First, Key Context For Understanding Successware® Vs. ServiceTitan

As competitors like ServiceTitan have developed products that take full advantage of cutting-edge tech and design, when it comes to the core features of Successware®, not much has changed in the last twenty years.   

Their interface relies heavily on keystrokes and right click menus—a non-intuitive approach that can result in extended training times, inconsistent usage and workflows, and difficult setup processes. Their reliance on keystrokes makes it especially difficult for users working with Mac products. And for features that are basic to modern FSMs like ServiceTitan—photos, sms texting, call recording, web-based access and more—Successware® users must deal with third-party integrations and partnerships, creating a costlier, disjointed work environment.    

The word among service companies is that they may soon be rolling out a rewrite of their system. But any full relaunch involves navigating the bugs and partial build-outs that inevitably accompany brand-new software. In all likelihood, they’ll also be looking at a new pricing structure. It’s well worth keeping these factors in mind when making value for money evaluations.

Whether you’re thinking about springing for an FSM for the very first time—or abandoning a newer product like HouseCall Pro or FieldEdge, it’s worth taking a close look at the very significant functional differences between our solutions. In the sections that follow, we’ll do exactly that.

Use a Quickbooks-Compatible FSM To Avoid Serious Accounting Headaches

Successware® is just one of a handful of field service management software products that features an entirely built-in accounting platform, allowing users to handle all of their bookkeeping directly in their FSM. 

The trouble is that: 

• Unlike ServiceTitan, they don’t offer an integration with QuickBooks, the accounting software most commonly used by medium and small businesses. 

• Many contractors find that there’s a steep learning curve to learn their accounting feature, requiring mastery of complicated setup and maintenance processes. 

• Due to the platform’s old-fashioned design, which provides for only very loosely defined workflows, it may be nearly impossible for a new employee to pick up where an old one left off.

At ServiceTitan, we’ve chosen to delegate accounting to the experts, providing seamless integration with both QuickBooks Desktop and Online (unlike most other FSM’s). Since the vast majority of bookkeepers know how to use QuickBooks, which operates according to generally accepted accounting principles, it’s easy for contractors to sub employees in and out of bookkeeping roles, and to maintain oversight of their company’s finances. 

Our QuickBooks integration can vastly increase a contractor’s efficiency, seamlessly connecting what’s happening in the field with what’s being recorded in the books, while providing business owners with the peace of mind that comes with knowing their data is accurate. For larger companies, we facilitate integration with Intacct.

Reporting Features That Deliver Clean, Reliable, Easily Accessible Data—Not Just Bells and Whistles

In order to improve their business, contractors need a layered, granular understanding of their numbers. The best FSMs on the market provide strong reporting capabilities. Leading business software platforms like ServiceTitan tell business owners things like:

• Which of their marketing strategies are delivering the best ROI and which are a waste of their resources

• If and where they’re currently bleeding cash

• Which of their employees are going above and beyond, and which need some additional training—or perhaps a reprimand 

At a glance, both Successware® and ServiceTitan might appear to offer roughly the same reporting features. But there are actually huge differences between them. 

To illustrate, let’s first take a look at some of ServiceTitan’s reporting capabilities.

1. Performance Scorecards

To help our contractors keep track of their employees’ performance, we’ve created a scorecard feature. Each and every employee gets a scorecard: customer service reps, field service technicians, managers, and more. 

As shown in the screenshot below, they’re populated with stats, which are fully customizable. Popular metrics include things like: 

• Revenue generation

• Service agreements

• Work orders completed

• Incoming calls and call conversions 

By referring to them, contractors and managers can get current in an instant.   

2. Field Reporting Dashboards

Much like the employee scorecard, our field reporting dashboard gives contractors the ability to essentially watch techs move through their job queue out in the field. In real time, live updates on those same customizable scorecard indicators are transmitted back to the dashboard, which can be accessed via mobile device or from a computer back at the office. 

