Turbocharge Your Average Ticket: Dispatch Pro and Other ServiceTitan Solutions

Got Lower Average Tickets This Summer? Here’s Why

Kohberger says recent ServiceTitan data shows trends of contractors struggling to keep their average tickets at a higher level as compared to previous years.  

“We've got some financial pressures that people are feeling. People are trying to delay big purchases as long as possible,” says Kohberger, the former director of operations at Comfort Control in Atlanta, Georgia. “We're also seeing an increase in competition. A lot of new companies are popping up, and more consolidation is happening.

“All of that increased competition creates downward pricing pressure, or that race to the bottom,” he adds. “Various markets are going to have various factors. Markets fluctuate. Consumer behaviors fluctuate. We all know this, but that doesn't mean there's nothing we can do about it.”

Good, strategic dispatching is one proven way to overcome this challenge and increase average tickets, Kohberger says. 

“Getting the right technician onto the right job while also keeping the routing efficient enough that we're able to fit in as many of the high-value jobs as possible,” he explains. “Obviously, those things are going to have some sort of impact on your average ticket.”

How Do Dispatchers Affect the Average Ticket?

To improve the average ticket, dispatchers must balance routing efficiency with sending the right tech to the right job. But how do dispatchers know which tech is the right one for a particular job? The Blue Collar Nerd breaks it down.

“If we send out a tech who doesn't have a ladder to a job where the equipment's up on the roof and they need a ladder to get it, that's wasteful. If we send a super green technician who isn't good at diagnosing problems yet to a super-complicated call where multiple techs have failed to diagnose the problem, that's wasteful,” Kohberger explains.

“And if we send a tech out who isn't particularly good at sales or turning leads, if we just send them out to a service call with super-old equipment where the customer has maybe even already indicated to us they might be interested in hearing about replacement options, that's also wasteful,” he adds.

At the same time, dispatchers must keep the most efficient routing top of mind to avoid wasting technicians’ time and fuel, not completing as many jobs per day, and hurting team morale.

Consider the following scenario:

Your dispatcher has two jobs to assign, and two technicians to choose from: 

• Sarah has eight years of experience. She's very technical, very smart, and excellent at diagnosing problems, but she has a low upsell conversion. 

• John is a green tech, fresh out of trade school, with one year of experience. He isn't very good at diagnosing problems, but he’s very personable and tends to do well with converting service jobs into replacement leads.

Job #1 is a 10-plus-year-old system that’s not working. It's only a few minutes away from Sarah. Job #2 is routine maintenance and it’s located right along John's route home. Who would you send to what job? 

Most dispatchers, Kohberger says, would choose to send Sarah to Job #1 and John to Job #2.

“It's sending the technician who's closer to the closest job regardless of the skill sets,” Kohberger says.

Dispatchers, and even company owners, may not know if Sarah’s conversion rate is low or whether John’s personable attitude converts more sales. 

“We get this idea in our head that John's our best tech for conversions. John kills it with conversions and we always send John out to those types of jobs. When in reality, these types of things fluctuate,” Kohberger explains. “Maybe next month, John's going to start sucking. It happens to the best of us. So, we have to keep reanalyzing this data to be able to continually make good decisions.”

Emotional factors also come into play as human dispatchers decide who’s best to send to a particular job, and avoid causing themselves any unnecessary pain or conflict. 

“If I send Sarah out to a crummy maintenance job at the end of a long day, and she pulls up and it's in John's neighborhood, I know Sarah's not going to be very happy with me,” Kohberger says. “I have to work with Sarah. I don't want to have that antagonistic relationship. I don't want to make her upset.”

Another common pitfall happens when dispatchers play favorites with their technician job assignments, Singer says.

“You might have a couple of technicians handing out Starbucks orders or smiling a little extra to everyone, remembering everyone's birthdays, kind of schmoozing the office rather than schmoozing the customers,” Singer says. “We definitely see some of those biases that can really play into this decision-making.”

A dispatcher’s experience and skill set can also affect your average ticket.

“Sometimes there’s a disconnect in what the owners want and what the business needs, and what dispatchers are actually capable of doing, because they can only process so much information,” says Singer, a former trucking dispatcher who now leads the development and launch of innovative dispatching and automation solutions for ServiceTitan.

