased way.”
4. Invoice summary generator
ServiceTitan also introduced several new Titan Intelligence automations during Pantheon 2023, including the invoice summary generator. Available to all ServiceTitan users, this automated feature allows designated office staff to clean up invoice summaries for grammar, punctuation, clarity, etc., before sending invoices to customers.
Simply prompt Titan Intelligence to use its machine learning to generate a new invoice summary based on the parameters you set, such as language, tone, structure, and more.
5. Invoice email generator
Once your invoice is complete and ready to send, use the Titan Intelligence-powered invoice email generator to customize and personalize emails to each customer.
This automated feature is available for use on the back end of your software system, but not for mobile devices. Check out ServiceTitan knowledge base articles to learn more about how to automatically generate invoice emails using Titan Intelligence.
Here's a snapshot of all Titan Intelligence features available or in development, from lead generation and booking jobs to gaining clear business insights.
Snow highlighted a few as her favorites:
Ads Optimizer: To identify well-performing Google Ads, and invest more resources in them
Second Chance Leads: A Phones Pro feature to help capture every lead
Automated Timesheets: A Fleet Pro feature to automatically track techs’ time
“ServiceTitan has lots of automations that are already available, or will be coming soon,” Snow says. “And the cool thing about this? We're not done. At ServiceTitan, we’re going to continue to invest in developing the very best software so you can save even more time, and drive business and drive revenue.”
Automating your business with ServiceTitan is a simple thing to do, VanHorn says.
“There's a lot of simple stuff here that doesn’t take much effort, but I think yields a pretty big reward,” he says. “I'm very excited to be going into the summer with some of this stuff in play.”