Note: We also have a non-job time tracking tool, unusual for an FSM, which provides business owners invaluable insights on how workday hours are being spent when field technicians aren’t physically on a job site. 

In combination, these functions give contractors a nuanced portrait of their employees’ greatest strengths and weaknesses, and guidance on how to assign them to best serve their customer and business needs.  

Our dashboards also offer real-time data on other crucial aspects of their business: 

• Sales tracking

• Accounts receivable

• Maintenance agreement profitability

• Marketing campaigns 

All of these and more are easily accessible to ServiceTitan subscribers, allowing contractors to understand in fine-grained detail where exactly their investments are paying off, how they might more effectively allocate funds, and what aspects of their operations need attention.

In a checklist-style comparison, a prospective subscriber might conclude that Successware®, too, provides many of these functions. And technically, in some cases, that’s true. They do have fairly extensive reporting features. 

In practice, though, users can run into problems such as:

• Ill-defined workflows can cause data to be mixed up or corrupted

• Reports can pull data from different places, resulting in conflicting readouts

• Limited ability to save or drill down into reports

• Inability to schedule and email reports

Leverage Technology to Improve Customer Experience

Ensuring that homeowners have a stellar customer experience—one that’s friendly, professional, and which emphasizes convenience and ease of use—has never been more important to a contractor’s success.

Again, this is an area where Successware’s® reliance on a legacy software platform puts the product and its users at a disadvantage. 

For ServiceTitan subscribers, optimizing the experience of their clients begins from the first point of contact: 

• Each and every call that comes into one of our contractors gets recorded and logged in a customer history. 

• When a service tech is assigned to visit a customer’s home from dispatching, they can access recordings of every call to date, along with any text message history between the customer and their employer. 

• By the time they arrive at the job site, they are well informed about what to expect: job type, equipment, previous work orders, the needs and preferences of the owner. 

When they’re en route, field service technicians can: 

• Use ServiceTitan to send their customer a text message indicating a precise, accurate window for their arrival, limiting the time homeowners have to spend waiting around—and becoming less inclined to make a purchase. 

• Allow customers to use a link included in the text to track their tech’s approach in real time, via an interface that resembles Uber. 

Note: Many of our subscribers also have their techs include a photo and brief bio in their text, so that when they get to the front door, the customer has already begun to get comfortable with them.

Once they’re in the home, using an iPad, iPhone, Android, or other ios device, service techs can access ServiceTitan to take advantage of a range of automated forms and checklists to guide them through a service or sales call.       

Customers can sign off on estimates remotely. Once a job is complete, ServiceTitan facilitates touchless payments, making the conclusion of a job as easy as possible for customers—and encouraging them to return to the well the next time they need service.

Quotes, complete with annotated photographs and findings checklists, can be emailed, too, and scheduled for automated follow-up in the event they go unsold— eliminating the nagging problem of lost or illegible paperwork and outstanding estimates that simply fall through the cracks.  

While ServiceTitan users appreciate each of these features individually, in combination, many of our contractors find that they quickly become an indispensable part of their business.    

Stay Connected With Mobile Features Developed, Perfected, and Supported by an In-House Team

These days, to do their jobs well, contractors and their employees need an FSM that provides virtually unlimited mobile connectivity—the ability to  communicate, access data, and execute on best practices no matter where they happen to be at the moment. 

Whether they’re on the road, at a job, or at their desktop, employees of a company using ServiceTitan can talk to one another via text in real-time. With an advanced API like ours, a thing as simple as texting can give techs a huge leg up. 

For example, they can:

• Confirm that materials are available

• Double-check the schedule 

• Verify equipment combinations

Many of our contractors—especially those running somewhat larger companies—like to use our mobile alert features. They can customize them to be notified about most any event or change they might want to know about to help them stay on top of what’s going on with their business. Some HVAC contractors, for example, like to get alerts when a call for a system replacement comes into the shop. That way, they can shepherd big-ticket jobs across the goal line by making sure every i is dotted and every t crossed up until the moment that the customer signs off.   

