Proactive facilities management gives you the power to take your service business to the next level. But it’s often an afterthought for revenue growth, and lagging technology creates additional work and duplicate processes.
Facilities management companies turn to ServiceChannel software to streamline work order management by creating, assigning, and tracking work orders for facility maintenance tasks, while also documenting maintenance schedules and repair history, and efficiently sourcing and managing external service providers.
Until recently, facilities management providers who use ServiceChannel in tandem with a field management platform needed to toggle between the two systems. Through a recent integration with ServiceTitan and ServiceChannel, work orders created in ServiceChannel now flow directly into ServiceTitan.
In a new ServiceTitan webinar titled Growing Your Commercial Service Business Through Facilities Management, ServiceTitan’s VP and GM of Commercial and Construction Alex Kablanian leads a discussion about how the integration helps facilities management companies work smarter and simplify key processes.
Webinar panelists include Shane Jaeger, Director of Operations at The Lawton Group, a commercial provider of HVAC, electrical and refrigeration services; Chad Kingsbury, Refrigeration Manager at MelKay Mechanical, a provider of supermarket refrigeration services; and Rudy Salinas, Senior Manager of Marketplace and Strategic Partnerships at ServiceChannel.
What you’ll learn:
How commercial service contractors are leveraging facilities management solutions to grow their business
Steps to launch ServiceChannel in ServiceTitan
How the integration helps users increase productivity and operational efficiency
Leveraging technology to deliver better experiences for customers and employees
“We're also going to talk about how technology is going to help us in terms of retaining the skilled labor that you all have recruited over the years through intuitive experiences and really cutting down on some of the painful work that happens primarily in the field and the back office,” Kablanian says.
Completing High-Quality Work Orders Faster from One Place
Salinas mentions how the ultimate goal of a commercial facilities management business
is for the technician to be able to get into and out of the location in the most efficient way possible.
“So, at a high level, the natural synergy between ServiceTitan and ServiceChannel was a no-brainer for us,” Salinas says. “Our teams worked collaboratively to bring a great product to help teams be efficient, focus on the important things, and build great relationships not only with your brands if you're currently working in the commercial facility management space, but with your technicians as well.”
Kablanian says the integration solves three key problems facilities management companies face: Connecting employees in the office and field, getting paid faster, and delivering exceptional customer experience. He says when companies excel at all three, they see their profits soar.
“When you think about what we're trying to solve for, it’s bringing the entire experience into one pane of glass so your back-office employees and your technicians in the field can reduce as much manual work as possible, from getting the work order to doing the work in the field to posting invoices, updates, and photos,” Kablanian says.
“Ultimately, we want to reduce the amount of time it takes for you to get paid because you cut out all the manual steps in between the work actually getting done and the invoice getting posted,” Kablanian adds. “We think this is the right way to deliver a top-notch customer experience for the facility's managers themselves because they're going to get better service out of it, they're going to get better insights, and ultimately we believe that's going to help bring more work orders to your business.”
Setting Up ServiceChannel
Next, Christine Yang, a ServiceTitan product manager leading the ServiceChannel integration, walks the audience through a demo on launching the app within ServiceTitan and explains how the integration enables the end-to-end flow of data between the two platforms.
“What I really want to highlight in this demo is how the integration really covers the end-to-end of a work order's journey from the initiation to accepting the job, updating the job, working on the job within ServiceTitan, and wrapping up the work order and bringing your invoice back to ServiceChannel,” Yang says.
Yang explains how once a ServiceChannel user creates the initial work order, it seamlessly populates on the ServiceTitan call booking screen as a new booking request.
“As you can see, the summary shares a lot of information about the work order including the number, the PO number, the NTE (not-to-exceed), and then you can go ahead and accept it and add it as a location that you may or may not have already saved. Then, you'll go through the similar workflow of adding the job type and business units.”
After booking a job, dispatchers can send a technician with complete job details, and the technician can self-check in to the job to begin working.
“The status is automatically updated to ‘in progress’ without your office employees having to manage two separate platforms,” Yang says. “You can click into the work order and see that a lot of the information like the job creation and note updates not only show up here in ServiceChannel, but they’ll also get brought into the job record in ServiceTitan as well.”
From the job site, the technician can update services and materials in the ServiceTitan Mobile App, track labor, and add job notes, photos and attachments, which all translate seamlessly between the two systems.
“All of this gets populated into the invoice, and then you can export the invoice to ServiceChannel,” Yang says. “All of the status updates get updated to ServiceChannel and this eliminates the need of the technician having to use two different apps to check in and out of their jobs or having an office employee having to do this manually in two different platforms.”
ServiceTitan users can turn the ServiceChannel integration on or off at any time and configure multiple features to match business needs.
Users See Results from the Integration
Jaeger shares how Lawton Group previously used both systems and found it cumbersome for techs logging duplicate information and having to make a phone call to check in to a job.
“It killed efficiency with technicians trying to remember all the little details for each customer. It was a challenge,” he says. “Once this integration came out with ServiceTitan, it's been great. Cutting down on the duplicate entries has been tremendous.”
Before the integration, Jaeger says bookings came in by email, often late at night, extending their response time and lowering their score in ServiceChannel.
“Now with the integration, instead of the email coming in, now it's going straight to our booking screen so we can accept it or decline it,” Jaeger says.
Kingsbury says MelKay was recently looking to consolidate its operations to one platform and the ServiceChannel integration became the deciding factor in choosing ServiceTitan.
“Once we found out that you guys now have that integration, it was a no-brainer for us to go ahead and get everything switched over into ServiceTitan,” Kingsbury says.
Jaeger says the integration helps his organization collect payment faster, notably because he can send an email or text the invoice to the customer as soon as they finish a job.
“They're going to start their terms when they get the invoice, not when we're done with the job. So, if it took us a week to get the invoice to them, now we're getting paid 30 days or 45 days after that,” Jaeger says. “Our accounts receivables definitely went down. We dropped it to six days on average and the ServiceChannel integration was a big part of it.”
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Leveraging Technology to Deliver Better Experiences
Salinas mentions how people often think price is the No. 1 factor when selecting a facilities management vendor, but he says it comes down to building relationships and providing quality work. Field management tools make it possible.
“It's more on the efficiency, the first-time completion, and the ability to communicate an essential repository that makes their life easier,” Salinas says. “The premise of our integration really is how do we make the efficiency and the communication a lot faster to allow you guys to have those conversations, show the value of the services you offer, and how you can make it better.”
Kablanian agrees, saying the ServiceChannel and ServiceTitan integration helps deliver real value for customers, whether it's improved customer experience, helping techs do their jobs better, or making sure facilities are up and running.
While offering exceptional technician delivery in the field and great customer experience should theoretically lead to more business, Kablanian says the only way to meet those objectives is by employing and retaining skilled labor. Eliminating paperwork and tedious data entry, while giving techs a real-time communication channel makes their jobs more enjoyable and allows them to focus on the task at hand.
“Most technicians enjoy the hands-on part. They like doing the work itself. They don't like doing the data entry, they don't like doing all the paperwork,” Jaeger says. “So, the less amount of paperwork we can have for them, the better. Eliminating that double entry was tremendous. They're not frustrated, they're not cussing out at their tablet because they can't figure it out.”
Kingsbury agrees.
“On the paperwork side of things, the easier we can make that on the technicians, the happier they’re going to be. They're all about the hands-on. Even when I was a technician out in the field, I was more about the hands-on. I could care less about the paperwork. I wanted to make sure the equipment is running by the time I'm done and the customer's happy,” he says.
For more, check out the full webinar on demand: Growing Your Commercial Service Business Through Facilities Management.
