Austin Haller grew up on the shop floor of his father's HVAC, plumbing, and electrical company in Pennsylvania. At age 11, he cut the ductboard in the warehouse with no air conditioning, his arms bright red at the end of every day. He trained as an installation technician. He knows what the job asks of the people who do it.
"The amount of uncertainty that a technician walks into every day is significant," says Haller, now ServiceTitan's senior director of product management for Field Pro. "That's a lot more difficult than you can explain. You have to experience it to really appreciate it."
Edward McFarlane, the chair of the board of directors at Air Conditioning Contractors of America, has been in the trades for nearly 30 years and makes the same point from a different angle.
Back in the day, he says, a contractor could hire a new tech with their own tools, ride with them for a day or two, hand them a price sheet and send them out. Today's techs need training on technology, systems, inventory, and daily operational processes before you can turn them loose.
The equipment is different. Consumer expectations are different.
"The gig's changed," says McFarlane, who also serves as chairman of the ACCA. "The days of looking at your shoes are gone. Customers want answers, they want a full set of solutions. It's no longer enough to be a fix-it guy. You have to be able to be well-rounded."
The technician must have a lot of open tabs — communication, safety, revenue, best practices, complex diagnostics, customer empathy — all at once, all day.
"I don't think technicians are better or worse," McFarlane says. "There's just more required of them."
And contractors, for the most part, are sending them out anyway — into homes, representing the company, on their own.
"Technicians are little remote islands representing your company, and they're darting all over the place," McFarlane says. "Sometimes they get into situations and they're on their own. They feel the pressure of, 'How am I going to either resolve this issue the customer called in, or at the very least build enough confidence so we can follow up the process if we need a different solution?' And that's a moving target."
The customer isn't making it easier, either.
"Our customers aren't just trained by how we treat them, they're trained by every transaction they have," McFarlane says. "They expect the technician to show up, greet them, and get on the same page."
'Guardrails for the technician'
Successful companies have a solid, standardized process for technicians in the home. Chris Michel, a training director at Service Nation with more than 30 years of sales experience in the trades, describes that process as "guardrails for the technician."
That process is a big part of setting the leadership tone within the organization, Michel says, and the plan needs to be holistic, with all the parts working together.
"Ride-alongs are not enough, weekly training is not enough, the process itself is not enough," he says.
Angie Snow, principal industry advisor at ServiceTitan and previous vice president and co-owner of Utah's Western Heating, Air & Plumbing, says a broader technician training plan is key.
"It's not always just technical training," Snow says. "There should be sales training. There should be communication training. There should be product training. And you don't have to do it all in-house, either."
The goal of all that training, Snow says, is a technician who can hold the whole conversation — diagnosis, solutions, financing, next steps — without losing the customer along the way.
"A confused mind says no," Snow says. "If the technician doesn't believe in the product, or if they don't believe in the process, they're not going to do it. You have to give the technician the training, the messaging, the sales tools, everything they need so that when they're talking to a homeowner they can feel confident."
Eliminating the dirty work
Training solves part of the problem. But some of the burden on technicians has nothing to do with skill or confidence — it's just drudgery. Paperwork. Forms. Manual data entry, maybe even with dirty hands in a customer's crawlspace or attic.
Tamar Rosati, ServiceTitan's vice president of product, says some of the most valuable improvements for technicians don't require AI at all, just thoughtful automation of the tasks that slow them down.
"A technician driving to a job can listen to a summary of what's going on with the customer, thanks to AI," she says. "But once they're onsite, they still have to fill out a form. Their hands might be dirty, and they're having to take out their phone and fill in a bunch of information."
The fix, she says, is closer than it sounds.
"Imagine if they just had their headphones in and could just speak through their inspection and their evaluation. They're narrating as they go, and that's populating all the critical details about that job. And then imagine AI taking that and auto-generating the estimates."
That improves efficiency and makes the job more satisfying, without asking technicians to do anything they aren't already doing.
That same philosophy, removing the manual burden so technicians can focus on the work itself, is behind Conduit Tech, a ServiceTitan company that has transformed how HVAC technicians handle one of the most time-consuming parts of a system replacement: the design process.
