Introducing ServiceTitan’s Contact Center Pro

Why We Built Contact Center Pro

As contractors, you spend so much money on generating customer calls to increase revenue, whether it’s through marketing, business development, or enhancing the customer experience. Even so, many calls still go unanswered, jobs don’t get booked, and businesses miss prime opportunities to grow profits.

“These phone calls are the lifeblood of any contracting business,” Mahdessian says. “Literally, every single one of those phone calls might be a $500 job, it might be a $50,000 job. It's important to convert every single call into a booked appointment.”

That’s why ServiceTitan built Contact Center Pro. 

“If we can figure out how to convert more of those calls that are answered into booked appointments, or figure out how to answer more of these calls in our busiest periods when we're just overloaded with calls and we don't have enough CSR staffing to answer them, that will go a long way towards increasing revenue,” Mahdessian adds.

Reducing Barriers to Answer Every Call

Southern Home Services, a heating, cooling, plumbing, and electrical services company with 26 brands across the U.S., partnered with ServiceTitan to beta test Contact Center Pro and find a better alternative to Southern Home Services’ clunky VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) call-answering system.

“The customer and employee journeys are critical, and we obviously wanted to reduce the barriers,” Burch says. “We must be able to respond to our customers, and not miss an opportunity.”

With employees answering calls in one place and customer data stored in another place, the system was difficult for Southern Home Services call-takers to navigate and created challenges when trying to train people or optimize the process.

“We knew those were two core key challenges that we really wanted to solve,” Burch says. “And we saw an opportunity to better serve our customers and reduce these barriers by using Contact Center Pro.”

In fact, missed calls mean missed revenue and challenges such as:

• Call center inefficiency

• Overwhelmed CSR managers

• Low after-hours and overflow booking rates

Southern Home Services Success Story with Contact Center Pro

With about 1,000 employees, Southern Home Services CSRs now use Contact Center Pro to answer customer calls at each location. If a particular location is too busy to answer the phone, the calls roll over to a centralized call center based in Orlando, Florida, so no calls go unanswered.

“It’s given us the ability to leverage a tool that’s just easy and simple,” Burch says. “You have all of your calls in one place inside ServiceTitan. You can easily set up call flows. You can easily connect the dots. And it just gave us an ability to even scale up.

“When you think about implementing a call system, a new call system in 25 centers, it's a challenge, and it's a change,” he adds. “And you’ve got to really make sure the solution that you're giving to your employees matters.”

With Contact Center Pro, businesses stop missing calls and start booking more jobs with smart, AI-powered automation. This leads to increased CSR efficiency, more booked jobs, and ultimately revenue growth.

Building revenue and protecting profit margins are the only reasons contractors should invest in software, Mahdessian says.

“It all comes down to ROI (return on investment),” the ServiceTitan CEO says. “I've challenged my own team, I've told them if there are any products we build and we ask our customers to pay us money for those products, we better be making them a lot more money than they pay us. That’s the only way this equation works. And, frankly, that's the only way I want to do business.”

The Contact Center Pro investment for Southern Home Services paid off, Burch says, increasing call booking rates by nearly 13% year-over-year.

“From our CSRs to our general managers, our dispatchers, our customer experience center, they're the ones that I think are reaping the rewards by leveraging Contact Center Pro and serving our customers better,” Burch says. “We wanted to deliver a tool to our employees to reduce the barriers and make sure we gain work productivity. 

“Contact Center Pro allowed us to book the call and take advantage of these opportunities.”

Think about what that 13% increase in call booking means, Mahdessian says. It means your business has 13% more jobs to run and you have the potential to earn 13% more in revenue—simply by optimizing your call booking process.

“If an organization is doing $10 million in revenue today, a 13% increase will be an extra $1.3 million in revenue. And because you've already paid for the cost of generating that call, this extra $1.3 million is likely going to be at a higher profit margin than the prior $10 million. So, it's a bigger than 13% increase in your bottom line,” Mahdessian explains. “And, of course, if you're doing $100 million, a 13% increase is going to be another $13 million of revenue.

“So, this is extremely meaningful,” he adds.

