As one of the fastest-growing software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies for the trades, ServiceTitan prides itself on delivering the highest level of customer service to thousands of contractors all across the country. And when those clients started reporting poor customer service related to that rapid growth, the co-founders of ServiceTitan decided to do something about it.
ServiceTitan CEO Ara Mahdessian and President Vahe Kuzoyan took their message directly to the contractors during their first 90-minute ServiceTitan Town Hall on May 10.
“Moving forward, Vahe and I will host a recurring Town Hall for an opportunity to engage with you on a greater scale, show you more of what's to come, and to also hear from you directly on how we can be of greater service to you,” Mahdessian says. “Your success is the No. 1 priority for me, Vahe, and for ServiceTitan.
“And I am very much aware that the primary obstacle many of you are currently facing with ServiceTitan is the level of customer service we're providing,” Mahdessian adds. “This is completely unacceptable, and the team and I are working hard to make the necessary changes as fast as possible.”
The ServiceTitan co-founders believe solutions to the customer service issue fall into three buckets:
Prevention
Self-Service
Assisted Service
“For me, the best experience is when a product is so good that you don't need to contact support in the first place,” Mahdessian says, describing the prevention solution. “We are working on making ServiceTitan more intuitive, more turnkey, and more error-free so you can use it to its full potential without running into as many challenging issues.”
As for self-service, many forward-thinking contractors and their teams of CSRs and technicians look online for the software answers they need, and can often resolve the issue themselves.
“I want you to have similar self-service capabilities, particularly so we can help you resolve issues even outside of our regular support hours,” the CEO says. “That’s why we're investing in a better self-service experience.”
And, finally, ServiceTitan hired a significant number of new employees in the past year and has taken steps to improve training companywide to provide customers assisted service from a knowledgeable rep whenever they need it.
“If we’re unable to prevent issues from surfacing in the first place, if you’re unable to find the right answer quickly, or if you simply just prefer to talk to someone, I want to make sure you get a fast and great customer experience when you reach out to us,” Mahdessian says.
Read on to learn more about the changes happening to improve the customer experience with success and support, gain insight into current product updates, and walk through a high-level overview of the company’s roadmap.
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10 updates happening in 2023
Mahdessian and Kuzoyan made a commitment to ServiceTitan customers to implement the following 10 updates this year to meet their goals for improving the customer experience.
1. Response time SLAs
One of the biggest issues customers express concerns about is not receiving a timely response when they send an email for support. Mahdessian says that’s completely unacceptable.
“If you need anything from us, and I mean anything, I want you to receive a response within one business day at the latest and ideally much sooner,” he says. “Even if it's just a reply to confirm we've received your email or say we need more time to work on the issue.”
ServiceTitan set the following service level agreement (SLA) targets for:
Technical support
Customer Success Management team
Billing support
Payment support (FinTech)
While extreme situations, such as power outages or a huge influx of customers calling into the call center, may bog down the system temporarily, the ServiceTitan team is “maniacally focused on doing everything possible to meet these SLAs on a daily basis,” Mahdessian says.
2. Level of knowledge & routing
Nothing frustrates customers more than reaching out for support, explaining your issue, then being told you need to speak to someone else, which forces you to start all over.
“What we've built is an improved transfer process for our customer-facing teams to capture your issue in a standardized intake form so we can transfer all that context to the right specialist, so you don’t have to repeat yourself over and over,” the CEO explains.
The process involves executing “the perfect hand-off” by ensuring all internal parties have access to the right information, the right expectations, and know exactly who from ServiceTitan will be leading the charge to solve your specific problem.
“We want there to be zero ambiguity about how your problem will be solved and who will be solving it for you,” Mahdessian says. “Starting now, if you contact any ServiceTitan team member with an issue and it's determined there is someone better suited to assist you, the first person you contacted will gather all the relevant information you provided, share that with the specialist you're being handed off to, and connect you directly to that specialist.”
3. Improving internal hand-offs
“This means connecting you with the right person at ServiceTitan to solve your problem the first time you reach out,” Mahdessian says.
To accomplish this, ServiceTitan recently hired more than 300 support agents to adequately staff its teams for Customer Success Management, professional services, FinTech, and more. The company also launched another round of improvements to its internal routing system, and employees must undergo rigorous training to learn how to field questions appropriately.
“If you have a specific issue, whether it be about memberships, payroll, inventory, or whatever, you'll be directly connected to a highly skilled agent who has been trained in the area you are calling about,” he says. “We're monitoring this internally to make sure we continue training the right number of specialists in each area, and that we're able to route you to the right person in an acceptable amount of time.”
