Ready to explore ServiceTitan’s new customer portal? This powerful self-service tool helps commercial and construction companies elevate the customer experience with a 24/7 on-demand access tool for customers to self-schedule, make payments, and more.
Whether customers want to book their own appointments, pay invoices, approve proposals, track tasks, or manage equipment, the new customer portal offers key self-service features to help you reduce manual tasks and unlock more revenue for your business.
Although 75% of commercial service contractors now offer portals, just 26% use them for genuine two-way communication, and only 30% see active usage among most clients—underscoring a massive customer experience opportunity.
In a recent webinar, ServiceTitan Senior Product Manager Christopher DeLuca shares real-world strategies for increasing portal engagement, boosting transparency, and delivering top-tier customer experiences that drive retention and referrals.
Discover why 44% of contractors consider online portals “extremely important” for customer experience, and how shifting communication from calls, texts, and emails to portals can revolutionize your customer journey.
Read on for the key takeaways for turning your portal into a central hub for self-service booking, payments, and proposal approvals.
The Value of Modern Customer Experiences
Historically, commercial and construction companies conducted business with their customers through word-of-mouth and phone calls. More recently, they’ve started communicating by email or text messaging, and now communication is moving toward an online platform where customers communicate when it’s most convenient.
While customer expectations for contacting your business used to look like the image above, with everybody answering the phones in a hectic and chaotic environment, they now expect to do everything on an app, DeLuca says.
“You can order food on an app, you can do your banking on an app, and also web portals, such as a healthcare web portal,” DeLuca says. “You don't necessarily talk to your healthcare provider every day, but it's nice to have that portal that has all this information at your fingertips and when you do need something, the ability to go do that online. We continue to see that as a trend that's growing and growing.”
So, what happens if your business lags behind and fails to adopt these newer online customer self-service experiences?
Higher overhead costs
Dollars left behind
Delayed payments
Unmemorable experiences
“You're going to continue to have high overhead costs from people answering phone calls and emails. We'll also see some amount of dollars left behind. There’s a growing contingent of people who want to view all of their outstanding proposals and accept those in the most simple way possible,” DeLuca explains. “Same thing with delayed payments. We see that invoice collection is a lot easier if you have a place to go view all of your past outstanding invoices rather than just one-time links to everything.”
You’ll also continue creating unmemorable experiences for your customers while your competitors attract all of the attention.
“They have something available that really shouts from the rooftop that they're one of the big players, they're a company that has everything together and is providing the most modern up-to-date experiences for people,” DeLuca adds.
Online Portal Use in Commercial Service
How do commercial and construction companies utilize online portals today? According to a recent ServiceTitan survey of more than 1,000 commercial service contractors, about 75% said they offer an online portal for their customers. And about 62% reported at least half of their customers have used it.
Even more intriguing, DeLuca says about 25% of those commercial service contractors say their customers prefer to use online portals as their primary form of communication.
“They're planning to go to the portal first if they have something to do because it's what they find the simplest,” he says.
Capturing and inspiring the remaining 75% to use a self-service online portal presents a clear opportunity in the trades.
“How do we get more of these people to go to the self-service online portal?” DeLuca asks. “It’s where they're going to have a lot of their questions answered, they're going to be able to take basic actions, whether it's related to booking, paying, accepting items, things that could avoid a phone call in the office and avoid an email chain back and forth, which will save time for the contractors.”
Enter …
ServiceTitan's New Customer Portal
Next, DeLuca walks through a live demo of the new ServiceTitan Customer Portal, which centralizes customer self-service—scheduling, invoices, payments, equipment history, and agreements—while allowing businesses to customize the feature for different business models (residential, commercial, or construction).
>>Access the full webinar on-demand to see ServiceTitan’s Customer Portal in action.
Here are the highlights:
Setup: The portal can be turned on quickly in the back office, with options to brand it (name, logo) and configure what customers can see (e.g., hide canceled jobs, only show approved invoices). Payment method settings can also be controlled.