Establishing better business processes also equips your team to handle whatever crisis comes their way, from a global pandemic and supply chain issues to increased costs due to inflation.

“It seems like as time goes on, in order for this industry to not just survive but thrive, we’ve got to get better at optimizing our businesses from the very top of the funnel to the very bottom of the funnel each and every year to be able to overcome these challenges,” Mahdessian says. “The call center is certainly one of these areas. So, the potential ROI is very high.”

>>See how Bonney Plumbing increased bookings by 11% with Contact Center Pro

How Contact Center Pro Works

Next, Henry Cheng, ServiceTitan’s Director of Pro Product Strategy, walked through a demo of Contact Center Pro. Here are the highlights:

• With Contact Center Pro, every call flows into one inbox that’s fully native to ServiceTitan. Each call is linked to the right job, and the system allows CSRs to handle calls from any location.

• Incoming call flow allows you to auto match the caller’s number to a ServiceTitan contact. If it's a new number, the CSR is prompted to create a profile right in Contact Center Pro. Tags, locations, balances, and even contact method edits are available here. 

• With one click, you can book a job directly from Contact Center Pro, which immediately launches ServiceTitan's job screen, with the call bubble pre-clicked, marketing campaigns auto-filled, and addresses pre-populated.

• When the call ends, the system auto dispositions the call that results in bookings. For calls not booked, you get a pop-up that asks the CSR to select the call reason.

• Call center managers gain access to queue monitoring across every location and every team. In the queue monitoring panel, they can see the agent’s status, what they’re currently handling, estimated wait times, and active call volumes. 

• Managers see a full, searchable view of every interaction, whether an inbound call, an AI voice agent convo, or an outbound follow-up. Each row shows you the customer, the CSR who handled the call, the call type, the reason, and the AI-generated sentiment.

• Filters allow you to search by channel (inbound, outbound, or virtual), by CSR, by call sentiment, and by call type or call reason.

“Contact Center Pro is the only contact center built for the trades and native to ServiceTitan,” Cheng says. “It has an extremely easy-to-use visual workflow builder that’s infinitely customizable and configurable to meet each of your unique business needs and requirements. Now you can set up and edit your call flow in minutes, not hours. 

“With the workflow builder, any call to any phone number can be routed to any queue, which can then be staffed by any number of agents,” he adds. “And additional routing options include fully customizable date and time rules; IVR’s (interactive voice response) ability to support personalized greeting and hold experiences; routing strategies ranging from longest idle to simultaneous ring; and roll over timer and destinations.

“If no one answers in the CSR queue after 30 seconds, it rolls to dispatch. Still no answer, it can ring a manager's cell phone or another queue at a sister location or a centralized call center,” Cheng says. “The idea here is whatever you want. The whole goal is simple, no dead ends, and no missed calls.”

Implementing Contact Center Pro

Answering every call with a tool that’s easy to use is what led Southern Home Services to a 13% increase in call bookings, Burch says.

“Answering the call is so critical to an organization because you just don't know what you're about to generate as far as your revenue. So, it's all about booking the job,” he explains.

For instance, CSRs tend to get slammed during summer heat waves, and missed calls often lead to missed opportunities to close a higher average ticket. To solve this, you can deploy Contact Center Pro to handle the overflow, which allows your CSRs to be more productive.

And the reporting and monitoring tools give call center managers insight on CSR performance, whether individually or as a team, so they know how to coach and train them to book more jobs. 

Burch says it wasn’t difficult to implement Contact Center Pro at all 26 Southern Home Services locations, especially with Southern’s strong training and technical team partnering with the ServiceTitan team to learn how to operate the system and adjust call flows on the fly.

“The simplicity, the easiness, I think it just created a lot of great opportunities for us to roll this out to 25 branches, plus a call center, and connect all the dots. The rinse-repeat process works,” Burch says.

While still in the early-release phase, Mahdessian says Contact Center Pro will become available in May. It’s a contact center platform that benefits multi-location organizations as well as single-location shops.

“It's the only solution that allows you to have a centralized call-taking process,” Mahdessian says. 

