We rely on our field technicians to get the job done and deliver great customer service. But the job has changed enormously over the years as customer expectations, manufacturers, and technology evolve and become more complicated.
In a recent webinar, two industry pros — Edward McFarlane, Chief Learning and Development Officer at Sila Services, and Austin Haller, ServiceTitan Senior Director of Product Management — walk through the challenges that field technicians face on a daily basis and offer solutions and strategies to overcome them with training, ServiceTitan features, and Pro Products.
The following recap offers solutions to these four challenges:
Brain Overload
Tough Market
Missing Insights
Not Enough Billable Hours
Here are the key takeaways to maximize your return on every job and set your technicians up for success.
The Real Daily Challenges of a Field Technician
For “old-timers” like McFarlane, who’s been in the trades for nearly 30 years, there’s a lot more to the field tech’s job today than there was even a couple of decades ago.
“Certainly the equipment that we have to work on and the consumer expectations… It's not good or bad, but it's different,” says McFarlane, who also serves as chairman of the Air Conditioning Contractors of America (ACCA) and oversees Project LiveFire, a fast-track trade school and internal leadership academy at Sila.
Whereas before technicians focused solely on finding the right tools or parts to fix or replace equipment, today they must also be great communicators.
“The gig's changed,” McFarlane says. “The days of looking at your shoes are gone. Customers want answers, they want a full set of solutions. And we live in a world where there's not enough techs most of the year, and then sometimes we have too many.
“So, the market has changed, the equipment has changed, the technology we use has changed, as well as the technical skillset, and then we throw in consumer expectation,” he adds. “It's no longer enough to be a fix-it guy, you have to be able to be well-rounded.”
The four main challenges technicians face are:
Brain Overload
Tough Market
Missing Insights
Not Enough Billable Hours
Back in the day, McFarlane 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 or pricebook, then send them out in the field. Today’s techs also need training on technology, systems, inventory, and other daily operational processes before you can turn them loose.
“The technician has to have a lot of open tabs, just like your computer,” says McFarlane, explaining how they also need training on communication, safety, revenue, best practices, and more, which all can lead to brain overload. “I don’t think technicians are better or worse, I think there’s just more required of them.”
Evolving consumer expectations also make it a tough market as customers seek true value on big-ticket mechanical systems for their homes. And contractors are also missing critical insights from the real-time interactions between technicians and customers.
“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. We don't really know, and so it's difficult to coach,” McFarlane says.
And as your field techs struggle through the brain overload, a tough market, and lack of insight, their efficiency — or billable hours — may suffer, affecting average ticket rates and your revenue.
“We only make money from one place: the customer,” McFarlane says. “Whether we're just a technician or run our own small company, we know there's never enough billable hours for the days where we could really make it rain.”
Let’s examine the four main challenges, and their solutions, further.
Brain Overload
In HVAC, for instance, today’s techs must be trained to troubleshoot incredibly complex systems. Not only do they need to understand the brands that you carry, sometimes they must also navigate other manufacturers’ parts and inventory to find the right solution.
Next, techs must communicate effectively with the customer after first learning the history of the equipment and diagnosing the right solution. This can create a lot of anxiety and brain overload, especially when the tech doesn’t really know what they’re walking into.
“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,” McFarlane says.
AI Field Assistant
To relieve some of this brain overload, ServiceTitan offers the AI Field Assistant for technicians as part of its core package.
The AI Field Assistant preps the technician for their next job with details about the work to be done, the job’s predicted value, and the customer’s name, work history, location, and more.
“The AI is automatically analyzing the last three calls [from each customer] and pulling out the most relevant insights from those calls, as well as pulling history in terms of dollars spent. Everything you hear is automatically coming out of the system, not prepped by anybody manually,” Haller explains.
Techs help themselves with the AI Field Assistant, and they no longer have to call the office to ask questions or decipher job history notes that may or may not have been entered correctly.
“How do we extract what is meaningful and put it right in front of the tech at the right time to build their confidence?” McFarlane says. “This is a really nice level-setting tool.”
Content Portal
You can also download how-to videos, step-by-step instructions, and other critical information to ServiceTitan’s Content Portal where techs can access the content on-demand to answer common pain points in the field.
“Information is one thing, but having the information right at your fingertips when you need it, that's the goal. And we need to make it easy,” McFarlane says.
Forms
As your business grows and you put established processes into place, you’re likely adding more people who need a consistent onboarding experience. To make this easy, you can use ServiceTitan Forms to reinforce all of your daily workflows.