Manual Dispatching Versus Automated Dispatching

Companies that use manual dispatchers focused only on finding the most efficient route—without considering the performance of their technicians—don’t possess all of the right data to make informed decisions, Singer says.

“In manual dispatching, you rely on people to interpret the information, to know where to get the right data, to know how to put all the data together to make the right decision,” she says. “With automated dispatching, you just set the settings. You configure it, and tell it exactly what your strategy is, what your philosophy is, and it executes.”

Unlike a manual dispatcher, Dispatch Pro, powered by Titan Intelligence, looks at the whole dispatch board at once. 

“It's not just looking at ‘How do I optimize the day for Sarah or John?’ It's looking at, ‘How do I bring in the most money for the day?’ And maybe I have to do 55 chess moves to make sure the best opportunity goes to the best guy,” Singer explains. “But it's very easy for a computer to do that because it can calculate things very quickly and spit out the result.”

For the Job #1 and Job #2 scenario described above, Dispatch Pro would send Sarah to the maintenance job and John to the possible replacement job to bring in the most money for your shop.

“That's how Dispatch Pro thinks,” Singer says. “This is how AI prioritizes exactly what is best for your business.”

And configuring your settings in Dispatch Pro allows you to set your business strategy.

“If you're trying to really strive for revenue versus routing, you can set that versus, ‘I really want to focus more on getting the techs to the closer job.’ You can tell it what you want,” Kohberger says.

You can even set up Dispatch Pro differently for different technicians, Singer adds, such as using efficient routing for your maintenance techs and making revenue generation a priority for your service and sales techs.

Dispatch Pro chooses the best tech for the right job based on real-time data, including the tech’s:

• Recent sales performance

• Drive time preference

• Job type skills

• Proximity to the job

• Turnover likelihood

Techs with lower performance automatically receive lower opportunities, and company owners and managers can use that direct feedback to coach and train them to perform better.

“If they get better, the numbers get better, and Dispatch Pro starts assigning better opportunities. It's a very, very simple system,” Singer explains. “You get out of it what you put into it. You put in your data, you put in your work, you put in your sales, and you get rewarded for that.”

With Dispatch Pro, dispatchers also spend less time making chess moves and reshuffling the job board, and more time on following up with customers and communicating with technicians.

“They have more time to spend an extra minute with the customer on the phone, follow up on parts orders or things that have been on hold, things that are very likely to fall through the cracks, or maybe go to your competitors,” Singer says. “They can actually engage and really exercise their emotional intelligence (EQ) skills and gain more revenue for your shop overall.”

Why Dispatch Pro is Your Dispatcher’s Best Friend

Dispatchers in the trades are often wary of Dispatch Pro, simply because they think it’s an automation tool used to replace their jobs.   

“That's not how I see it, and that's not what I see in the shops that have been adopting Dispatch Pro,” Singer says. “Dispatch Pro really becomes their best friend because it takes away the tedious reshuffling on the board all day long and figuring out how to best assign things. 

“All of that mental load, stress, and tedious task, it all goes away,” she adds. “You can now focus on things that are actually fun. You can talk to customers. You can talk to your technicians more.”

During a recent visit to a shop using Dispatch Pro, Singer expected to see a chaotic morning rush of getting everyone assigned and out the door, but instead she found the dispatcher calmly sending meme greetings to all of her techs because Dispatch Pro already took care of the morning rush.

“She had 40 plumbers on her board, and she had a separate thread going with each one of them, building that relationship, checking in on their kids' recitals, sending memes, and continuing those conversations,” Singer says. “This is absolutely priceless and definitely will increase your technicians’ happiness, retention, and further increase their average ticket.”

Dispatch Pro also makes it easier for a single dispatcher to handle a larger fleet, Kohberger says, which allows you to grow your technician team and expand your business without needing to hire more dispatchers. 

ServiceTitan data also shows that nearly 60% of dispatchers are managing fewer than 10 technicians, Singer says. With Dispatch Pro doing the heavy lifting, companies can grow their tech to dispatcher ratio as high as 50:1.

“That really helps your dispatchers, helps your shop, and helps you manage your costs,” she says.

