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.

 

 

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.

 

 

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.