4. Resolution satisfaction rates
Reports of customers connecting directly to the right support specialist, but not getting the issue resolved to their satisfaction, is also unacceptable. Mahdessian considers it such a major issue that he took immediate steps to resolve it.
“After every interaction with ServiceTitan, you will now get a brief email that's going to have a short survey asking if your issue has been resolved to your satisfaction,” he says. “And this new communication channel will allow us to gather the information we need to make sure issues are getting resolved, as well as to take immediate action if your issue isn't completely resolved.”
So, when you get one of these quick surveys, please respond.
“We're going to hold ourselves accountable to this standard,” Mahdessian promises. “We'll be reviewing these surveys and satisfaction rates every month, and I want to see them improve month over month, week over week, day over day.”
5. Escalation paths
In the early days of ServiceTitan, Mahdessian says he and Vahe often provided hands-on support to many of ServiceTitan’s clients, and he wants that direct line of communication to continue, even as the company experiences massive growth.
“The buck stops with the two of us, and if ServiceTitan is not delivering on the commitments we've made to you, I want to know, I want to know ASAP, and I want to help,” Mahdessian says.
Email the company’s executives at founders@servicetitan.com about any issue, Mahdessian says, and they will help you find a solution.
“You're not bothering us. You're doing me and Vahe a huge favor by giving us the opportunity to make these things right,” he adds.
6. Town Halls
The ServiceTitan co-founders plan to conduct regularly scheduled Town Halls throughout the year to share any company updates, product improvements, and progress on the company’s 10 commitments to customers.
“Communication between each of you and myself, Vahe, and other leaders at ServiceTitan is absolutely critical to ensure our teams are continuing to focus on your success,” Mahdessian says.
7. Improved Help widget
When customers click on the question mark icon at the top right of their ServiceTitan dashboard, the Help widget can help them find solutions to common challenges. To improve this experience, ServiceTitan made updates to the widget to improve its speed and functionality.
A recent enhancement to the topic and subtopic drop-down menus will help route your issue to the right specialist, and ServiceTitan plans to create even more knowledge-based articles and videos to beef up this valuable resource.
8. ServiceTitan Certified Admin
ServiceTitan also expanded its resources dedicated to the Certified Provider program to help customers get the most out of their software program. Any customer can register for this program at ServiceTitan Community and receive training for free.
“This program gives your employees the opportunity to become experts on the ServiceTitan platform, and it provides them with a very structured approach to maximizing your business' use of our software,” Mahdessian says.
9. Improving the product
On average, ServiceTitan receives about 25,000 support tickets every month, Kuzoyan says. After digging into the support tickets to find out why customers needed help in the first place, the company discovered the No. 1 topic was accounting. Digging further, they broke down the accounting issues into three categories:
Integration errors
Non-intuitive basic workflows
Configurable invoice formatting changes requiring CSM support
“We are just in the early phases right now, and we're going to be rolling these out for the rest of the year, but we've re-architected how it works,” Kuzoyan says. “And our expectation is that there will be a dramatic decrease in the number of errors. We're very excited to get that rolled out because we think it's going to make a big, big difference.”
Customers also expressed concerns about the mobile app crashing, causing errors, or not syncing properly, Kuzoyan says. After spending so much time trying to fix these issues, ServiceTitan decided the whole app needed to be rebuilt.
“The components that we were using were from the earlier versions of iOS, Android, and so on,” Kuzoyan says. “What [Chief Technology Officer] Anmol [Bhasin] will show you is a completely new app that we built from the ground up, with not necessarily a focus on doing anything new, but about rebuilding it using native components, which just means it's the built-in components of Apple and Google.
“Ultimately, the focus of the re-architecture is strictly on performance and stability,” he adds. “In this case, the goal is obviously to have a mobile experience that’s less buggy, better performing, and causes less sync issues.”
10. Sharing product roadmap
Kuzoyan says the majority of ServiceTitan’s resources goes into strengthening the core product and improving the underlying technical infrastructure of the platform.
“We have some amazing stuff that's going to be rolling out that's really around strengthening the core and not about adding new modules or new capabilities,” the company president says. “It's really about taking what we have and making it better and easier to use.”
The areas of focus for 2023 fall under four themes: Uptime, Simplify, Streamline, and Enhance.
ServiceTitan Product Roadmap
While the ServiceTitan product roadmap is an evolving beast that morphs and changes based on customer feedback and shifting timelines, Bhasin says ServiceTitan is investing in the following areas for 2023:
Making the platform more available, secure, compliant, and stable.
