Automation for Increased Efficiency

For service companies, one of the greatest benefits of using a field service management tool is drastically reducing the number of tasks that business owners and their employees have to perform manually, allowing them to devote more time and energy to delivering high-quality customer service and driving revenue growth. 

And when it comes to automation, our software distinguishes itself in three key areas:

1. Membership Billing

2. Scheduled Reports

3. Job Booking

Membership Billing

Customer memberships and service agreements are crucial to the growth and financial health of service businesses. Among other benefits, they allow HVAC companies, plumbers, electrical contactors, and others to:

• Foster customer loyalty

• Maintain a steady revenue stream over the course of the year

• Capitalize on big-ticket items like air conditioning system replacements

But particularly for companies with a lot of customers—and for those that aspire to have a lot of customers—managing service agreements can be a challenge, especially when it comes to billing. Without an FSM that ensures that members are billed regularly for their subscriptions, business owners can find themselves devoting a ton of valuable resources to pursuing outstanding bills—and, even worse, short on the kind of liquidity that membership agreements are designed to provide.

Although ServiceTitan and Service Fusion both offer service agreement functionality, the difference between how the two products handle them—how they actually perform—is significant. 

With ServiceTitan, contractors can automate billing for membership agreements on an annual or monthly basis, alleviating the need for office employees to send out individual bills. Our software also provides for bulk membership billing, so that members can be automatically billed en masse, rather than piecemeal.    

In combination, these features allow business owners to set it and forget it, secure in the knowledge that their members are billed accurately and on time, while drastically reducing the time employees spend on oversight. And with ServiceTitan’s Quickbooks integration, contractors can be confident that memberships revenue is properly accounted for on the back end.   

Service Fusion doesn’t offer either of these crucial functions. Users must bill for membership agreements individually, and office employees have to keep track of their company’s calendar, devoting time to sending out bills to each of their members at the right time. Over the course of months and years, this dynamic significantly reduces the product’s value proposition. Meanwhile, Service Fusion customers have reported issues with the platform’s Quickbooks functionality, noting difficulties related to erroneous double payments and faulty reconciliations.    

Scheduled Reports

Later in this article, we’ll take a close look at the differences in reporting capabilities between ServiceTitan and Service Fusion—the data and analysis tools that give business owners visibility into employee performance and marketing ROI. 

Reporting features are a key thing to consider for any service contractor shopping for an FSM. But as for any business resource, the true utility of reporting tools much depends on ease of use and convenience. 

At ServiceTitan, we make accessing reports of all kinds simple. Owners and managers can set up automated email delivery of the reports that they find most valuable on a schedule that works best for them—end-of-day, at the end of each week or month, every Thursday at lunchtime. 

That way, it’s one less thing that busy contractors have to keep track of. Rather than constantly reminding themselves to find and review data, it’s right at their fingertips at exactly the moment it’s most helpful. (ServiceTitan users can also easily access real-time reporting data any time they want.) 

Without regularly scheduled report deliveries, it’s easy for contractors to fall behind on the status of their business, leading to the kind of imperfect financial and personnel decisions that can quickly become very costly.                

Job Booking

Job booking can be cumbersome and time consuming to handle manually. ServiceTitan operates as a fully integrated CRM, going above and beyond the basics that competitors like Service Fusion tend to provide. 

With ServiceTitan, contractors get a leg up on booking new jobs from the moment a call comes in. Our software automatically provides the dispatcher on duty with the name and address of the caller, allowing them to quickly establish a rapport, and zero in on sales opportunities based on property data like the age and size of the caller’s home. Every incoming call is automatically recorded, so that CSRs, field service technicians, business owners, and managers can refer back to it at any time.

Once a job is booked, ServiceTitan sends an automated confirmation to the homeowner. Our users can also set up automatic text reminders for the day of the appointment, complete with tech arrival tracking for a better customer experience. That way, the homeowner can keep track of their tech’s location, and is all but sure to be on the premises when they arrive. We also offer automated web booking.

While Service Fusion technically offers a number of these features, they come at an additional cost, as add-ons, rather than as fully integrated elements of the core product. As a matter of both value for money and product functionality, it’s worth considering these differences when comparing ServiceTitan and Service Fusion.

Mobile Functionality for Improved Field Operations and Sales Presentation

Long gone are the days when simply making sure every field service tech had a cell phone was enough for contractors to ensure they were keeping up with the competition. Nowadays, service contractors need an FSM that not only allows owners and employees to communicate no matter where they happen to be, but one that guarantees they’re able to adhere to best practices and access data day in and day out.    

One of the things that users like best about ServiceTitan is our software’s ability to facilitate real-time text messaging between all of a company’s team members, whether they’re traveling from one job to another, on site, or sitting at a computer back at the office. It might sound like a small thing, but this capability, provided by an advanced API, can translate into huge advantages.

