One Year on ServiceTitan: What to Expect

Why make the switch to ServiceTitan?

For Van Delden Wastewater Systems, a septic system company that provides pumping and cleaning, installation, and aerobic services for customers in South Texas, ServiceTitan helped them transition from paper to a more streamlined and efficient digital workflow. 

“We did everything by carbon copies and paper copies, copies of copies, and paper everywhere,” Van Delden says. “We really needed something that was more efficient … something that we could streamline all of our departments in one area.

“I probably demoed 20 to 25 different softwares. I wanted to make sure we did it right the first time,” she adds. “ServiceTitan was the most robust and offered everything I was looking for. And then now that I'm in it, I know there's even more it offers than what you even see in the demos.”

With a like mindset to do it right the first time, Lewis also demoed several software platforms for Gleason Plumbing, Heating, Air and Electric.

“I ended up switching to another software for three months, and about a week into it, I regretted it. I was like, ‘Man, I should have just gone on ServiceTitan,’” Lewis says. “We wanted to be able to have one area where all of our marketing information and statistics could all influence our decisions in real time. 

“That running report section [in ServiceTitan], that was really a big thing for me,” he adds. “Once I was ready to switch, I switched quickly and got moving.”

Onboarding with ServiceTitan: Tips for success 

It took the septic company about eight weeks to successfully onboard ServiceTitan, Van Delden says, but she blames herself for being a perfectionist and wanting everything set up exactly right before they went live.

“My biggest thing was our records,” Van Delden says. “We were coming from two different databases, but it was really important to me that our records were kept and that everything was merged in properly.

“I actually paid for the data integration. It was an extra couple thousand dollars for us to have ServiceTitan take our database and import everything,” she adds. “But that was well worth the money.”

Lewis also paid for data integration, he says, but he wanted a different approach to the typical six-week onboarding experience with ServiceTitan.

“I think my onboarding experience was different than most everyone I've talked to,” Lewis says. “I onboarded in about a week. I still tweak stuff. I'm still tweaking stuff today, but I was able to get live in about a week.

“I was very impatient, because I liked the software, and I just wanted to get a hold of it and use it,” he adds.

Many potential ServiceTitan customers, Aubel points out, share a common misconception that once you go live on the platform, you’re done.

“I think really to get the best use out of it, you are always going to be improving it and making changes,” Aubel says.

That’s something both customers discovered.

“Until you’re actually using it, you're not going to know fully how it's going to work for your company in all those little ways,” Van Delden says. “You’re going to have to tweak something, no matter how much time you spend in the implementation process.”

“ServiceTitan is constantly updating the software to make it better, so you also have to constantly tweak to make your experience better, too,” Lewis adds.

Other tips for a successful onboarding experience:

• Clean your databases to reduce redundancies before the ServiceTitan data integration to make for a smoother transition.

• Customize your pricebook with as much information as possible for your company, but try not to make it too big and unwieldy.

• Dedicate a specific resource to onboard ServiceTitan, and delegate a back-up to learn the software at the same time.

• Ask for your onboarding specialist’s direct contact info, and use them as a resource.

“We'd have our onboarding call during the day, but I'd have 10 more questions after we hung up,” Lewis says of his ServiceTitan specialist. “I'd text them or call them right away like, ‘Hey, how do I do this?’ They're really good, and they’re there to help you.”

ServiceTitan simplifies and streamlines maintenance memberships

In Kendall County, Texas, Van Delden says septic system companies are required to keep maintenance contracts on certain types of aerobic septic systems. To do so, they followed a “very tedious” process that involved printing and mailing hard copies of the contract to the customer and the county, printing and mailing invoices, and a bunch of double data entry.

“It was really messy before,” Van Delden says. “It was just a lot of paper, a lot of mailing, a lot of time, a lot of paperwork pushing, and a lot of room for errors, because there were so many different processes to get one thing accomplished. 

“It was really easy for mistakes to be made and things to get left behind,” she adds.

Going digital with ServiceTitan helped Van Delden clean up that messy paper trail. Now, she simply clicks on the follow-up tab on her dashboard to see a list of all the memberships and she can filter by specific tags, such as expiration dates, unsold estimates, or expiring credit cards. She can also create a digital estimate in ServiceTitan, send it to the customer to sign and pay online, then automatically send a digital copy to the county by email.

“It makes it super simple,” Van Delden says. “Everything's just tied together. Our maintenance customers love how much easier everything is for them to get renewals.”

ServiceTitan’s templates and forms help Gleason grow average tickets 

For Gleason, Lewis uses the estimate templates in ServiceTitan to train his service technicians on how to make professional presentations to customers. All of the information is loaded right there on their tablet, and all they need to do is click on the right buttons to show it to the customer.

“It's really easy. It's very user friendly, and it's user friendly for the customer,” Lewis says. “It's not a hard-sell thing. It's really about information. You're giving them options. You can give a recommended one. And from there, all the customer options are available. You can finance, you can do whatever.”

Before ServiceTitan, Gleason used a paper process to know what options to present to the customer, and some technicians just never presented them well.

“Now, they have to present the recommended option,” Lewis says. “You're giving the customer so much detail and such a better presentation than 99% of the companies doing it.”

A professional presentation helps to build his techs’ confidence, Lewis says, and the forms give customers detailed information and pictures about their repair.

“ServiceTitan really allows you to have the ability to give the best presentation possible to a customer, which is obviously what we want,” Lewis explains. “That's how you get tickets to go up. That's how you get numbers to go up.”

Increasing the average ticket for technicians not only means more profits for Gleason, but also a pay raise for his employees who earn performance-based pay.

“This is how you're going to make more money,” Lewis tells his technicians. “If I pay you another $2 an hour, that’s not going to make you real money. But if you understand how to do a form, do an extremely thorough evaluation, do a really great presentation, and actually care to make your estimates look nice, take pictures of everything, that's a raise right there.”

Getting the most ROI from your ServiceTitan investment

Lewis also leveraged ServiceTitan KPIs to make real-time decisions about his business, creating customized reports that go to managers weekly, daily, and even midday to show real-time performance of each technician.

“Everybody's assigned a daily goal,” Lewis says. “We do everything on an opportunity basis. If we give somebody a whole day of 16-year-old furnaces, let's say, and if they're zero for three that day, they're not getting the fourth and fifth call. At that point, we're going to play the hot hand every day.”

He can also create customized technician reports with specific tags and alerts to show details about how many estimates they presented versus how many were viewed online or how many times the technician presented financing options to the customer, and so much more.

“If you're like me, and you want to be a little numbers crazy, you can go create your own reports and be extremely, extremely specific in what's needed,” Lewis says. 

For Van Delden, digging into the service technician reports in ServiceTitan revealed the company had capacity to take on a whole new service.

After reviewing the reasons for calls not booked, Van Delden discovered a large number of customers were calling to inquire about roto-rootering or hydro-jetting of the drainfields in septic systems.

“Before, it was never really something we could take on because we just had too much paperwork as it was,” Van Delden says. “But we really saw through the reporting, ‘Hey, we are getting a ton of calls for this.’ Now we can go ahead and add that, because we have the capacity now, because things are more streamlined.”

Van Delden added the service last summer, and the company plans to add a second van to handle all of those calls.

“It's been a great help to be able to really see all those details of the business,” Van Delden says.