Contact Center Pro also replaces ServiceTitan’s previous offering, Phones Pro. While Mahdessian says Phones Pro was a good product, some users experienced technical problems that resulted in call quality issues.

“The No. 1 priority for Contact Center Pro is high reliability and call quality. Our goal is 100% of calls come through with zero issues, fast, very high, and clear call quality,” Mahdessian says.

ServiceTitan also plans to roll out its own AI voice agent solution shortly. 

“In situations where your CSRs are completely overwhelmed with calls, the AI agents would answer the call and make sure it gets booked. Certainly after hours or over the weekend when nobody is manning the phones, the AI agents would make sure those calls get booked,” Mahdessian explains.

“The performance of anything related to AI is based on how much data there is to train these AI agents off of,” he adds. “And given that there are hundreds of millions of phone calls that ServiceTitan manages each year, we’re able to build AI agents that have the most human-like experience.”

Secondly, for an AI agent to be able to answer call inquiries not related to booking a job, the system needs more contextual data like yesterday’s invoice, tomorrow’s job, the tech’s ETA, etc.

“And these [other] third-party solutions don't have access to that data, so they can't provide those answers,” Mahdessian says.

Also, if you’re routing calls to a third-party AI solution and the customer gets frustrated and wants to speak to a human, there’s no way to route that call back to the CSRs in your office.

“These were the problems that customers asked us to solve for, and we have thankfully been able to successfully solve them,” he says. 

Here’s an example of a ServiceTitan AI Voice Agent:

Thank you for calling Titan Home Services. What can I do for you today?

Hi, my water heater's been having some issues, and I was wondering if I could get someone to check that out.

I can help with that. Could you please start by providing your full name?

Yeah, that would be Sally Tan.

Thank you, Sally. Just to confirm, your full name is Sally Tan, correct? Could you also provide the best contact number to reach you in case this call gets disconnected?

Yeah, that would be 310-692-8806.

One moment please. I found a matching customer record for you. Could you please confirm if your street is Glendale Drive in Hillsborough Heights? Also, is the servicetitan.com email address still okay for contact?

We actually moved recently, so I have a new address. And then the ServiceTitan email should be correct.

Got it Sally. Could you please provide your new full address including the zip code?

Yeah, that would be 555 Titan Way, Glendale, California, 94010.

One moment please. Thank you, Sally. Your new address is-

So one sec, I have someone at the door, one second.

No problem. Take your time. I'll be here when you're ready to continue.

Okay, I'm back.

Great, no worries. Let's continue. Is there anything else you would like to add about the issue with your water heater?

Just that it's pretty urgent since we haven't had hot water.

I understand that it's urgent. Do you have a preferred day of the week for the appointment, or a preference between morning or afternoon time slots?

Probably the soonest available appointment that you have.

All right. I'll make a request for the earliest available appointment for you. Your appointment request has been made. Once the time is confirmed, we will send you a text message. Is that okay?

Yeah, that sounds great.

Perfect. Is there anything else I can help you with today?

I think that's it. Thank you so much.

Thank you for choosing Titan Home Services. Please enjoy the rest of your day.

Once a customer speaks to a Contact Center Pro AI Voice Agent about a booking request, the job is automatically placed on your dispatch board. For other requests, the CSRs receive messages with everything they need to follow up. 

You can also set it up to give customers a choice between waiting on hold to talk to a live agent or immediately speaking to an AI agent, as well as redirecting AI-call escalations to your CSRs or ServiceTitan live services.

Roadmap for Contact Center Pro

New features to be released in May for Contact Center Pro include:

• Mobile app: Allows office employees to answer calls remotely, so they miss fewer calls and can return customers’ calls sooner.

• Advanced reporting: Call center managers can see call volume, abandoned calls, and missed calls, and queue performance metrics, such as average wait times, time on calls, and SLA (service level agreement) adherence. 

• Abandoned calls follow-up: Captures every abandoned call across all business locations in one table and in one centralized location for easier follow-up.

• Second Chance Leads: Powered by Titan Intelligence, this automated feature identifies potential missed opportunities by analyzing calls handled by live agents.

>>Want to learn more about Contact Center Pro? Book a demo