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#1 FIELD SERVICE SOFTWARE FOR CONTRACTORS
ServiceTitan vs ServiceMax
Breaking down the strengths and weaknesses of each software.
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ServiceTitan vs ServiceMax: How Two Leading Field Service Softwares for Mid-sized Companies Compare
Mid-sized service businesses that find themselves in the market for field service management software (FSM) often end up weighing the pros and cons of our solution, ServiceTitan, against those of ServiceMax.
Inevitably, one of the biggest challenges in selecting the right software product for a service business is that superficially, many FSMs appear alike, even when they actually function very differently. We’ve discussed this issue at length in our other comparison articles, in which we’ve looked at ServiceTitan competitors such as HouseCall Pro, FieldEdge, and Jobber.
The upshot is that contractors sometimes rely too much on pricing when they make their decision between SaaS products, investing in what seems to be the lowest-cost option. Unfortunately, this line of thinking tends to end up being more expensive for contractors in the long run. Often it turns out that the “low-cost” choice doesn’t have everything they’re looking for and they ultimately need to switch to a more advanced FSM, incurring more expenses for additional onboarding, training, and work slowdowns.
When business owners switch to ServiceTitan from another service industry software, they’ve often found that their old product wasn’t built to expand with their company. That goes for plumbers, electricians, HVAC contractors, landscapers, and general construction companies alike.
To go from small business to large, or from midsize to enterprise—to truly grow a service company by optimizing business processes—most contractors need a high-end software solution like ServiceTitan to help them capture and organize increased revenue, manage new hires, and more.
Unlike a number of the FSMs that we’ve written about in the past—and unlike our own product, ServiceTitan—ServiceMax wasn’t designed specifically for the service industry. In fact, ServiceMax aims to cater to an extremely wide variety of businesses all over the world that couldn’t be more different from yours. From London to Tokyo, ServiceMax offers support to medical manufacturing and energy companies, and businesses that work in aviation, rail transportation, mining, telecommunications, and more.
There’s no doubt that they’ve picked up some valuable knowledge along the way. In particular, ServiceMax offers solid features in these areas:
Cloud-based platforms that make data accessible anywhere, anytime
Mobile-first software with robust offline functionality
Reporting features
But ServiceTitan offers all these features, too, often in more advanced form. And unlike ServiceMax—which has no particular speciality in the service industry—ServiceTitan is designed and created exclusively for field service industries, with the backing and expertise of countless industry professionals.
That means that the contractors who rely on ServiceTitan know that they’re getting software tailor made to suit their requirements, by highly knowledgeable veterans of their trades.
In this article, we’ll break down what that means at the ground level, comparing ServiceTitan and ServiceMax in three basic categories:
Streamlining business operations
Pricebook functionality
Membership agreements
Discover what ServiceTitan can do for your commercial or home service business. Schedule a call to get a personalized demo of our software solution today.
Streamline Operations by Fully Integrating the Core Elements of Your Service Business
One of the things that often trips up contractors when they’re choosing an FSM is the fact that inevitably, an awful lot of them technically offer similar features— things virtually no service business can do without, like dispatching, scheduling, invoicing, and project management.
It’s one thing to simply serve up a bunch of features, however, and quite another to provide a holistic, fully-integrated platform that facilitates optimal workflow by allowing contractors to move seamlessly between all of the core functions of their service business.
A main benefit of a best-in-class FSM—and a key differentiator from the competition—is the capacity to provide owners, managers, customer service reps and techs with push-button access to all of the tools they might need to operate at the top of their game.
When contractors come on board with ServiceTitan after trying one or more other FSMs, they’re often struck by that difference. And one of the things they value most in our product is that it lets them toggle smoothly from one feature to another without the hassle of opening multiple windows, programs, or add ons, which can disrupt workflow.
These include the basics, but also more advanced features like:
The ability to move painlessly between features is often especially helpful for contractors who provide more than one service: plumbing and HVAC, electric and plumbing, landscaping and pool service, etc. But ServiceTitan’s approach is far from one-size-fits-all. In addition to being designed specially for industry-specific users, virtually every core feature of our software is highly customizable. With support from our staff of industry experts, contractors across the service industries are optimally equipped to perform at the highest level.