Inevitably, contractors and techs occasionally end up in places where they don’t have mobile service. For some FSMs, this poses a serious problem, cutting off users from tools like pricebooks, equipment packages, and work orders that are essential to their job. With ServiceTitan, subscribers can access all of their data via mobile device even when there’s no Internet available.  

Techs can still be sure that all of the cutting-edge features that help them do their best sales work are there: 

• The capability to present multiple quote options, with pictures and video to educate customers about the differences.

• The ability to create purchase orders on the fly and access pre-built packages.

• The capacity to reference work history. 

Until very recently, mobile functionality in Successware® was built and supported by a third-party provider. Successware® has lately brought their mobile components in-house. 

Service contractors weighing their FSM options should pay especially close attention to these differences in the mobile functionality.

Marketing Features That Track—and Maximize—ROI  

On average, contractors spend 5-10 percent of their total revenue on marketing. Yet they often don’t have a clear picture of their ROI. They have a hard time figuring out which of their campaigns are working—where, and how well—and which are falling flat. In effect, they end up throwing money out the window. 

ServiceTitan membership comes with a host of tools that help contractors address these issues: 

• Revenue attribution analysis: shows business owners which campaigns are actually generating new (and repeat) customers

• Marketing heat maps: highlights the geographic areas where marketing has been most effective

• Phone number tracking: shows how campaigns are tied to incoming calls

Last year we introduced Marketing Pro, a feature that allows contractors to harness customer information to build sleek, customizable, targeted marketing campaigns. Marketing Pro is a powerful tool, with diverse applications, and we’ve written about it at length here. But it’s particularly good at helping contractors do things like:

• Follow-up on unsold estimates

• Bolster membership plan renewals

• Reinvigorate idle accounts

• Win big-ticket jobs, like HVAC system replacements

So far, ServiceTitan subscribers who use Marketing Pro have seen a 15% increase in membership renewal rates, a 12% increase in year-over-year revenue, and a 10% increase in conversion rates for unsold estimates.   

With its heavy reliance on core legacy software, Successware® has nothing that resembles the marketing heatmaps and automated revenue attribution features that come standard to ServiceTitan subscribers—let alone the advanced capability of Marketing Pro. 

Building and tracking marketing campaigns with Successware® requires users to transfer info from their customer database in their FSM to a third-party marketing company—and to rely on that company to accurately monitor and attribute incoming revenue to the right campaign.     

A Support Team Focused On Building Businesses—Not Just Answering Software Questions 

At ServiceTitan, our goal is to provide not merely a software product, but but a tool that can truly help business owners manage their companies. It’s something that separates us from other FSMs, and it’s mirrored in our approach to customer support, in which we aim to enable our subscribers to get the absolute most out of our product. 

To accomplish this, we employ a team of Success Managers. Every user gets one, and any time they have a question, large or small, they can get on the phone with their pointman for live support. Like most software vendor support personnel, Success Managers can help ServiceTitan users address any hiccups they might be having. But they’re also experts in assisting contractors to better understand the software’s many features, and helping them understand how best to use them to optimize their operations. 

Successware® simply doesn’t have any of these features—not even chat support. They offer only limited customer support. Their reps are able to spend only a limited amount of time on each call, so that even if an issue remains unresolved, subscribers might be left on their own to figure things out.   

Conclusion

There’s no doubt that Successware® technically has a lot of features. But owing largely to the software’s outdated design, actually using them depends on mastering complex, non-intuitive processes. 

As a result, many of their subscribers aren’t ultimately able to leverage the benefits of the software, as they struggle to navigate the usage—and even the features setup of the features theoretically available to them.

In contrast, we’ve developed a feature called Titan Advisor to help assure that our users are getting the full value from our software.

For contractors looking for an FSM to truly modernize, streamline, and grow their business, the best option may well be to look beyond a legacy field service software product like Successware® in favor of a tool like ServiceTitan, which allows contractors to leverage cutting-edge technology to optimize their operations. 

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.

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