Scheduling and Dispatching

Whether they’re out in the field, back at the office, or at home after hours,  techs, customer service reps, owners, and managers can access ServiceTitan’s Scheduling and Dispatch features via best-in-class mobile functionality. And a variety of interfaces, created with ease of use in mind, have been designed specifically to address the challenges of project management that inevitably come up in successful contracting shops.

Our scheduling software has a color-coded tagging system that allows contractors to classify jobs according to their characteristics: tools the tech will need, difficulty, time to complete, and more. That way, when techs arrive, they’ll have everything they need and the proper window to complete the task and move on. 

Our field service software gives dispatchers a real-time view of where techs are in their job cycles over the course of the day, providing for maximum flexibility when it comes to reschedules, appointments that go long, and on-the-fly adjustments that urgent, unexpected calls require. 

With automated texts and emails, ServiceTitan reminds homeowners of their appointments, a feature that reduces the incidence of no-shows, and which reduces wait times by providing an accurate, real-time ETA.

Meanwhile, our Dispatch features provide field service technicians with a plethora of details about each and every job before they even reach the site: service history, outstanding service requests, communication logs, and more. 

Techs can even listen to homeowners’ calls with their CSR, educating themselves about the equipment they’ll find when they arrive, as well as with the customer’s preferences, problems, and needs.

Measuring Marketing Attribution

Keeping track of where leads come from and the revenue they produce can be tough, particularly with numerous campaigns distributed across multiple channels. So although service contractors tend to devote substantial resources to marketing, they often don’t have a clear picture of their ROI.

Using a collection of marketing features and metrics, we’re helping contractors to sharpen their view. For example, the ServiceTitan Marketing dashboard ranks campaigns—email marketing, social media initiatives, mailers, etc.—  according to revenue generation, giving business owners a crystal clear understanding of what campaigns are working, which of them aren’t, and even what kinds of jobs each campaign is producing.  

At the same time, our marketing heat map provides a geographical picture, showing exactly where campaigns are performing, and how well. Drawing on contact information from current leads, contractors can deploy the new marketing campaigns that they create in Servicetitan with pinpoint precision. 

Tracking Employee Performance

With features such as our field reporting dashboard and Technician Scorecard, ServiceTitan gives contractors unrivaled visibility into their employees’ performance, allowing them to monitor KPIs while techs are out in the field, and review incoming calls and conversions in real time to see which CSRs are at the top of their game and who might need some additional training.  

By better understanding how to optimize the way their employees perform, contractors can make adjustments with minimal friction, ensuring that all the members of their team are enabled to contribute their best at every moment of the day.      

Managing Membership Agreements

It’s increasingly difficult for service companies to compete without offering well-managed customer membership and service agreements. So when deciding on what FSM to invest in, it’s important to weigh the relative quality of each product’s membership management features. 

We’ve done our best to make it as easy—and profitable—as possible. With ServiceTitan, adding prepaid membership options like checkups and tune-ups to a tech’s schedule is as simple as a few quick swipes in our software’s Service Agreement interface. Contractors can also easily take advantage of a variety of more cutting-edge features:

• Instantaneous membership account creation

• Custom membership design

• Value-proving renewal agreements

• Profit-prioritizing scheduling

Financing and Accounting 

Contractors who use ServiceTitan can seamlessly integrate the process of connecting customers with financing into their overall sales process, furnishing homeowners with financing choices via iPhone, Android, iPad, or other iOS device while techs are still on-site. Once a customer has found an option they like, they can send in an application and get approved near instantaneously.

In addition to cutting down on the kind of lag time that can sometimes prevent a deal from closing, our financing features help make sure that contractors get paid on time, and that they don’t have to deal with financing plans that don’t fit their business model.

Similarly by taking advantage of ServiceTitan’s smooth and simple QuickBooks integration, service contractors can rest assured that their books are organized and pristine. In the event of an audit, or if a business owner decides at some point that they want to sell their company, they can be certain that all of their ducks are in a row. Since QuickBooks uses generally accepted accounting principles, business records can be understood by virtually any accountant a business might hire, so transactions in the future are all but guaranteed to proceed without a hitch.    

