Powerhouse Consulting Group

Settings

Technician Shifts in ServiceTitan: What are they and why use them?

·

ServiceTitan Technician Shifts allow your CSR’s & Coordinators to easily see when technicians are scheduled to work, have scheduled time-off, or on-call. 

Technician Shifts can replace schedules you might have printed or stored on a shared drive. By building the work schedule into ServiceTitan, your team won’t need to reference any external documentation – saving time and improving efficiency! 

The standalone benefit of Technician Shifts is that once created, the team’s schedule displays on the Dispatch board. The different types of shifts are color coded so that it is easy to see when a technician is working, has time-off, or on-call.

Another benefit of using Technician Shifts is that this feature integrates with Arrival Windows and Capacity Planning. You must have Technician Shifts set up to use Capacity Planning. Capacity Planning helps your dispatchers maximize schedule efficiency and technician idle time. 

Things to Know About Technicians Shifts

Before you get started with Technician Shifts, here are a few things you should know:

  • Get it enabled! If you do not see Technician Shifts under your Schedule tab, ask your PCG Consultant or ServiceTitan Success Manager to enable it in your account.
  • Payroll. Using Technician Shifts does not affect the technician’s daily Clock-in/Out, Payroll Reports, or Timesheets
  • Beware of setting up too many shifts! Although it’s tempting to set up Technician Shifts for the entire year, we recommended that you only schedule the shifts out One Month. The reason for this is if you schedule events too far in the future, you will eventually have to delete any changed shifts.  When it’s time to create the next month’s shifts you can copy an existing shift and the information will carry over.

Powerhouse Tip!

Technician Shifts vs. Non-Job Events.

You might already be using non-job events to indicate times when the technician will be out of the office. With technician shifts, you’ll be able to delineate the difference of when a technician is out of the office versus just not working at a job.

Use technician shifts to indicate time periods where the technician is not working, like paid time off.  Use non-job events for events that are work related but not directly related to a job, like meetings or vehicle maintenance.

Understanding the Types of Technician Shifts

  1. Regular- This is the technician regular daily/weekly schedule
  2. On-Call- This is when a technician has an “on-call” shift outside his/her regular working hours.
  3. Time-off– When a technician has scheduled time off (like Paid Time Off). 

On the Schedule Board you will see that the “Regular” shifts have a green line, “On-Call” shifts have a yellow line, and “Time-off” has a gray line. On the dispatch board, “Time-off” is grayed out on the board, “On-Call” is highlighted in an orange color from the time the on-call shift starts and ends, and Regular shifts appear as “white” on the dispatch board. When there are no shifts scheduled, the Technician’s row is a light gray color. 

How to Set Up Technician Shifts in ServiceTitan

There are 10 easy steps to creating a shift:

  1. Click on the Schedule tab.
  2. Click on Technician Shifts in the top left corner.
  3. Click on Create Shift.
  4. Name the Shift. No need to get fancy here – we  recommend naming a shift the same as its type, for example, “Regular Shift” or “Time Off”. 
  5. Select the shift start date
  6. Start time – Best practice is to use the time the technician is expected to arrive to their first call
  7. End Time – We recommend using the end time of the last arrival window of the day. For example, if the last arrival is 3pm to 6pm, the end time of the Shift would be 6:00pm.
  8. Repeat – If this is a recurring M-F shift, select the recurring option. If you have technicians on a different type of recurring schedule, like a 4-10 schedule, you can also set this up for that also well.
  9. Select Technician/technicians that this shift is for. To filter the Technician list, you can select a Business Unit
  10. Add to schedule.

To copy or delete a shift, hover over the shift on the schedule board, from there you can view the shift, copy the shift and delete the shift.

Powerhouse Tip!

Time Off shifts can not be entered for more than one day or as an “overnight” shift. If they have time off for more than one day you will need to enter each day individually when entering the time off shift.

Need Help Setting up Technician Shifts in ServiceTitan?

Want to set up technician shifts but you’ve got a million other things to do? That’s what we’re here for! Allow our team at Powerhouse Consulting Group to take that off your plate and do the heavy lifting. We’ll work with you to get technician shifts set up, so that you can make use of the most powerful scheduling features in ServiceTitan. Plus, we’ll train your team on how to use it, and can even check in every so often to see how it’s going. Contact us for a free discovery call.  

Val

Val Brashears

Associate Consultant
Powerhouse Consulting Group

Val Brashears is based in Lynnwood, WA and has over 10 years’ experience in home services, with a primary focus on HVAC, Plumbing and Electrical with a record of accomplishments in the areas of Operations, Productions and Service Management. Val started working with Service Titan in 2016 where she has experience onboarding, and the daily workflows with Coordinators, CSR’s & Accounting. Val’s favorite role with Service Titan is onboarding, working through all the settings and building out a new company.

