“Without having an online booking presence that’s actually able to generate the bookings, your business leaves money on the table.” — Jacob Levine, ServiceTitan Product Manager
Among today’s consumers, 70% expect to book online. And according to ServiceTitan survey data, 94% of consumers looking for a new contractor are more likely to choose one that offers online booking.
“Even though online bookings are so popular among consumers and contractors alike, many home and commercial service businesses still do not use online booking,” says Jacob Levine, a Product Manager for ServiceTitan. “And really, this is no one's fault. It's just a matter of some of the historical challenges that existed with online scheduling.”
In a recent session at Pantheon 2023, ServiceTitan’s annual conference for the trades, Levine and ServiceTitan Senior Product Manager Jordan Neiman shared information about the evolution of online scheduling, as well as past challenges and how Scheduling Pro, a ServiceTitan product, solves them.
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"We are laser focused on building an online scheduling experience that makes it easy for you,” Levine says.
Online Booking Challenges
Online booking challenges that have prevented home service companies from adopting this wildly popular consumer option include:
Lack of customization: Most online scheduling solutions aren’t built for the trades and don’t provide customization options. This means companies haven’t been able to collect the information they need to properly schedule the job, including customer address and system details.
“We’ve not been able to customize it to ask additional questions, such as, ‘What is the age of your HVAC equipment? When was the last time you got your filters replaced?’” Levine says. “The business impact is that you haven’t had the ability to properly take action on these leads. In simpler terms, this means more work is being put on your office to outbound call your prospects.”
Inaccurate availability: Online booking hasn’t provided a way for businesses to communicate their availability in real time to customers. Again, the office is left having to contact the leads, and potentially disappoint them if your company is too booked to take an urgent job in a timely manner.
Limited 24/7 support: Customers often require service on nights, weekends, and holidays.
“There is no jurisdiction. There is no day off from the customer’s eyes,” Levine says. “Without having an online booking presence that’s actually able to generate the bookings, your business leaves money on the table.”
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Marketing attribution: Marketing attribution refers to understanding where online bookings come from.
“It's really expensive to market your business,” Levine says. “It’s absolutely critical in today's day and age that we know what is driving online bookings to your business so we can reinvest in the areas that are working really well and divest from the areas that have not hit the mark.”
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ServiceTitan’s Scheduling Solution
Even as online scheduling rose to popularity, there wasn’t an integrated solution for home service businesses until recently.
“It was still disparate systems, potentially double entry,” Levine says. “With the invention of Schedule Engine and its integration with ServiceTitan, we made it so you just have to set up your account and allow online booking requests and jobs to show up to your business.”
With Scheduling Pro, users have the ability to create conditional workflows. For example, if a customer requests heating repair services, the system can be configured to ask the qualifying questions a CSR would ask: What is the age of the unit? Where is it located?
“We can customize Scheduling Pro to this level so when the job gets to you in ServiceTitan, you already have all of the information you need to know exactly the right tech to dispatch,” Neiman says.
The tool also takes technician capacity into account, serving the customer with realistic time windows based on the available technicians and their skills.
Service providers can customize the look and feel of the scheduling widget to include brand colors, messaging, and fonts.
“You can really tailor this to your business to ensure a seamless experience on your website,” Neiman says.
Scheduling Pro and ServiceTitan web scheduler users booked over half a million appointments in the first three quarters of 2023, generating over $30M in revenue.
“When you carve out a space for your customers specifically to go to book, you're likely to see more qualified leads come in and a higher share of revenue for those interactions,” Neiman says. “Whereas, things like phone calls could be billing questions, operational issues, or just general questions about your business.”
Online Booking Best Practices
To maximize online booking results, Levine recommends contractors focus on three areas.
1. Website Positioning and CTA
For customers to utilize online booking, they must first know it’s available. This means using bright booking buttons on your website with actionable language, such as “book now” or “schedule your repair.”
Levine recommends adding several booking CTAs to your website. If you have specific website pages for your various service offerings, customize the language of each booking button to match. For example, add a “schedule plumbing repair” button to your plumbing repair page.
“Think of it as adding a door to a building,” Levine says. “You don't want to have one door to channel everyone into this massive convention center. We have many, many doors to let customers in. Programmatically, the best way to do this is making sure you have it on every page of your website that we view as acceptable.”
In the example shared, the website displayed booking buttons in the top-right corner, center of the homepage, and at the bottom of the homepage.
2. Short Sequences
While ServiceTitan’s scheduling widget is customizable, there’s a fine balance when it comes to asking qualifying questions.
“The name of the game is speed to lead,” Levine says. “Once a request is submitted, it goes quickly to your business, and we want to make it so your CSRs don't even have to think twice. They see the online booking, and then they schedule it right away. With that being said, we want to make it so the end consumers don't get deterred from actually completing the widget and submitting a booking.”
According to ServiceTitan scheduling data, this means including only one to two clarifying questions.
3. Direct-to-Dispatch Job Assignments
To enhance operational efficiency and speed to lead, Scheduling Pro integrates with Dispatch Pro. Once leads are submitted, they go into a user’s ServiceTitan account. Every 10 minutes, Dispatch Pro scans for unbooked jobs and assigns them to available technicians.
Product Sneak Peek
Levine and Neiman closed their session by sharing new and upcoming features and priorities for ServiceTitan’s online booking capabilities. Reserve with Google is an available feature that allows for online booking with a company right from a Google search. All a ServiceTitan customer needs to get started is a Google Business Profile.
Levine’s family business, Levine & Sons, is seeing success with the tool.
“From the contractor perspective, the lead quality has been amazing,” Levine says. “It's people with high intent to actually work with a home service business, not as much price shopping. And we’ve generated over $60K in revenue in the first couple of weeks using Reserve with Google. We're excited for you all to try for yourself.”
ServiceTitan customers don’t need Scheduling Pro to use Reserve with Google.
“There's also a lot that we can continue to improve on to make scheduling better for you and your customers,” Neiman says. Those focus areas include:
Streamlined onboarding experience: Customers will soon be able to launch Scheduling Pro configurations right from their ServiceTitan account. This will streamline both onboarding and the ability to make changes to capacity and availability on the fly.
Improved customer experience: The scheduling widget will undergo a redesign to provide a mobile-first experience that gives customers more information about your company’s availability earlier in the workflow and captures lead information quicker.
Payments and memberships: The ability for the booking widget to capture payments will save CSRs from having to proactively reach out and collect payment information. In addition, the booking widget will be able to identify and offer priority booking and capacity to customers with memberships.
Pro Products integrations: A Marketing Pro partnership will allow users to see performance for all marketing solutions, including online booking, in one place.
“Demographics are shifting, and that means the share of homeowners that are part of younger generations will grow to prefer online scheduling more and more,” Neiman says. “Scheduling Pro offers key features that take it beyond a form fill and make it something truly progressive.”
ServiceTitan Software
ServiceTitan is a comprehensive software solution built specifically to help service companies streamline their operations, boost revenue, and substantially elevate the trajectory of their business. Our comprehensive, cloud-based platform is used by thousands of electrical, HVAC, plumbing, garage door, and chimney sweep shops across the country—and has increased their revenue by an average of 25% in just their first year with us.