Providing easier navigation, easier searchability, more intuitive workflows, and consistency of design.
Streamlining your workflow in the office and out in the field.
Minimizing the number of configurations needed to fine-tune integrations.
Enhancing core features used for accounting, inventory, service memberships, dispatching, estimates, and more.
Here’s a quick snapshot of specific areas of improvement.
Accounting
ServiceTitan launched its own Transaction Hub in January with improved functionality for three Accounts Receivable (A/R) modules: Invoices, Customer Payments, and Bank Deposits. Transaction Hub allows you to:
Access, modify, review, and send invoices.
Easily see when you sent an invoice to the customer.
Send all unsent invoices seamlessly to your customer with a single click.
No more fake batching. Mark invoices as reviewed or assigned to a team member to ensure they are resolved in a timely fashion.
Easily search for specific invoice or transaction via the top search bar.
Change the view by filtering data, adding or moving columns, or taking single or bulk actions.
Group payments into batches that match bank deposits for easier reconciliation.
And more!
To learn more about the ServiceTitan accounting updates, check out this video by Richard Kohberger, aka The Blue Collar Nerd.
Journal entry integrations
Another huge pain point for customers is the manual process of batching, posting, and exporting of accounting files. Recent updates eliminate the need to batch, post, or export entries manually. ServiceTitan also unlocked the ability for customers to modify any transactions in ServiceTitan regardless of the export status.
A new accounting-periods feature allows for control over when transactions can be created and modified, and a new native accounting system allows for real-time updates to external accounting systems.
“It also eliminates the constraint of having to use Intacct or QuickBooks Desktop or QuickBooks Online. But if you already use those systems, those integrations will become super streamlined and automated,” Bhasin says.
Configurable invoice print
Changes are also being made to the drag-and-drop document template editor that allows customers to configure their own invoices. You can also control which templates get sent to which customers, as well as control the status of templates available for your technicians to use.
Not only will you be able to edit invoices and service agreement templates, but also fine-tune invoices specifically for job type, business units, individuals, or a specific type of customer, Bhasin says.
Field mobile app
As Kuzoyan mentioned above, ServiceTitan rebuilt its field mobile application from the ground up based on a fully native platform. The new mobile app will incrementally add new customers throughout this year and next, and hopefully become generally available in early 2024.
“This new super-improved app has been optimized for a fully native mobile experience that provides significantly better stability,” Bhasin says. “So no more app crashes, hopefully, and it's performance snappy.”
Inventory app
ServiceTitan’s new inventory app eliminates all the paperwork and the switching back and forth between desktop and warehouse, or even software platforms, to properly manage purchase orders and keep track of inventory with barcode scanning.
“We are delivering increased accuracy and efficiency,” Bhasin says.
Commercial service agreements
For commercial clients, in particular, improvements made to ServiceTitan’s service agreements allow you to customize, create, and manage service agreements from proposal to execution all in one place.
“This gives you increased accountability and control, and empowers profitability reporting, pricing accuracy, and increased gross margins on your agreements,” Bhasin explains. “This will actually save you time by reducing the amount of hours you spend setting up complex commercial agreements.”
Once you’ve activated a commercial service agreement with a new customer, you can track specific performance methods, including: completion and billing status, profitability reporting, estimated costs and margins versus actual cost and margins, and all related historical invoices, revenue recognition, and deferred revenue balances.
Business unit bulk updater
ServiceTitan’s new Business Unit Bulk Updater is like a bulk sort of business unit configuration tool, Bhasin says. It will come in super handy for companies operating multiple business units under one umbrella, like an HVAC-plumbing-electrical shop.
“This will reduce initial set-up time for onboarding each business unit, as well as the time you spend updating for success, including logo updates, authorization agreement documents, minimum post date, goals, and more,” he says.
You Asked and We Listened (YAWL)
Bhasin says product improvements and new features, often showcased in The Blue Collar Nerd’s video tutorials, are the direct result of customer feedback. The ServiceTitan team listens to the pain points and needs of its customers, then tries to incorporate changes and updates in the company’s product roadmap.
“Please keep those ideas coming, because this fundamentally allows us to channel an energy and effort towards things that fundamentally make your experience better,” Bhasin says.
Here are some other ideas currently in progress:
“Hopefully, everyone sees the amount of focus we have on improving and strengthening the core product and really addressing a lot of these issues,” Kuzoyan says. “We really need your help to help us understand where the most pain is coming from and where we need to focus our energies.”