Comparing Servicetitan Alternatives

In this section, we’ll give a brief overview of how ServiceTitan measures up against five of the top alternative FSM solutions on the market. For each product, we’ll zero in on a handful of key areas that are worth thinking about carefully for contractors who are deciding on the best FSM for their service business. 

FieldEdge

Integrated manufacturer materials catalogues

Whether they’re plumbers, HVAC specialists, electricians, or general practitioners, service contractors derive tremendous benefits from having accurate, up-to-date catalogue listings for the manufacturers that they rely on for the materials and equipment they use to perform their work. It allows them to more effectively estimate costs, sell to homeowners, and accurately and reliably calculate their markup and installation rates.   

Unfortunately FieldEdge, like most FSMs, just doesn’t offer this kind of functionality. ServiceTitan, on the other hand, provides fully integrated pricebook catalogues from manufacturers including Amana, American Standard, Dalkin, Bryant, Lennox, Carrier, Goodman, and Dynamic ACS, providing a clear point of differentiation from virtually all our competitors.   

Many of our users like to use our integrations to build packages for install and service jobs, using the very same parts and equipment that their techs will handle while they’re actually on site. In other words, the numbers, models, makes, sizing, price, reflected in their estimates will be exactly reflected in the work performed. And because ServiceTitan catalogue updates are automated, contractors can be confident that old info won’t mess up their estimates. 

Streamline and automate operations

When considering the relative ability of FieldEdge to help contractors streamline business operations through automation, it’s worth considering three much-loved ServiceTitan features:

• Instantaneous access to unsold estimates, plus automated reminders to follow up

• The marketing heatmap, which we described above

• Fully integrated, highly customizable and searchable pricebook

These features help ServiceTitan users to grow revenue, while improving efficiency by streamlining and integrating the core functions of their service businesses. In FieldEdge, they are limited, nonexistent, and/or included only in premium versions of the product, which come with a higher price tag.

Dispatching

Automated address verification—the kind that makes sure techs go to the right location for every object—is, in a tech-enhanced world, arguably the most fundamental foundation for dispatching.   

And while both ServiceTitan and FieldEdge employ user input to generate a web search-validated suggested address, FieldEdge validates using WhitePages, while ServiceTitan relies on Google Maps. Based on our usage of both products, Google Maps tends to be both more accurate and more reliable.   

WhitePages sometimes seems to get confused about past occupants of a given address and who lives there now. Google Maps doesn’t bother with residents, focusing on the address itself. So ServiceTitan sidesteps the kind of mix ups that can trouble FieldEdge users, allowing our subscribers’ techs to get to the actual job site every time.     

Reporting   

Compared to ServiceTitan, which offers more than 150 pre-built reports, FieldEdge has relatively limited reporting abilities, offering considerably less flexibility than our software.  

In addition to the employee performance tracking tools we described earlier in this post, ServiceTitan users get access to real-time data and reports on service agreement revenue, accounts receivable, sales data, and more. In combination with a host of other reporting tools, these features give contractors unrivalled access to data about a breathtaking range of KPIs. 

If you’d like to learn more about how FieldEdge compares to ServiceTitan, you can check out our in-depth study of the subject.

HouseCall Pro

Pricebook

Few elements of a contractor’s business are as important as their pricebook. But many field service management software products don’t quite offer the dynamic functionality that can turn a pricebook into a tool that drives growth, revenue, and efficiency. The less advanced software on this list often require contractors to do an awful lot of manual work, cross referencing costs and markups, hourly estimates and labor rates, in a tedious, inefficient process that often results in expensive mistakes. 

That list includes HouseCall Pro. 

In addition to offering numerous high-quality, pre-made pricebooks, which can be seamlessly integrated with any ServiceTitan account, our pricebook features include: 

• Billable hour and markup calculators

• Access to automated pricing catalogues from a wide range of major industry manufacturers 

• Easy-to-use customization options, and more

By contrast, contractors who use HouseCall Pro are often stuck trying to compare and analyze a variety of spreadsheets to calculate pricing. Users can’t access updated catalogues, like in ServiceTitan—to say nothing of automatically updated prices—or build customized service and installation packages. More data warehouse than dynamic platform, HouseCall Pro’s pricebook function has neither the ability to import existing pricebooks, nor to help contractors upsell and cross-sell.

