5 Steps to Building a Better Call Center with ServiceTitan Phones Pro

1. Expert advice and insight about onboarding with Phones Pro

For One Hour Air, switching to Phones Pro proved simple and easy.

“The onboarding was fantastic,” Nuffer says. “Mark was upfront and said, ‘Hey, with you going into the cloud system…before I put you on this, we need to make sure No. 1, can your computers handle this? No. 2, do you have the right headsets for it? And No. 3, the biggest one, how is your internet speed?’ And he really went through the process to make sure that everything was ready to go.”

Onboarding with ServiceTitan’s Phones Pro can go as quickly or as slowly as you prefer, Anson explains.

“To really get the most out of your onboarding and make sure things go smoothly, get your hardware in place as early as possible and start plugging it in and testing it,” Anson says. “Make sure you've got your audio under control for that hardware.”

Then, it’s important to understand what changes you’re looking for in a call center vendor and to make sure you can easily access all of your customer and vendor phone numbers in whatever automated phone system you choose.

“Likely, a lot of the numbers have already been poured into ServiceTitan and you don't need to do anything, they're ready to go,” Anson says. “But if you have other numbers out there with various vendors or multiple providers, getting an idea of where those are will make the porting process a lot quicker and ultimately your speed to go live will be much faster.”

When setting up a call center, Nuffer says it’s critical to give your call center manager clear insight into how your team handles every call.

“The nice thing about Phones Pro is you get so much real-time access to data, to what's going on,” Nuffer says. “You need clarity on, ‘Are we dropping calls? How many are we dropping? What were those numbers we dropped? How quickly are we answering these phones? What are my people even doing?’"

2. Best practices for managing 300+ inbound calls per day

To set up your CSRs for success when answering your company’s phones in a Phones Pro-operated call center, Nuffer advises starting the process with solid training. Educate both CSRs and dispatchers on how to use the Phones Pro DialPad app and VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) system, and explain the reasoning behind the changes, he says.

“We really took time to sit down with the team and help them understand the whys and how Phones Pro is going to help them be successful in their job duties,” Nuffer explains. “The other thing we did was make sure they all went through the ServiceTitan Academy Training for CSRs.

“I think the team was extremely comfortable with the system before they even got onboard with it, because it’s so user friendly,” he adds, pointing out how similar Phones Pro is to simply using a cellphone.

The live call transcripts through Phones Pro help his CSRs stay on message to boost the customer experience, as well as automatically assisting new CSRs when answering customers’ questions about what services the company offers. Utilizing the speech analytics feature, for instance, a new CSR might receive a prompt to answer affirmatively (and knowledgeably) if the customer asks about tankless water heaters or indoor air quality (IAC) products.

Phones Pro even monitors the quality of the customer’s call based on certain words or phrases, and labels each live call as positive, neutral, or negative. The call center manager can see that data in real time, and intervene on a live call if necessary.

For Anson, hands-on training works best.

“The best way to learn something is to try it,” Anson says. “Once you get your Phones Pro account, you can start making calls. I love having CSRs make calls to each other, start testing things out, start getting familiar with the interface and the headset, too.

“Get the agents started with training, and then hone them through the live coaching,” he adds.

3. Tips to “kill the simultaneous ring” and improve call quality

So, what’s a simultaneous ring, and how do you kill it? 

A traditional call center uses what’s called an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system that directs callers through an automated phone system or list of menu options to reach a certain person, service, or department. The caller clicks a button and the call gets routed to where they want to go.

When Nuffer started at One Hour Air, he says the call center team was using something called “the simultaneous ring,” where every single phone on the call center floor rang each time a call came in.

“So what happened, and I'll never forget it, I walked onto the floor. All the phones rang. There were two agents on the floor. One goes, ‘Hey, are you going to get that?’ The other goes, ‘No, I thought you were going to get that.’ And then what do you know? We dropped the call,” Nuffer says.

With ServiceTitan Phones Pro, Nuffer created a traditional IVR system that routes calls specifically to the CSRs who are marked as available and ready for the call. This not only reduced the number of dropped calls, but gave Nuffer insight into what he calls a “bad volume” of calls.

“We used to take more than 300 calls a day, but a lot of that was bad volume, meaning spam callers, robo-dialers, or people trying to solicit our business,” Nuffer says. “Because we were able to put that stop gap between the CSR and that phone call and make them click a button, we were able to stamp out 60% of the bad volume that was lowering our efficiency rates.”

Anson says IVR systems work best to filter out unwanted calls, and you can give callers one selection to speak directly with a CSR or multiple choices to reach other specific departments. The system also lets you customize or personalize each message, so it sounds less robotic.

“It makes the caller feel like, ‘I'm making a choice and getting routed to the group that’s most apt to answer my question, handle what I'm calling about," he says.

It also helps call center managers weed out the useless calls and see real-time performance reports for each CSR.

4. Best ways to facilitate remote work

With so many hiring issues in the trades right now, Nuffer says Phones Pro was an absolute game-changer for One Hour Air, not only to attract new hires but facilitate remote work for its current employees.

“With Phones Pro, you're able to take phone calls from anywhere,” Nuffer says. “As long as you have a stable internet connection, you have your headset, and you can log into the internet for ServiceTitan, you can take phone calls.”

Phones Pro even allowed him to retain a high-performing, bilingual CSR who needed to move to Ohio, and another who moved to North Carolina. Both now work as remote employees for One Hour Air.

“And in the call center, if you're trying to hire for call center agents right now, you better hope you have remote work available, because most call centers are still remote. I don't think they're really ever going to go back (post-pandemic),” Nuffer says.

“It's just allowed us to do so many things we weren't able to do beforehand — keep talent, recruit talent, and obviously keep business flowing as normal,” he adds.

Before setting up employees to work remotely, Anson advises checking to make sure their home internet provider can support the VoIP system. Ask your Phones Pro customer success manager at ServiceTitan to conduct a network test. It’s also best to work from home using ethernet cables rather than a simple WiFi connection.

“You never know how many devices are connected and using WiFi at the same time, and that kind of stuff can impact your call quality,” Anson says. “Whereas an ethernet connection on a stable internet is really going to be a bit more smooth sailing.”

5. Best KPIs for improving call center performance and efficiency

According to ServiceTitan Senior Content Marketing Manager Jackie Aubel, Phones Pro customers report the following overall success metrics:

• 8.4% increase in jobs booked

• 17% decrease in abandoned call rate

• 5% to 10% increase in call booking rate

For One Hour Air, Nuffer and his team monitor key performance indicators for abandoned calls, staffing up for peak periods of service, and improving the company’s customer satisfaction scores.

“How quickly are we answering those phone calls within 60 seconds? We're obviously shooting for anything over 90% or better. On a monthly basis, how busy are we? Where are our peak periods as far as Monday through Sunday? 

“We're able to build out forecasts, we're able to staff better and more efficiently,” Nuffer says. “If you're a call center leader, manager, or team lead, you really need to have visibility into what your team is doing and how you're performing. 

“You can take data from the Phones Pro platform and make informed decisions that really impact not only you, but really your clients,” he adds.