How Dispatch Pro Works

Trust is the top issue for contractors when it comes to adopting and implementing Dispatch Pro, Kohberger says, but that’s because they often don’t have enough information.

“It's hard to blindly trust that something is making the best decisions when you don't really understand how those decisions are being made or how the thing works,” he says. 

Singer explains.

“Dispatch Pro is not only AI. It also looks at your ServiceTitan setup. It's like a funnel,” she says. “You have a job. You have all of your technicians to assign. How do you find the right technician? The first thing that comes to Dispatch Pro's mind is actually your hard constraints.”

Hard constraints are black-and-white settings, such as:

• Tech has skill or Tech doesn’t have skill

• Tech is in zone or Tech is not in zone

• Tech shift is available or Tech shift is not available

• Job is within tech maximum drive time or Job is not within tech maximum drive time

“Then that shrinks the pool of technicians,” Singer says. “Instead of looking at every single one, we're now looking at who's working today, who has the right zone, who has the right skill, and who has all the right setup that you actually provide.”

Soft constraints allow you to set strategies for dispatching based on routing versus revenue, determining your priorities for job urgency, and making sure your tech’s last job of the day brings them closer to home.

“Those are a little bit more fluid,” Singer says. “We're going to weigh them against the benefit of sending a technician out of the way.”

Data on tech performance informs the third level of the funnel. Dispatch Pro weighs metrics for repair, maintenance, service, and sales, as well as conversion rates and average tickets.

Once you reach the bottom of the funnel, Dispatch Pro assigns the most optimal tech.

“This optimal technician is not always the best technician, because then the best technicians will get all the jobs all day,” Singer explains. “We’re trying to assign jobs in a way that brings the most money for the entire shop. We look at the whole board at once. We're not trying to optimize per job. That's why you get the most optimal outcome and the best results.”

Dispatch Pro Set-up

Downloading all of your dispatching processes and telling Dispatch Pro exactly how to set it all up might sound intimidating, but Singer says it’s really self-explanatory once you get started.

“It’s just a few steps that ask, ‘Do you prefer this or that?’ or ‘Do you want this or that?’ You just make those choices, which you can change afterward, and that's how it goes,” she says.

Singer provides a few recommendations for setting up:

• Job types

• Skills

• Prep for AI

Job types

First, look at how many job types you’ve entered into ServiceTitan. If you only have two or three, you may need to go more granular and add some. If you have hundreds of job types, you may need to cut some to find a good balance and see more accurate revenue predictions. Also, measure performance and offer enhanced training so CSRs book the right job types every time. 

“If you work with equipment, ask the age of equipment, and separate those best opportunities by age of equipment into separate job types,” Singer recommends. “If you’re working in a trade where age of home matters, then separate it by age of home so we can identify your best opportunities. You can tell us what your best opportunities are.”

Skills

The graph below shows ServiceTitan’s recommendation for setting up skills in Dispatch Pro:

“The general idea is to keep the majority of your skills very generic so we have many technicians to pick from,” Singer says. “And then only use ‘unique skills’ for rare skills like tankless water heater or maybe boiler or wire fishing. Something that not everyone's able to do.”

Prep for AI

When preparing to utilize the power of AI in Dispatch Pro, it’s important to know one key rule: Garbage in, garbage out. 

“If the data you're putting into the service segment of Dispatch Pro is garbage, you don't book the right job types. Your skills are all over the place. Some technicians are assigned to zones; some are not. You're going to get funky results, and you’re going to think Dispatch Pro isn’t working,” Singer says. 

Dispatch Pro is still working, but it can’t make sense of your messy data, she says.

“If you have clean data, if you always book the right job types, add the right tags, and your setup is really clean, you're going to get much, much better results very, very quickly,” Singer says.

To know if Dispatch Pro is working, just look at two reports:

• Technician Performance Report—shows the stack ranking of technicians per job type.

• Utilization Report—shows the amount of time dispatchers save by using Dispatch Pro. 

“Dispatch Pro, right now, works the best for anyone who prioritizes sales in the field because Dispatch Pro is trying to optimize for how much money you make on each job in the field,” Singer says. “If all of your jobs are exactly the same, then it becomes more of a routing tool.”