Tagging Features

Like many modern FSMs, both ServiceTitan and HouseCall Pro offer tagging features. But as with most comparable FSM tools, HouseCall Pro tags function mostly as reminders. 

In ServiceTitan, on the other hand, tags can become powerful tools that can prompt employees to help drive revenue growth by focusing on priority KPIs. 

ServiceTitan’s “smart tags,” for instance can be incorporated into a contractor’s pricebook, giving them full visibility into their employees’ performance in a variety of sales-opportunity situations:

• How frequently do they sign-up a new customer for a maintenance plan? 

• How often do they close a sale on a new HVAC system? 

Even customers can be tagged, providing techs with a reminder, for example, to ask follow up questions about the last job performed at a given residence. 

Fostering Accountability

It’s one thing to have well-defined best practices governing key operational elements like sales processes, CSR scripts, comfort surveys, and safety protocols. Getting employees to follow those best practices, of course, is another thing altogether.  

In ServiceTitan, users can create gated sequences and flexible, highly customizable forms to lead techs, salespeople, and CSRs through any business process that might otherwise present opportunities to forget or skip over best practices. 

At present, HouseCall Pro offers no similar functionality. 

Texting and Accessibility

For contractors who value the speed, flexibility, and efficiency of SMS messaging, it might be enough to know that some business owners who use HouseCall Pro find the software’s texting functionality so cumbersome and disruptive to workflow that they simply tell their CSRs not to use it.

The reason for this is that texting in HouseCall Pro works only via mobile device. In other words, CSRs and other office employees, who mostly use desktop computers or laptops, must continually toggle between screens to text with field service technicians. 

The setup requires that CSRs stop what they’re doing to read and respond to text messages, creating opportunities for distraction and lack of focus that can lead to costly issues: 

• Faulty installation or bills

• Misdiagnoses

• Unnecessary lag time

• Missed chances to sell

• Poor customer experience

We’ve avoided these problems by making texting in ServiceTitan easily accessible to all employees, whether they’re using a mobile device out in the field, or a desktop at the office. 

A distinct but related point of differentiation between ServiceTitan and HouseCall Pro is that the latter has no offline mode, so that if a tech enters an area without cell phone service, they lose access to much of the information they need to perform their best work—and in some cases to do their job at all.

Customer Portal  

For homeowners who have membership plans with contractors that use HouseCall Pro, a membership portal facilitates membership-related tasks, like updating credit card information. For customers without service agreements, however, the HouseCall Pro customer portal might as well not exist: it offers no functionality whatsoever.  

Since ease of use for customers is increasingly important to service contractors—a key competitive edge—we’ve made our user-friendly customer portal available to all customers who patronize service businesses using ServiceTitan.

Through the ServiceTitan portal, among other things, Homeowners can book appointments, review previous work and outstanding proposals, and update credit card information. Perhaps most importantly, they can also pay off invoices, providing a smooth, prompt method for contractors to collect payment.  

For more on the differences between HouseCall Pro and ServiceTitan, check out our previous deep-dive on the subject here.  

Successware®

Technology

When it was founded, in 1994, Successware® was a trailblazer—one of the first companies to create anything that resembled a soup-to-nuts FSM solution for service businesses.

But as more modern competitors like ServiceTitan have made cutting-edge technology and design available to HVAC contractors, garage door companies, pool services, landscaping, roofing, pest control, and others, Successware®, at its core, has remained largely unchanged.    

To use Successware®, contractors and their employees must master a complex, less-than-intuitive system of keystrokes and right click menus, often necessitating lengthy training processes, and irregular usage and work patterns. It’s especially hard to use with Apple products, and things like photos, sms texting, call recording, and web access—all basic to ServiceTitan—require third-party integrations for use with Successware®.     

In analyzing your service company’s needs, and making value for money evaluations, it’s essential to keep these tech-related issues in mind.

Customer Experience

Ensuring an optimal customer experience is one area where the somewhat outmoded software system on which Successware® relies can cause users to fall behind the competition. 