The possibilities for ServiceTitan Forms are endless, McFarlane says, and the feature allows you to digitally manage your documentation for jobs, customers, locations, technicians, and equipment.
Tough Market
Today’s customer journey is also a moving target with falling consumer sentiment amid rising consumer expectation.
“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.”
Consumers also expect your techs to know how to work on their specific equipment and to provide full solutions.
“So, all of that in a market where the economy's tough and costs seem to continue to go up,” McFarlane says.
Offer Multiple Options
To ease those tough-market challenges and improve customer satisfaction, ServiceTitan recommends that techs present multiple options to customers on most jobs, whether it’s for service and repair, a whole-system replacement, or a separate equipment issue.
“Think of it as being that assistant buyer, that trusted advisor. It's a critical role,” McFarlane says. “Your job is to protect that trust. And we do that by giving choices and being transparent about those choices.”
Add Upgrades and Recommendations
Along with choices, customers also appreciate when their trusted technician identifies a potential safety issue or equipment failure before it happens. Rather than focusing solely on the issue the customer called about, the tech uses their knowledge to protect the homeowner against future costly repairs and offers upgrades and recommendations to solve the issue now.
“It's another way of just incrementally serving the customer better, making the consumer experience better, but it also has the added benefit of making you more revenue,” McFarlane says.
Offer Financing on Every Job
And with increasing costs for service and repair, don’t just offer customer financing on big-ticket items. Some customers may want to use financing on smaller jobs.
“Don't make your customer beg, and don't leave it up to your technicians to define that customer experience,” McFarlane says. “Our job is to help make the right choice affordable.”
Explore ServiceTitan financing features such as Integrated Financing, Plan Optimizer, and Second Look Financing to determine what plan fits best for each customer.
Invoice Summary Generator
While some technicians are really good at communicating the cost of a job to customers and details about the repair, others might struggle to convey the proper messaging in the invoice.
With ServiceTitan’s Invoice Summary Generator, you can automate the process using Titan Intelligence to get clear and detailed invoice summaries based on your original invoice and job summaries with one click.
Sales Pro
Remember that challenge of not really knowing what’s going on when techs interact with your customers? With Sales Pro, every interaction is automatically recorded so techs can learn how to improve from other peers and receive relevant and timely coaching from their managers.
“It’s a tool that can capture what's going on in a call, highlight the most relevant parts, and then give specific, real-time coaching to a team to help them overcome the challenging parts of the call, helping them go home with a bit more emotional juice in their tank, and ideally start to make more money and enjoy their job more,” McFarlane says.
Missing Insights
Most contractors track KPIs (key performance indicators) and some even use technician leaderboards within their business to incentivize and inspire a little competition.
McFarlane suggests integrating AI into the technician-evaluation equation to discover missing insights and change the way you and your techs look at your key goals.
For high-functioning teams versus low-performing teams, he says there’s a definite correlation between positive and negative feedback, with the higher-performing team receiving six instances of positive feedback versus one instance of negative feedback.
Technician Performance Reports
To easily find those instances to champion and celebrate, you can use ServiceTitan’s AI-powered Technician Performance Reports.
Not only do these KPI data-filled reports empower your technicians, but managers also improve their coaching efforts.
“Feedback, good and bad, should be specific, timely, and direct,” McFarlane 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.”
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Ask Sales Pro and Scorecards
For Sales Pro users, you can use the Ask Sales Pro feature to get AI insights on specific sales calls and save time on reviewing hours of recordings.
And with Sales Pro Scorecards, you can automatically score sales and service calls to see where techs are performing at a high level as compared to those who may be struggling.
Billable Hours
Maximizing your billable hours means training your techs to work as efficiently as possible.
“By being more efficient and working on things specifically one-on-one, you can actually increase your utilization rate,” McFarlane says, which ultimately translates into more money for the tech and more profits for your business.
With Dispatch Pro, you can double your efficiency and decrease your driving time.
“And what the data continues to show is if you match the right skillset with the actual performance data, rather than a cursory glance, this is where we can start to play the game plan and not get caught running someone else's race or not let the clock dictate our actions,” McFarlane says.
“I like to concentrate on what I call needle movers. The only things I want to look at are things that make me start doing things or stop doing things,” he adds. “With technology, it's not perfect, it's not going to be perfect, but the more we use it, the more we can craft the future together.”
>>Watch the full webinar on-demand to learn more about ServiceTitan features that help ease the workload on your field technicians.
