Want to book more jobs, reduce rescheduling, and decrease cancellations? We have yet to meet a service business owner who says no to that question.
ServiceTitan’s Adjustable Capacity Planning (ACP) feature—a solution to strategize scheduling—allows office managers, dispatchers, and CSRs to book jobs with confidence, maximize revenue, and keep techs busy.
ServiceTitan Senior Specialist of Front Office Operations, Margaux Mireault, walks us through a live demo of ACP features in a recent ServiceTitan webinar.
Read on to learn how ACP helps streamline scheduling for ServiceTitan customers, including a real-life case study from Kristin Smith, office manager at Covenant Plumbing in Bloomington, Ill.
» Want to grow your business? Click here to get a demo.
What is Adjustable Capacity Planning?
ACP optimizes the scheduling process while maximizing profit and homeowner satisfaction with the following features:
Ensures maximum CSR efficiency by giving managers control over how many hours of appointments are available to book.
Provides insight into labor hours booked per time period and technician shifts for effective service job booking.
Allows users to strategically underbook or overbook time periods.
Filters job types by skill to show technician capacity limits for certain types of jobs.
With several filtering features, ACP offers flexibility based on business needs.
“Some managers are very granular in how they want their board to look,” Mireault says. “And some people want to just set it and forget it, but know that it’s accurate based on technicians’ availability, so it takes into account hours booked per window based on the technician shifts you apply to your technician. It’s very important that you’re maintaining their schedule. If they have time off, make sure it’s plugged in as time off.”
For the initial setup, which requires several steps, follow the ACP checklist.
“This checklist is going to be a game changer for those of you who are a little intimidated by setting it up,” Mireault says. “Everything you need to know is there.”
>> More of a visual learner? Check out The Academy for a video walk-through of the checklist.
Manual Adjustment vs. Skills Settings
ACP allows for two modes: Manual Adjustment and Skills. If you plan to overbook or underbook, Mireault recommends using the Manual Adjustment setup.
“That’s something you’re going to be touching on a daily basis,” she says. “You can go in and quickly add or subtract hours. It just takes a couple clicks—super easy.”
If you don’t want to be so hands-on, and plan to book jobs based on what skills your technicians have across multiple business units, use the Skills option.
Bonus: In an open beta, which any ServiceTitan customer may access, you can apply temporary rules to Skills. This comes in handy for weather events that prompt specific jobs, for example, rainy days and sump pumps.
“Normally, your veteran technicians don’t need to be level one of a skill,” Mireault says. “But on emergency weather days when that’s your No. 1 moneymaker, you want those veteran technicians to also handle those jobs.”
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ACP Integrations
ACP integrates with the following tools and apps:
ServiceTitan Web Scheduler (and Web Scheduler 2.0 currently in open beta)
Google Local Services
ServiceTitan Smart Dispatch (currently in beta)
ServiceTitan Marketing Pro
The Marketing Pro integration allows you to create campaigns based on manager board data. For example, if the board shows eight free hours for a specific business unit group, you can create an email campaign to drum up business.
“Use one of our campaigns that our Marketing Pro team has created and tweak it to be specific to these types of situations. Say ‘Hey, if you book a job on these three dates, we’ll give you a discount,” Mireault suggests. “And then you can suddenly have jobs available to add on those slow days.”
She also recommends getting an email ready to deploy for weather-related events that would require you to reschedule appointments.
Solving Common ACP Roadblocks
Mireault notes a few reasons clients don’t use ACP, and how to overcome those hurdles.
1. Technicians work across multiple business units. ACP requires assigning technicians to a business unit, so companies struggle when a technician works across multiple specialties. Mireault says to solve this, you can combine all your business units into one group.
“As long as the business unit they’re [technicians] assigned to in their profile belongs to this group that has multiple business units, they’re going to show as available in capacity planning,” she adds. “You can set it up in any way that you want.”
2. Technicians have different skill levels. The new Skills feature solves this issue.
“[If] you have newer techs who are just tiptoeing their way into some things, and you don’t want them to show as available, you’re going to want to switch from Manual Adjustment to Skills,” Mireault says. “When you select a business unit and job type, if that job type requires a skill, then those technicians won’t even show as an option for you to book. And if no technicians in that window are available, it's going to show that the window is not available to be scheduled.”
3. Lack of training/understanding. Mireault admits that setting up ACP can be daunting, so she hosted this webinar and created a checklist and training video to help.
“I've been working with our training team to get up to date on all the different options, documents, knowledge-based articles, and academy videos to help you feel more comfortable with your setup and take advantage of ACP once it's up and running,” Mireault says.
ACP Case Study
Covenant Plumbing integrates ACP with Google Local Services and Web Scheduler 2.0. Smith notes their CSR answers an average of 225 calls a month.
“She can do it flawlessly because of ACP,” Smith says. “She doesn't book any way besides hitting that button.”
Covenant utilizes ACP to overbook jobs.
“We actually book jobs like we’re running two extra trucks,” Smith says. “I would rather overbook every day, because there’s always that ‘just in case.’ My guys are install and sales, so if they go to a job and don’t sell it, I want to be able to pull something straight in. I’d rather push them and apologize than not have enough work and send them home early.”
Smith notes this strategy ensures they’re running profitably every day.
Ready to dive into ACP? Use the checklist to get started, and reach out to your CSM with any issues.
“If it's something that needs to be addressed right away, go to support,” Mireault says. “We have people on the support side who can help troubleshoot it live. You can also talk to your CSM and ask them to do an audit of ACP. We're all partnering together to make sure that ACP works for you. Know that you'll not be alone on this journey to get it set up; we’ve got your back.”
>> Watch the ACP webinar and live demo here.
ServiceTitan Software
ServiceTitan is a comprehensive software solution built specifically to help service companies streamline their operations, boost revenue, and substantially elevate the trajectory of their business. Our comprehensive, cloud-based platform is used by thousands of electrical, HVAC, plumbing, garage door, and chimney sweep shops across the country—and has increased their revenue by an average of 25% in just their first year with us.