Conduit uses LiDAR scanning to automatically capture a 3D rendering of a home on-site, then runs load calculations, airflow modeling, and temperature analysis from that scan. A process that once took hours — or days, if a design had to go back to the office — now takes about 15 minutes, with the technician walking the homeowner through a real-time 3D model of their own house while the numbers are still fresh.
IAQ Medics, a Washington, D.C.-area HVAC company and early Conduit adopter, saw close rates climb 21% and average ticket size grow 32% after implementing it, results the company's leadership attributes directly to the trust built when a homeowner can see and understand the design rather than just take a technician's word for it.
Conduit also generates permitting documentation precise enough that IAQ Medics was able to submit directly to Fairfax County, Virginia, with a high approval rate, eliminating another administrative bottleneck that used to slow projects down after the sale was made.
"We want technicians applying their expertise," Rosati says, "not doing a bunch of busy work on every single job."
Coaching a team without watching the games
Here's the problem with even the best training program: A contractor can't be in every home or business with every technician.
"We don't know if they spent 15 or 20 minutes having a good conversation about what the customer cares about or if they just came up from the basement and slid a piece of paper across with three random options," McFarlane says. "We don't really know, and so it's difficult to coach."
Haller frames the management problem bluntly.
"Running your business without Field Pro for sales managers is like coaching a sports team without watching the games," he says. "You coach beforehand, you get the score afterward, but you have no idea what happened during that game. You can't just coach on scores alone. You need to understand … what the technicians are doing. What are the behaviors that drive the desired outcomes? And coach the behavior."
That's the gap ServiceTitan's Field Pro closes.
Field Pro automatically records every technician interaction with a customer. Before the job, it preps the tech with an audio brief — customer history, dollars spent, sentiment from previous CSR calls, open estimates — so they arrive informed and confident. It tracks key events from every call, scores performance against preset best practices — rapport building, objection handling, finding a compelling need, closing, speaker share, pacing — and shares those scores with techs and managers automatically.
It also surfaces peer examples: real clips from the field of technicians handling objections, presenting financing, closing jobs. Techs can scroll through them, listen, and comment. It's built, as ServiceTitan CEO Ara Mahdessian describes it, like "the Instagram or TikTok of learning."
"Would you rather see better performance on 30% of jobs or 100% of jobs?" Mahdessian says.
At Esser Air Conditioning in Palm Desert, Calif. — where summer highs hit 120 degrees and technicians routinely face complex equipment issues, difficult conditions, and customers on their worst day — comfort adviser and field supervisor Skip Wintter has seen exactly how that plays out.
"With Field Pro, it's definitely easy for us to pinpoint areas of growth, and then we can work one-on-one with each technician specific for what they need," Wintter says. "And that really allows them to be the best technician that they possibly can be in the field."
Esser has built a culture around that feedback — one where technicians listen to their own calls, share their best moments with the team and ask for help when an interaction didn't go the way they wanted. Chris Holland, Esser's service manager, says the recordings changed how technicians think about their own performance.
"Field Pro made people more conscious of what they were saying, and when they were saying it, and how they were saying it," Holland says. "So you get guys who are able to judge themselves and really hold themselves accountable due to the training and the feedback they've gotten from Field Pro."
It also changed how Holland coaches. The manager dashboard lets him see who is engaging with the recordings and acting on the AI-generated improvement suggestions and who needs more support.
"It really lets me know who's actually trying to better themselves," he says, "and who I need to do a little bit more training with."
The unbiased feedback factor
The coaching lands differently coming from a peer recording than from a manager. Mahdessian says the same feedback a manager delivers can fall on deaf ears for whatever reason.
"But when a tech hears this from a peer who used it yesterday and saw success with it, they realize, 'Wow, this stuff works,'" Mahdessian says. "And that's how we get the performance improvement on a daily basis instead of waiting for end-of-week training sessions."
At Blanton & Sons Heating, Cooling and Plumbing in Charleston, S.C., the techs crave the unbiased feedback they receive from Field Pro recordings — feedback they might push back on if it came from a manager.
"A lot of people nowadays don't like taking criticism at all," says Vice President Brandon Blanton. "They think you're attacking them constantly and always telling them they're doing something wrong. But with Field Pro, it's the unbiased coaching that it's giving them, they're listening to it, and it's working for them."
Blanton also found that recordings protect the business. With customers now shopping five, six, seven, or more contractors before choosing, confusion about what was promised is common.