ServiceMax, on the other hand, is much less tailored to the particular needs of service contractors. Given that their software is designed to suit mining and railway companies, in addition to businesses operating in the trades, how could it be otherwise? After all, considerably less separates a plumber and an HVAC contractor, than a lawn service company and a medical device manufacturer.
Where ServiceTitan emphasizes speciality and expertise, ServiceMax is a generalist. And there’s also the fact that while ServiceTitan is dedicated to best serving companies in the U.S., ServiceMax must stretch its resources to handle the needs and demands of businesses operating all over the world.
This need to appeal to many different kinds of companies in many different places might help explain why ServiceMax also takes a less integrated approach to product design.
Unlike ServiceTitan, where we house all of our features on a single platform, with inclusive pricing, ServiceMax disperses functionality across several products: primarily ServiceMax Core, ServiceMax Engage, and Asset 360 For Salesforce.
The basics live on ServiceMax Core, but for advanced customer communication features, users must pay extra for the Engage software. Asset 360 comes with additional costs, too, and supplies features like equipment management, contract management, employee monitoring, workflow templates, and maintenance plans. As the name suggests, Asset 360 is powered by Salesforce, a customer relationship management (CRM) software.
In contrast, all of these features and more are part of ServiceTitan’s core product. They come standard to our users for a single fee. And while Salesforce is a great CRM, ServiceTitan provides much the same functionality in a more holistically integrated environment, allowing contractors to do things like link customer information to specific jobs so that business owners can better understand the demographics, geography, and job types that bring them the most profits.
It’s also worth noting that ServiceTitan imports users’ customer information, from Salesforce or wherever it might be stored, as part of the standard onboarding process, at no additional cost.
Increase Ticket Prices and Close Rates With Visual Pricebooks and Good, Better, Best, Proposals
Like other elements of ServiceMax, the software’s approach to sales presentations is broad, offering users a basic “multiple options” model to present to customers. As we’ve written previously, as a general rule, giving customers multiple options is a good strategy. But when it comes to growing average ticket prices and increasing close rates, execution matters.
ServiceTitan gives contractors access to dynamic, highly customizable visual pricebooks. They can create their own from scratch by uploading their materials, services, pricing, and corresponding images. Their pricebooks can be easily managed using our bulk editing features. And all updates are immediately pushed live and accessible in the office or field, so that estimates and invoices always reflect the latest pricing.
With our add-on product Pricebook Pro, additional features make pricebook management and integration easier than ever. Contractors can select from prebuilt options and tailor them to their own needs, as shown in the screenshot above.
Pricebooks are linked to accurately priced materials catalogues from a variety of major service industry manufacturers, regularly updated via automation, so it’s easy for techs, business owners, and managers to attach the cost of materials to jobs for the kind of precise job costing, estimating, and work order creation that translates into fatter bottom lines.
With our user-friendly keyword search function, techs out in the field can quickly and easily find the parts and materials they’re looking for.
The screenshot above is an example of the kind of detailed specs they can instantaneously call up on screen. The technical information will often be accompanied by a full-color photograph, so that techs can be certain that the items they select are appropriate for the project they’re working on.
And that’s just the back end. ServiceTitan’s customer-facing pricebook functionality includes modern photo and video presentations that make closing sales a relative cinch. These can be added to packages and templates so that techs can quickly create accurate proposals for common jobs right on site using an iPhone, Android, tablet, or other iOS device.
Unlike with ServiceMax, however, which allows users to build proposals only via mobile app, contractors using ServiceTitan can also do so from their computers back at the office—a crucial differentiator, particularly where commercial work is concerned.
Using ServiceTitan, contractors can use those packages to create sleek, professional Good, Better, Best sales presentations simply by dragging and dropping the items they want into the appropriate fields, as shown above.
Upon completion, they will have a tiered proposal reflecting full, detailed, and precise estimates for each job package, complete with all of the information their customer will need to make an informed, educated choice.