    ServiceTitan Technician Skills Best Practices

    ·

    Sending the right person to the job is a surefire way to drive efficiency and profitability in your business. But how do your customer service representatives (CSRs) and dispatchers keep track of which technicians have the know-how to complete the job? 

    Enter: technician skills. With a little setup, you can alleviate the guessing game when scheduling/dispatching the technician to a job. 

    Once implemented, CSRs and dispatchers can quickly select the technician either through Schedule Assistance or Adjustable Capacity Planning (ACP).

    Knowing the capabilities of Technicians are able to do will allow the best person for the job, which in turn results in customer satisfaction, efficiency, and profitability.

    What Kind of Skills should I Set Up?

    It’s easy to go skill-crazy, so take a moment to think through what would actually be most helpful to the team member responsible for assigning a technician to a job.

    The best practice is to set up skills include separating by skill levels. by skill type, or both

    Skill levels are often a broad range and not every level would know each job type, but can be easier to assign. Examples:

    Level 1 = apprentice/helper – learning phase, maybe knows a few job types, but would not be able to finish a job to the company standard. Would not be able to diagnose or furnish an estimate. 

    Level 2 = technician that can do the average, more often required jobs. Diagnose the basics and create an estimate for those. 

    Level 3 = lead technician or journeyman who can troubleshoot, work quickly and efficiently at the more tougher jobs. 

    Skill types should be highly specific to a very particular skillset. For example, perhaps only a few of your technicians have been trained on how to install a mini-split or replace a full electrical panel. You can limit which technicians can be assigned to the job if the skill type is not listed on the technician.

    Our recommendation is to draft a list, then meet with your CSR and dispatch team to gather their input.

    Powerhouse Tip!

    Consider how technician skills might help newly-hired team members. Your current team may be very knowledgeable about the abilities of your technicians, but a brand new dispatcher may rely on the technician skills feature.

    Implementing Technician Skills

    To configure technician skills in your ServiceTitan account, the steps are:

    Adding The Skills – Head to Settings > Operations > Skills to add your skills.

    Apply Skills to Technicians – Navigate to Settings > People > Technicians to apply skills to each technician.

    Keep in mind if you are using skill levels that a technician who is a Level 3 can also perform Level 2 and Level 1 work, so they should have all three skills applied to their profile.

    Add Skills to Job Types – Navigate to your Job Type settings, and apply the technician skills required for various job types.

    Powerhouse Tip!

    Set a reminder in your calendar to revisit the skills you’ve applied to technicians every so often. Technicians learn and develop new skills, and we want to make sure that’s reflected in your ServiceTitan account!

    Assigning Technicians at time of Booking

    When booking a job having the skills associated with the technician and/or job types will reduce the time it takes to create the job. This is especially true if you are using the “Get Availability” feature with Adjustable Capacity Planning or the Schedule Assistant. In these cases, skills will be used to select the best technician for the job.

    Here’s an example for ACP users: by selecting the “Get Availability” on the booking screen, it will find the availability of the technicians shifts to the timeframe for the job.

    Hover over the box and two icons will appear: i and 🗸. Clicking on the i (information icon) will show a slide out with more information about the availability. It looks like this:

    The window only shows technicians that have the required skills. We can select technician Bob with confidence, as this technician has both availability and t the skills to be assigned to the job.

    If a job is booked with a technician who doesn’t have the right skills for it, a notification about the skills gap will appear while trying to book the job. Also, if trying to assign a technician to a job, but that technician doesn’t have the correct skills, the alert will appear about the skills gap. This applies regardless of how the job is booked or assigned to the technician. Here are some examples of what these notifications look like:

    Assigning Technicians via the Dispatch Board

    If your workflow is to have the CSRs book the job and the dispatcher assign the job, technician skills are still useful.

    Let’s say a job is already booked and a technician need to be assigned. You can use the dispatch board to find a technician with the skills. Hover over the technician’s name and it will have the skill tags if any are assigned to the technician:

    Need Help Setting up Technician Skills in ServiceTitan?

    Want to set up technician skills but you’ve got a million other things to do? That’s what we’re here for! Allow our team at Powerhouse Consulting Group to take that off your plate and do the heavy lifting. We’ll work with you to create a list of technician skills that makes the most sense for your company, configure ServiceTitan for you, and train your team on how to use this feature. Contact us for a free discovery call.  

    Glenna

    Glenna Bowery

    Support Analyst
    Powerhouse Consulting Group

    Glenna is based in the beautiful foothills of the Sierra Mountains in California. Before working at PCG, she helped a small family-owned plumbing and HVAC company transition from a paper operation to ServiceTitan. In that process, Glenna grew into a ServiceTitan expert! As a Support Analyst, Glenna helps behind the scenes on work that requires deep focus like data cleansing, Pricebook, and Inventory.