Episode Overview
Missed calls during the day and unattended lines at night cost trade businesses jobs, and ServiceTitan Virtual Agents now cover more than the phone to close that gap. On this episode of Mastering ServiceTitan, host Josh Lu talks with Matthew Webb, Senior Solutions Engineer at ServiceTitan, about what ServiceTitan Virtual Agents include today: voice agents, SMS agents, and web chat agents. The conversation focuses on setup and rollout, from the prerequisites you need in place to the workflows worth automating first. His core advice is to pick one use case, collect data, then expand.
The Three Cs of Change: Channel, Collaboration, and Customer Base
Webb’s rollout framework starts with channel. Decide whether voice, text, or web chat fits how your customers already reach you. Web chat can also convert website messages into text messages, so your team can reply by SMS.
Collaboration is next. The agent books the straightforward work, such as heat checks and routine maintenance. CSRs keep the calls that need a permit pulled or an invoice looked up.
“My mindset is never, like, replace somebody with AI. It’s really, like, how do you unlock other things for them?”
The third C is your customer base, and the intro is where most businesses trip. If the opening line tells callers to say “human” whenever they want a person, nearly everyone will. His advice is to frame the call around help rather than an apology for overflow, and to check your local and state disclosure laws first.
You can test this with data. The virtual agent dashboard shows every call, its outcome, and whether it was booked or escalated. A high rate of live-agent requests is a cue to revisit the intro. Voice is the other variable. There are 14 or 15 to choose from, and the best way to pick is to play each snippet and choose the one that sounds like an extension of your office.
Choosing Your First Use Case and Workflows
Four goals come up most often:
After-hours calls that would otherwise go to voicemail or an answering service
Daytime overflow, after a set number of rings or when CSRs are already busy
Emergency calls, where the agent can escalate to an on-call technician
A receptionist-style agent that books, answers questions, or routes calls
To find the right one for your shop, ask your team where the leaky bucket is.
“I think it’s really just where is your kind of like leaky bucket right now, right?”
Beyond inbound calls, agents can run trigger-based workflows:
Parts arrival: when the team tags the job, the agent reaches out and books the visit
Speed to lead: a form or lead-source submission gets an automatic text, and optionally an outbound call and voicemail
Appointment move-ups: when a cancellation opens a slot, the agent offers it to customers booked further out
Unsold estimates: the agent follows up on open estimates, then books the job once it’s sold
Webb singles out unsold estimates as the one everyone should turn on, and it is the workflow generating the most interest right now.
“I love this quote I heard recently. It’s that the fortune is in the follow-up, ’cause if you are not following up with your customers, you are losing revenue.”
A CSR can take over any text conversation when they have history with the customer.
Setting Up Call Forwarding, Capacity, and Configuration
Three prerequisites determine whether your agent can do its job.
Call forwarding. Any phone system works as long as you can forward calls to the number you’re given, including cell carrier rules like after-5 forwarding. IVR and day versus after-hours routing are controlled in the phone system itself. If you’re on Phones Pro or Contact Center Pro, ServiceTitan walks you through it. On a third-party system, you need access to those settings or someone in IT who has it.
Capacity. This is the biggest sticking point. Before a test call, run a normal booking and click Get Adaptive Availability to see what the agent will see. In one onboarding, a shop was quoting three-week lead times because only one of its four plumbers was assigned that job type. Adaptive capacity rules can also raise demand-call availability or cap maintenance visits. When you run a live test booking, remove it from the dispatch board afterward.
Configuration. Most of the onboarding time goes here. Settings include:
Persona, voice, and opening message
Which job types the agent can book, reschedule, or cancel, such as allowing repair bookings but blocking install changes
Whether to use natural-language fillers like “uh” and “um,” which he usually turns off because agents overdo them
Questions tied to job types, such as splitting no-heat or no-cool by equipment age (0–5, 6–10, 11+) so the agent routes to the right visit
Expect to find stale job types while you do this. The agent also can’t pull customer equipment data directly yet, though better membership controls are in development.
Your knowledge base should read like a CSR FAQ: hours, service areas, and what you do and don’t work on. For high-risk topics like membership upgrades, use an escalation trigger instead of knowledge base content. Triggers pair a condition with a path, either take a message or transfer, and the transfer can go to a cell phone, a department, or another number. Custom triggers can catch words like “commercial” or “tenant” and hand those calls off immediately. A short IVR up front also keeps most spam bots out of the agent’s queue.
Simplify Before You Scale
Webb is the first to admit he’s an over-optimizer, and he recommends against trying to launch a perfect setup.
“I would probably say simplify before you scale.”
If your phone system supports it, start with overflow. A missed daytime call is lost revenue, and it frees CSRs while the agent starts to feel like a team member. After-hours-only makes more sense for shops that already accept nearly every call.
“80% good is, is pretty good, uh, to start, right?”
Once calls are flowing, the dashboard shows what to fix. Repeated no-capacity outcomes on one job type usually mean a technician is missing a skill or zone assignment. Most contracts are pay-as-you-go, and you can set up on your own or book a live onboarding. Job types, questions, and the knowledge base are where people most often get stuck.
Matthew Webb recently joined Josh Lu on the ‘Mastering ServiceTitan’ podcast to discuss:
[00:45] Best practices for virtual agents, where to start with implementation, and easing customers into AI voice agents
[17:53] Call forwarding, adaptive capacity, and rules configuration
[26:36] Managing your virtual agent’s knowledge base and escalation triggers
Check out these resources mentioned during the podcast:
You can find this interview and many more by subscribing to Mastering ServiceTitan on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, or here.
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