Customers demand convenience, and most contractors providing home and commercial services want more customers. So, how do you achieve both goals with one simple solution? Offer customers an easy and hassle-free way to book your services online and watch your job boards fill up.
Think about how consumers secure services nowadays. Instead of using smartphones to call and make an appointment, they simply book appointments online for haircuts, food delivery, medical visits, ride shares, auto repair, and so much more.
Customers can book an appointment how they want, when they want, and with no need to speak to anyone.
The same concept can be applied when booking services for a plumber, electrician, HVAC repair, roofing, garage doors, landscaping, and more. Top contractors recognize that offering intuitive, easy-to-use online booking provides a superior customer experience, and allows their business to scale faster and operate more efficiently.
In fact, ServiceTitan users say the percentage of jobs booked online by their customers more than doubled in the past two years, mostly as a result of the global pandemic.
“We know your plates are more than full,” says Strick Tudor, Vice President of Schedule Engine. “Running a service business 24/7 is a 365-day job that requires you to balance so many different obligations, from seasonality, competitive local markets, team recruiting, training, management to, most importantly, taking care of your customer demands.
“Our goal is to help make life a little bit easier, ensuring that you never miss a chance to convert an opportunity to a booked appointment,” he adds.
To address shifting consumer demands, this summer ServiceTitan partnered with Schedule Engine to offer the most advanced and intuitive online scheduling technology for the trades. It’s simply a “must-have” for any trades business interested in providing a better customer experience.
In this post, we’ll take a look at Schedule Engine’s evolution from an online home services booking solution to a fully integrated live and automated solution for contractors. We also explain how this powerful integration works and how it benefits contractors and their customers.
What is Schedule Engine?
Schedule Engine is a comprehensive software solution that streamlines the scheduling process for home services. From automated online scheduling to 24/7 live chat and voice support with industry-trained professionals, it allows contractors to never miss a job while optimizing efficiency for dispatchers and technicians.
Designed to easily integrate with a contractor's existing software systems, Schedule Engine can be implemented and configured quickly to capture the right opportunities by meeting customers where they are — online. In fact, Tudor says Schedule Engine users book four times more jobs than other leading online scheduling tools.
The platform went live in 2018 as an on-demand job booking app. As more contractors started using the app, Schedule Engine shifted its focus to a streamlined online scheduling experience that easily integrates with a wide variety of field service management systems, like ServiceTitan.
» Find out more about Schedule Engine
In 2020, the company added live voice and live chat features to provide 24/7 customer support. In June, ServiceTitan announced its acquisition of and partnership with Schedule Engine to give contractors the best technology tools to drive business.
According to Tudor, Schedule Engine’s successes for home services contractors in the past year include:
1.3 million total customer interactions
460,000+ book deployments
200,000 new customers
45,000 total CSR hours saved
“Contractors’ needs and direct feedback have fueled the evolution and growth of Schedule Engine,” Tudor says. “We're able to help to lower your customer acquisition costs and create exceptional customer experiences.”
How ServiceTitan Integration Works with Schedule Engine
The prevalence of online booking shows a definite upward trend, with a majority of home service providers expecting more than 30% of their jobs to be booked through an online scheduling tool over the next three years.
In preparation for this major change, the ServiceTitan-Schedule Engine integration allows Schedule Engine industry-knowledgeable agents to:
Book a real job right in the ServiceTitan dispatch board, just like your team would over the phone.
Prevent overbooking and double-booking with updated real-time availability.
Map questions to the correct job type, business unit campaign, and more inside ServiceTitan.
Create overrides to show same-day or next-day availability for high-value jobs.
The Schedule Engine suite of resources helps to reduce the workload on you and your team of service technicians, CSRs, dispatchers, and more by always being on, so you don’t have to be. Providing around-the-clock support, highly trained Schedule Engine agents can significantly improve your customer experience and, in turn, complement your brand.
“We’re capturing jobs for you at any hour of any day, giving your customers the flexibility to book how they want and when they want, and giving you greater insight about customer behaviors,” Tudor says.
Schedule Engine resources include:
Online Scheduling: Streamlines the booking process, helping customers schedule complete appointments online at any hour of the day with less time, effort, and attention from you and your team.