By switching to ServiceTitan’s presentation mode, field service technicians can present to customers, engaging them in a collaborative process that places the power in their hands to create a friendly, pressure-free dynamic.
Once a homeowner has made a selection, ServiceTitan makes it simple to find financing, providing access to two integrated financing partners—twice as many as ServiceMax—that can grant approval in near real-time, removing yet another barrier to closing the deal.
Give Your Revenue a Boost With Expertly Managed Customer Service Agreements
ServiceMax’s recurring service and maintenance features, which are housed in Asset 360, are mostly designed for companies that specialize in working with high-tech and industrial equipment, virtually always in commercial settings. The product may very well be great for that purpose. But it’s simply not well suited to service businesses.
To be competitive these days, service companies need to maintain a steady revenue stream over the course of the year, improve customer experience to foster loyalty, and make the most of every big-ticket sales opportunity. And to do that, most need a well-designed membership program, which is extremely challenging to manage without a great software platform.
ServiceTitan contractors can select from a diverse menu of membership templates, each of which provides for a certain number of home visits per year and services to be performed.
The screenshot above shows how easy it is for contractors to set up the membership type(s) that best fit their business model. Using dropdowns, they can select from an array of recurring services. All of them can be customized to suit the requirements and financial resources of different customers.
Of course, many business owners who adopt ServiceTitan already have a contract program that they’re fond of. In these cases, our team of industry experts can help companies translate what’s already working for them into customized templates that can be modified and replicated going forward.
When customers with service agreements in place have multiple pieces of equipment at their home or business, confusion can sometimes arise about which item to service, and when. That’s why we designed our software to allow contractors to tie maintenance visits to specific, clearly identified pieces of equipment, ensuring that techs adhere exactly to the agreement terms.
Tracking and following up on membership plan issues can be dizzying without the right software. But contractors can use ServiceTitan to automate this process, emailing every customer who’s coming due for a given service all at once, making individual membership follow-ups largely a thing of the past—and saving tremendous time and resources in the process.
Customizable, automated plans allow ServiceTitan users to bill monthly, yearly, or quarterly for memberships, depending on the needs and preferences of the service company and their clients.
Whenever they want, contractors can consult a master list displaying the condition—paid or unpaid—of every one of their membership accounts. The list makes an ideal reference with which to analyze how effectively a business is managing their service plans month to month, and how much of their revenue those plans are responsible for.
Most field service management solutions don’t offer revenue recognition modeling, but it’s easy to implement via ServiceTitan’s seamless QuickBooks integration.
To further ensure that membership payments stay on track, many ServiceTitan users opt into our renewal protection feature, auto-updating the credit card expiration dates of service plan members. It’s a big improvement over calling up homeowners to ask for new card information—a best-avoided opportunity for customers to cancel their memberships.
Conclusion
If you’re a contractor sizing up ServiceMax and ServiceTitan, the main issues to focus on are specialization and expertise. While ServiceMax is designed for a broad range of companies that operate all over the globe—and which often have nothing to do with service businesses—our product, ServiceTitan, is made exclusively with U.S. service contractors in mind, created to address their specific needs by a team of industry experts that know those needs all too well.
We know that service contracting companies perform best when all of their essential business processes are working together as a well-oiled machine. That’s why ServiceTitan facilitates the seamless, efficient integration of everything from call booking to financing and credit card payments. And unlike ServiceMax, whose features are spread across several products, each of which comes with its own price tag, ServiceTitan offers similar functionality on a single platform—and for a single price.
The upshot of all this is that while ServiceMax very well may be an excellent product for companies that specialize in servicing mining equipment and medical technology, it lacks the holistic, contractor-specific features and design that have enabled ServiceTitan to take so many HVAC specialists, electricians, and other trades businesses to the next level.
To see how the differences between these two products play out in practical terms, look no farther than these three key areas of business:
Streamlining business operations
Pricebook
Membership Agreements
Discover what ServiceTitan can do for your commercial or home service business. Schedule a call to get a personalized demo of our software solution today.