"It's really helped us combat a lot of refunds and 'he-said, she-said' conversations," he says.
McFarlane, who has spent decades thinking about how to make feedback stick, sees the broader opportunity.
"Feedback, good and bad, should be specific, timely, and direct," he says. "We can do that in almost real-time with an AI tool to go in, scrub through all this, ask the questions, and crunch the data, so that even with all of the time constraints on our schedule, we can have a meaningful conversation."
What it does for the business
Start with the math of sending a technician to a job. Mahdessian says it costs, on average, about $400 to roll a truck, factoring in marketing, lead generation, call booking, dispatching, drive time, wages, fuel and equipment. At a 50% gross margin, a contractor needs to generate $800 per job just to break even. At a 20% profit margin, they need $1,000. Every dollar above that threshold, driven by a better average ticket, is nearly pure profit.
"If you can drive the revenue increase through an increase in the average ticket, nearly all of that increase is purely incremental profit," Mahdessian says.
Field Pro is built to move that number, not by adding leads or headcount but by making the technicians already in the field more effective on every call.
The bottom line? Field Pro is a tool to improve management and scale business, says Steve Michaelson, director of operations at Lee's Air, Plumbing and Heating.
"There's no way for you to scale and have reasonable overhead," Michaelson says. "This is what the tool does. It helps so your service managers aren't having to go on ride-alongs every day all day. They're able to focus on real issues."
Blanton & Sons implemented Field Pro in 2024. The year before, the company earned $5 million in revenue and netted 5% in profit each month. After Field Pro, revenue doubled to $10 million and monthly profit climbed to 20% — with nearly the same number of employees.
Mahdessian breaks that down plainly.
"You've effectively doubled revenue. But if we think about what's happened to profitability, you said you were at 5% at $5 million — that means $250,000 in profit at the end of the year. Now you're at $10 million, but at 20% profitability. That means $2 million in profits at the end of the year. Almost 10 times profit, just by doubling revenue."
The techs at Blanton & Sons didn't need a manager telling them to engage with Field Pro. They came in before work and did it on their own.
"I'm constantly finding them when they're at the office in the mornings, grabbing their Field Pro, listening to recordings, or even just coming up to their sales manager and saying, 'I didn't do too well on this job here. Can you listen to this call with me?'" Blanton says. "We've never had that before, and it's really boosting our company's morale and helping our technicians."
Field Pro also generates AI-powered performance reports giving managers data to coach with precision and identifies the technicians who have been quietly outperforming without anyone noticing. McFarlane notes a consistent pattern in high-functioning teams: They receive roughly six instances of positive feedback for every one instance of negative feedback. That ratio doesn't happen by accident. It happens because managers have the visibility to find what's working and amplify it.
In the field, techs can also use Field Pro's AI diagnostics and troubleshooting feature to diagnose equipment issues in real time — inputting symptoms, scanning nameplates, looking up documentation — without tying up the service manager on the phone.
"I can put in the symptoms that I'm seeing, and it's going to respond based on this piece of equipment, what may be happening, and what troubleshooting steps I should proceed with," Haller explains.
After using Field Pro to identify missed opportunities in unsold estimates, Above + Beyond Service Co. in Edmond, Okla., saw its average ticket climb 29% and close rate rise to 55% to 60%.
"Everything we track has increased," says sales manager Vincent Price. "Our ticket averages, our closing percentage, our conversion ratio, everything has gone up. Our booking rates have gone up. Everything that helps our technicians relates to everybody else in the business."
Haller sums up the mission he's been working toward since those summers cutting ductboard in his father's warehouse.
"Our job with Field Pro is turning potential into performance," he says, "and performance into legacy."
The next conversation
All that training — the guardrails, the role-playing, the peer coaching, the AI scoring — is building toward one thing: a technician who can hold the full conversation in the home, from diagnosis to solution to the question every contractor wants their tech to ask.
One part of that conversation is harder than most.
Talking about money — specifically, offering financing — is its own skill. Customers don't always know to ask. Technicians don't always know how to bring it up. And the difference between a job that closes and one that doesn't often comes down to whether anyone mentioned that an affordable monthly payment was an option.
That's the next training challenge. And it's another challenge automation can help solve.
The full ServiceTitan Automation Playbook is coming soon, a practical guide to end-to-end automation for contractors told by the operators already running it.
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