Live Voice: With scheduling integrations and emergency on-call escalation workflow strategies managed by industry-trained agents, Live Voice makes it easy for you to always deliver the best customer experience, even after hours and on holidays.
Live Chat: Provides answers and guidance as soon as your customers reach out with real industry-trained agents to book real jobs on the spot, build brand loyalty, and boost customer satisfaction.
Remote Assist (extension of Live Voice): A real expert tech can virtually assess your customers' issues and guide them to a potential resolution over a video call. This helps contractors avoid after-hours dispatching and allocates resources more efficiently.
Customer Insights: Provides marketing analytics that connect your booking conversions to revenue sources across all of your marketing channels, empowering contractors to make more educated decisions on where to spend their marketing dollars and improve their ROI.
Enterprise: Elevates the customer experience for original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) to boost conversion and maintain better control over your brand, network, and service experience.
In addition to a great booking experience for your customers, Schedule Engine also added some extra functionality to its ServiceTitan integration. For instance, Schedule Engine can be used to support ServiceTitan companies using legacy capacity planning or adjustable capacity planning.
“Software integrations are always evolving,” says Steve Fafel, Schedule Engine’s Head of Product (Technology). “ServiceTitan's second version of their API (Application Programming Interface) is coming out…and that ushers in a whole new opportunity for us and ServiceTitan to work together, to make sure we're adding additional features and additional integration capabilities to expand the value that Schedule Engine provides to you.”
Live 24/7 Help Sets Schedule Engine Apart
When things go wrong with a home’s mechanical systems, customers typically want to pick up the phone and call for help. If the emergency happens on the weekend or a holiday, chances are the call to your business either goes unanswered or gets routed to an agnostic answering service with no industry knowledge. Either way, it probably results in a missed opportunity.
With Schedule Engine, every call gets answered, giving customers the right solution at exactly the right time.
“The thing that really sets Schedule Engine Live Voice apart from your typical answering service is our integration, our industry training, and our escalation services,” says Savannah McDermott, Head of Customer Success for Schedule Engine. “It's not just a standalone answering service, it's actually a fully integrated service that stacks right on top of your scheduler.”
Schedule Engine live agents are specifically trained to work with contractors specializing in home services. Live agents receive extensive training about how the industry operates and what your specific customer needs might be.
“They're able to be really specialized and meet the needs of our client base,” McDermott says. “The other thing that really sets Schedule Engine Live Services apart is our escalations. We have a customized escalation (customer complaints, refunds, warranty issues, etc.) product that allows you to be in control of how we are notifying your on-call techs, on-call dispatchers, or whatever the case may be after hours.”
The customized escalation features are fully automated, totally in your control, and can be adjusted on the fly.
“What that means is that we've taken away the human-error piece and we've taken away a lot of the heavy lift that causes delays and mistakes,” McDermott says. “We are able to funnel this all through a really seamless process that's going to allow you control and visibility over all of your after-hours and overflow activity.”
» Find out more about Schedule Engine now
New Schedule Engine Features
Schedule Engine also introduced webhooks last year, which allows contractors to share real-time data with the other business applications they may be using and keep their shop running efficiently. Contractors can leverage webhooks in conjunction with Schedule Engine to push key appointment data to their preferred systems, including Google Calendar, HubSpot, Google Sheets, Slack, and more.
“Schedule Engine never wants to hold data hostage,” Fafel explains. “Ultimately, we want to make sure conversions happen. We want to make sure appointments get booked, and then we want to make sure you can lean into those areas so you can do even more.”
This year, Schedule Engine released a whole new dashboard with additional tools and filters that enable users to see their entire chat log, listen to voice recordings of customer calls, customize when and to whom after-hours or escalation notifications are routed to, and adjust windows of availability for regular bookings and escalation. Coming soon, Schedule Engine users will be able to choose from an array of customized booking experiences.
“We also want to expand our live services to be able to do things like help you with daytime calling, do warm transfers during the day, provide additional things after hours like rescheduling appointments, or providing additional insights about membership information to your customers,” Fafel says.
“In cooperation with field service management systems like ServiceTitan, we're going to be able to provide additional support and services that make our voice or live services even more valuable than they are today.”
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