And if you think Dispatch Pro isn’t working correctly, click on the “Troubleshooter” icon in Dispatch Pro and ask why it assigned a certain tech or didn’t assign another tech. If you don’t receive a satisfactory answer, you can submit a help ticket directly to the support team.

For further details on how the backend of Dispatch Pro functions, thinks, and calculates, check out the Blue Collar Nerd video that Kohberger and Singer collaborated on.

What’s Next for Dispatch Pro?

During Pantheon 2024 next month, Singer plans to announce Dispatch Console, a new feature coming to Dispatch Pro.

The goal of Dispatch Console is to cut down the noise for dispatchers managing a large number of techs and only surface the immediate tasks that require their attention in real-time.

“You can actually control what dispatchers see or don't see, so you can set up your own tasks,” Singer says. “If you have that special tag that means something to only you, your shop, and your dispatcher, you can set a rule and whenever a job appears through this task, it's going to show up in the Dispatch Console and the dispatchers can do something about it.”

Getting Results with Dispatch Pro

Singer says the most recent ServiceTitan stats on Dispatch Pro (last six months) show:

• 1.75X growth in average ticket for Dispatch Pro customers overall

• 2X growth in average ticket for Dispatch Pro customers with fewer than 15 technicians

At John Henry’s Plumbing, Heating, Air, Electrical in Nebraska, IT Manager Jared Rohrs led the implementation of the ServiceTitan inventory module as well as Scheduling Pro, Phones Pro and Dispatch Pro across a fleet of 96 trucks. He says getting everyone on board with Dispatch Pro took time.

“There was some pretty decent pushback from dispatchers, managers, and technicians. Nobody trusts the machine,” Rohrs says. “But it’s made the dispatcher’s job easier. Technicians can schmooze the dispatchers a little bit, and it takes that out of the equation. The system's doing what it's doing, and it doesn't play favorites. It's literally doing the best for the company.”

When Rohrs compares average tickets from March to September 2022 (before Dispatch Pro) to March to September 2024 (with Dispatch Pro), the average ticket for the plumbing division increased by $200 to $500. And for the HVAC side, his top two techs’ lead turnover jumped by $2,000 on average during the same time.

“Just because they're getting to the right calls,” Rohrs says. 

His best advice for setting up Dispatch Pro? Make sure your tech skills are set properly, then use it as a training tool to help your maintenance techs build skills for selling your services. 

“It's just another tool in your toolbox, but you can show, ‘Here's where Tech 1 is, here's where Tech 2 is, and here's where Tech 3 is. Here's what you need to be doing,’” Rohrs says. “And then you go to those lead techs, ‘What are you doing differently? How are you closing so much better?’ And it becomes more of a team-building exercise and growing as a group.”

Other ServiceTitan Solutions to Boost Average Tickets

Senior Product Marketing Manager Josh Lu says companies that use ServiceTitan Pro Products together often see bigger results.

“Pretty cool story to be able to automate all of that to drive more revenue,” Lu says.

Kohberger says Marketing Pro, Scheduling Pro, and Dispatch Pro are a knockout trio when it comes to boosting average tickets.

“Because with that stack of three, the jobs just happen, and no human involvement was ever there. Jobs are just showing up on the board and nobody was on the phone,” Kohberger says. “That’s really nice.”

Conditional logic in forms

Another solution to help techs boost average tickets is using conditional logic in forms.

“If you're not already using conditional logic in forms, you should,” Kohberger says. “I think you're doing your technicians a great disservice by not using it because it really makes forms much more pleasant to fill out on the technician side.”

New additions to conditional logic include the ability to add tags to the job, customer, or the location, based on specific answers within the forms themselves. This can help you keep track of customers’ equipment history or know when customers express interest in upsell opportunities.

Offer integrated financing

Train your techs to offer integrated financing to customers, then measure how often they do. 

“You're a lot more likely to close jobs if you can offer competitive financing options,” Kohberger says. “Not as many people are actually offering the financing as are claiming to be offering the financing. So make sure you are holding your technicians and salespeople accountable.”

>>Ready to see Dispatch Pro or another Pro Product in action? Book your demo today.