Real-time texting allows owners, techs, managers and CSRs to do things like:

• Verify the availability of materials

• Confirm schedules 

• Double-check the compatibility of equipment combinations

Our mobile alert features are especially popular with contractors running larger shops—though they can be just as useful to mid-sized and small businesses, particularly those with plans to grow. Alerts can be customized to notify owners and managers of any event or update that might help them stay abreast of operational status. They come in handy, for instance, for HVAC contractors who want to know right away when a customer in need of a system replacement calls the office.     

Mobile alerts like these make it easy for owners and senior employees to guide big-ticket jobs with care in order to increase their close rate on the kind of high-value contracts that can really boost a company’s bottom line. 

Many FSMs run into serious trouble when, as they inevitably do, the contractors using them find themselves in places where mobile devices don’t have service. In such cases, field technicians are often cut off from vital tools, like work orders, pricebooks, and equipment packages. But with ServiceTitan, all of the data that techs and their employers need to do their job is available to them, even when there’s no Internet access.

That includes all of the cutting-edge ServiceTitan features that allow our users to get the absolute most out of their sales process: 

• Good Better Best quote presentations, complete with pictures and video to educate customers about the differences.

• Real-time creation of purchase orders and access to pre-built packages.

• Fingertip access to full work history for existing customers.

Via iPhone, iPad, Android, and other iOS devices, contractors and their employees can even follow up on unsold estimates. With Service Fusion, on the other hand, many functions are severely limited outside the office. Others simply don’t exist at all.

Reporting for Real-Time Business Insights

By providing granular reporting on KPIs including employee performance and marketing ROI, the best FSMs furnish service contractors with actionable real-time insights to help them achieve their business goals. 

Top service business software platforms like ServiceTitan can help business owners understand things like:

• Which marketing strategies result in substantial returns on investment—and which ones don’t.  

• How and why their company is leaving money on the table or spending too much on overhead. 

• Which techs, managers, and CSRs are reliably following best-practices and which might need some additional training. 

By the same token, an FSM that offers only limited reporting capabilities can often require contractors to pull and manipulate data manually, losing hours of critical productivity. 

So it’s worth emphasizing that while Service Fusion and ServiceTitan might look similar at surface level, when it comes to reporting functionality, there are tremendous differences between them. 

Let’s take a closer look to get a concrete idea of what we mean. 

Employee Scorecards

Most employers have a general sense of their employees’ strengths and weaknesses. But getting a detailed, nuanced understanding of how those characteristics translate into measurable performance can be difficult. 

That’s why we’ve created the employee scorecard. At contracting shops that use ServiceTitan, every employee gets one: CSRs, techs, managers, and anyone else that might be working there. 

Like the example shown in the screenshot above, they’re chock full of statistics, which owners and managers can customize according to their needs and preferences. Popular categories include: 

• Revenue generation

• Service agreements

• Work orders completed

• Call conversions 

Scorecard stats are updated automatically in real time, so by referring to them, decision makers can get up to speed instantaneously.    

Field Reporting Dashboards

While our scorecards give business owners a clear picture of employee performance over time, ServiceTitan’s field reporting dashboard effectively lets contractors observe techs while they’re out in the field on service calls. 

On the field reporting dashboard, updates on the customized scorecard metrics they’ve selected arrive in real time, where contractors can view them via mobile app or desktop device. A related tool, unusual for an FSM, enables business owners to keep track of non-job time, providing them with insights about how techs are spending the hours that they aren’t physically on a job site.  

Other vital business indicators for which ServiceTitan dashboards provide real-time data include: 

• Sales tracking

• Accounts receivable

• Maintenance agreement profitability

• Marketing campaign performance 

In combination, these and other reporting features give ServiceTitan users an in-depth understanding of their ROI, how they might invest most effectively, and what parts of their business need optimization.

Rather than do a point-by-point comparison, it is simplest to say that Service Fusion does not offer any of these essential business management features—and that the reporting functionality the software does have is extremely limited. As a result, some users find that Service Fusion doesn’t provide them with the kind of intelligence they need to optimize operations and grow their business.

The Service Fusion Alternative to Optimize and Grow Your Business

As we mentioned in the introduction to this article, there are certain features, which, because virtually no service professional can do without them, are offered in most of the FSMs on the market: dispatching, scheduling, estimating, invoicing, and the like. And for small shops with limited needs, an FSM like Service Fusion, which can handle the basics—but not too much else—might be a reasonable choice, at least in the short term. 

But for contractors who are looking for a software platform that’s going to help them modernize their business processes, streamline workflow, and grow their company, it probably makes sense to look to a more advanced tool like ServiceTitan, which is designed to leverage cutting-edge technology to optimize the performance of a growing business.