At the same time, with ServiceTitan, contractors can begin delivering a top-notch customer relationships from the moment of first contact:  

• Every incoming call gets recorded and logged

• Techs can access those call recordings, along with any other communication history, to prepare for service visits

• When they arrive, they know exactly what to expect: scope of work, equipment, old work orders, owner preferences

Via a link provided via text message, customers can even track their tech’s journey to their address in real time, as shown below.  

User Support

In order to provide a platform that can truly help business owners run their companies, ServiceTitan employs a cohort of Success Managers—a team whose only goal is to help contractors get as much as they can from our product.   

Every subscriber is assigned a Success Manager. They can address minor questions and snafus, naturally, but their guiding purpose is to make sure contractors know how to use SericeTitan’s wide ranging functionality—to help them deploy the software’s features in the way that best suits them, and which best stands to optimize their business management processes. 

Successware® offers little in the way of customer support, neglecting even to provide chat support from their help desk. Reps at Successware®  are permitted only a predetermined amount of time for each call. That means that even if a problem hasn’t been fixed, a subscriber might be effectively out of luck.

More on the many differences between Servicetitan and Successware® can be found in our previous article on the subject. 

Service Fusion

Membership Agreement Billing

ServiceTitan allows for automatic monthly or yearly membership billing. Our software also facilitates automated bulk membership billing, vastly reducing the time and labor the piecemeal alternative requires, while our Quickbooks integration guarantees revenue is accurately reflected in contractors’ books.   

Service Fusion users don’t benefit from these billing features, significantly curtailing the value proposition of the software. At the same time Service Fusion subscribers have sometimes had trouble with the FSM’s Quickbooks functionality: mistaken double payments and error-prone reconciliations. 

Job Booking

ServiceTitan automatically provides CSRs with the name and address of callers, giving them entry to focus on sales opportunities gleaned from property data.To confirm a new booking, ServiceTitan sends an automated confirmation. Our contractors can also take advantage of ServiceTitan’s automated web booking features.

It’s true that Service Fusion theoretically offers some of this functionality. But it generally comes in the form of add-ons, and at an additional cost—not as fully integrated elements, as in ServiceTitan. 

Readers who are especially interested in comparing Service Fusion and ServiceTitan might want to take a look at our earlier, in-depth head-to-head comparison here.

Jobber

Dispatching

Jobber makes a specialty of dispatching, providing modern design and performance to deliver solid dispatching features to service contracting professionals. But beyond dispatching, Jobber’s menu of features is limited, often leaving users feeling as though they need a more comprehensive solution. 

Areas where contractors tend to find the product lacking include:

• Reporting: With Jobber, it’s difficult to gain insight into the health of a business or the content of a customer database.

• Mobile functionality: Jobber’s mobile app emphasises work order management and web booking, but lacks sales tools; with Jobber, it’s tough for techs to offer the kind of Good, Better, Best presentations that boost close rates and increase average ticket prices. 

• Pricebook: Subscribers to Jobber don’t get access to an integrated pricebook, making job costing a challenge and creating obstacles for techs when they’re pricing work and drawing up proposals.

• Onboarding: Reportedly, customer onboarding with Jobber is a struggle, lacking the education and acclimation processes that come standard with products like ServiceTitan.

Conclusion

As we’ve demonstrated in this post, competing field service management platforms almost always include at least a handful of the same features: scheduling, dispatching, customer support, inventory management, call booking, invoicing, timesheets, job management, CRM, and work order management, for example.

The result is that even when two or more software solutions appear to be very similar, they can actually offer extremely different levels of functionality and service. 

For this reason, choosing an FSM based on pricing and surface-level resemblance can lead service contractors to decide on products that ultimately don’t pan out the way they hope. 

To avoid this kind of disappointment—which can end up being costly in the long run—we encourage business owners to spend some time on research to get a deep understanding of how, for instance, ServiceTitan stands out from alternatives like FieldEdge, HouseCall Pro, Successware, Service Fusion, and Jobber.  

By digging deeper, contractors can get a true grasp of the the key differences between these and other products, allowing service business owners to decide on the FSM that will keep them a step ahead of the competition and grow with them, driving improvements through:

• Revenue growth

• Streamlining operations

• Data accuracy and coaching tools

• Custom reporting and business insights

• Impressing customers

Discover what ServiceTitan can do for your commercial or home service business. Schedule a call to get a personalized demo of our software today.