Inviting Customers: Customers can be invited directly from their record with a one-click email invite, or they can self-register through a shared portal link. Access is tied to their email across all relevant customer records and locations.
Portal Login: Customers can register with email/password or sign in with Google.
Features for Customers:
View and book jobs (including unscheduled maintenance visits).
See invoices (paid/unpaid), download them, and pay online.
Manage and update saved payment methods.
Review proposals/estimates, sign/approve them, and pay deposits.
Access installed equipment details and full service history.
Manage service agreements, including signing agreements online (DocuSign) and, in the future, self-scheduling visits.
Configurability: Businesses can toggle which tabs and data appear to customers in real time (e.g., hide canceled jobs or certain equipment info).
Role-Based Access: For property management or commercial use cases, businesses can assign billing vs. non-billing access and restrict visibility at the location level.
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What’s Next for ServiceTitan’s Customer Portal?
As for what’s next, ServiceTitan wants to build a roadmap that moves online interactions from optional to essential, supporting customer delight and business growth. DeLuca says this roadmap includes:
Bulk Invite Tool: Allows you to see the full list of users who currently have access in one place and invite new email addresses to grant access.
Deposits on Estimates: Gives you the ability to collect deposits when customers accept estimates through the customer portal and through the estimate links emailed out by the office.
Demand Intake Form: This feature will be made available to commercial users who don't want to use the existing scheduling functions, allowing customers to self-schedule appointments by submitting a work request.
Images, Forms, Docs: Gives your customers the ability to see the images, forms, and documents you’ve emailed to them in the customer portal.
Schedule Agreement Visits: Allows you to schedule those unscheduled service agreement maintenance visits quickly and efficiently.
Site Audit Report: Discover additional statistics, findings, and other information related to the equipment used on each job site.
“We're very excited to continue to improve this one and provide more self-service capabilities to your end customer,” DeLuca says. “We know there's always going to be a place for people calling into the office with questions, but we'd also like to cut down on some of the busy work.”
Q&A
DeLuca also answered a few follow-up questions about the new customer portal.
Q: Will customers be able to email or text the office from the customer portal?
A: Yes, customers can email your business directly from the customer portal. However, a full two-way chat history functionality is not yet available.
Q: Will the new content portal be able to address aggregators for multi-branding in a single tenant and multiple payment processors per brands in a single tenant?
A: Not yet, but we plan to add more functionality here in the future.
Q: Will the new customer portal provide monthly membership invoices or the recurring billing statements?
A: Yes. When they click on their individual membership tab, they can view the invoices.
Q: Do payments have to be made through ServiceTitan?
A: We offer additional payment processors, so it does not have to be ServiceTitan Payments specifically.
Q: Are there bank processing fees involved with ACH payments through the portal?
A: Everything that's done through the customer portal is going to be identical to your current process of sending an online payment link. If you're using those payment links today and there's no fee, then there would be no fee here.
Q: Can we turn service agreement views on for commercial customers but leave them off for residential customers?
A: No, not at the present time.
Q: What information will show in the customer view on a job page?
A: A completed job will show the job number, job type, appointment dates, the appointment status, the techs who serviced the job, job location, total invoice amount, invoice summary field, and a quick view of the initial job proposal.
Q: If a customer uses self-scheduling, what does their view look like?
A: If they're using self-scheduling, they're going to get the same view that you get if you're using either the Web Scheduler 2.0 or Scheduling Pro.
Q: Can customers request additional work to be done on an existing appointment?
A: Today, we don't have the ability to put a comment on that specific appointment. But they could do that by either using the email function through the contact us here button or they can book again on the widget.
Q: Will customers be able to confirm their own appointments from the portal?
A: Not today. The customer portal shows only confirmed appointments.
Q: Will customers be able to pay without saving a card or adding an account to their portal?
A: Yes. Customers can make payments with credit cards or ACH without saving the information to the portal.
>>Allow customers to help themselves with ServiceTitan’s new customer portal. Learn more by watching the full webinar on-demand.
