ServiceTitan Dispatch Pro: What You Need to Know

A dispatcher’s job is tough work; there’s no disputing that. A great dispatcher needs to balance many changing priorities, from routing to the skill set of technicians, to the potential value of a job. And the more trucks you have, and the more services you offer, the more challenging it gets. Service Titan Dispatch Pro was built to take these complex decisions and put them in the hands of an algorithm that adjusts and changes as it learns your operations. 

Let’s put it another way: what if you could have a 🪄magic wand🪄 you could wave across your dispatch board, which bumps back your lowest-value calls, and match up your biggest opportunities with your most skilled technicians? With a little Dispatch Pro magic… ✨abracadabra presto change-o✨…ServiceTitan does it for you! 

Dispatch Pro uses Titan Intelligence (Ti) to automatically organize your Dispatch Board to maximize your profitability. Because of the volume of data available for Ti to use and run calculations on, the system can accurately determine which technician has the greatest chance of maximizing an opportunity. It then assigns the best-matched available technician to each incoming job.

Can I Really Trust AI to Dispatch Technicians? 

Trusting your dispatching to AI can be downright scary to business owners who have a tried-and-true dispatch process.  

Here’s a mind bender: the training and knowledge that makes a Dispatcher great can also be a big disadvantage. Consider a dispatcher that’s giving preference of certain types of jobs, customers, or neighborhoods to certain technicians. Sometimes this preference is completely unconscious – the Dispatcher doesn’t even know they are doing it!

With the benefit of machine learning, and running thousands of scenarios to automatically choose the best match, you can realize these benefits of Dispatch Pro: 

• Average ticket price increases, leading to increased overall revenue.
• Technician drive time decreases, limiting their exposure to our industry’s #1 churn risk factor.
• Dispatchers’ efficiency increases, leaving them with more capacity to focus on customer care and technician preparedness.

Dispatch Pro will not replace your Dispatchers. It’s a tool to help them improve efficiency, allowing them to spend their time on the highest impact work like delivering superior customer experience, taking care of techs, and making quick adjustments.

How Does ServiceTitan Dispatch Pro Work?

Once Dispatch Pro is up and running in your account, it will automatically assign technicians to Jobs in queue. Dispatch Pro uses information already in your account to determine the best technician for the job. 

Some of the information the tool uses to decide are: 

• Predicted value of each opportunity. How much revenue does ServiceTitan expect this job to pull in?

• What priority level is the opportunity? Is this an emergency for the customer, or a potential high-value estimate? 

• Routing. Which technicians’ routes can most easily accommodate the additional stop?
• Skills. Which technicians have the right training and are most likely to be successful in the opportunity in question?
• Past Performance. Which technicians’ recent sales record increases the chances of capitalizing on this specific opportunity?

Dispatch Pro takes all these factors into consideration and chooses the technician for you. The system will place that job on the technician’s schedule. 

Ten minutes later, it does it again. Yep, every 10 minutes during business hours, Ti reassesses who is the best person to run each job on the current day’s schedule.

Am I Ready for ServiceTitan Dispatch Pro? 

When our clients seek to implement Dispatch Pro, we have to check a few boxes before forging ahead. The most important factors in ensuring a successful deployment of ServiceTitan’s Dispatch Pro are: 

1. Operations Settings
2. Technician Profiles
3. Job Type Mapping
4. Capacity Planning

We’ll cover each of these items in the sections that follow. As always, we encourage you to consult with your PCG Consultant or ServiceTitan Support to evaluate your readiness for Dispatch Pro before enabling the module yourself. Having an experienced professional as a partner on your journey can prevent many wasted hours of frustration and troubleshooting.

1 – Are Your ServiceTitan Operations Settings… Operational?

Your operations settings are the foundations of your ServiceTitan account. In order for the Dispatch Pro module to function properly, crucial items to consider are:

• Are your zones set up and organized? Have you entered all zip codes and cities you service?
• Are your business hours set up?
• Are your arrival windows set up? 
• Do your job types have the right duration assigned to them?

When our consultants at PCG review a client’s account for Dispatch Pro readiness, operational settings is the first building block we look at. In our experience, you will not be successful with Dispatch Pro if you do not build these elements out.

2 – Have You Polished Your ServiceTitan Technician Profiles?

It is important to understand how ServiceTitan’s workflows use the data within a technician’s profile within ServiceTitan. In order to leverage the full value of the Dispatch Pro module, key items to review are:

• Are your technician skills set up? Have you mapped them to job types? Have you assigned them to your technicians? (Read more about this here)
• Are technicians’ addresses entered and verified?
• Have you assigned zones to your technicians? 

If any of these pieces are missing, or incorrect, you will need to address them before continuing on your Dispatch Pro journey. Each feature ServiceTitan is connected to at least one other feature in the software; even if an item seems like a trivial component, omitting it could prevent successful implementation.

3 – Have you Mapped all your ServiceTitan Job Types?

Dispatch Pro relies on the job mapping feature to connect the dots between trades you service, job types within them, the business units that perform them, and the technicians assigned to them. Without this feature being configured, Dispatch Pro cannot add value to your process. 

4 – Are you Successfully Using Capacity Planning?

The Dispatch Pro module needs to see which technicians are available to assign to jobs; therefore, essential features to have in place are:

• Are your technician shifts set up? Who maintains the ongoing shifts? (Read more about this here)
• Is Adjustable Capacity Planning (ACP) enabled and configured on your account? Who maintains ACP daily?

A Few Cautionary Notes about ServiceTitan Dispatch Pro

We know this is a really exciting development and you’ll want to get started immediately. However, before you dive in, we must offer a few words of warning:

• The more jobs you allow the system to assign by automation, the more accurate it will become. Dispatch Pro is machine-learning-based, so it needs the opportunity to learn. 
• You will not feel the added value immediately. It will take a few weeks for the system to dial in enough that you can really feel the positive impact on your company.
• Dispatch Pro is primarily for companies that dispatch for profit. Companies that are primarily new construction may not benefit from implementing Dispatch Pro. 

Case Study in Automatic Dispatching

Recently, our team attended ServiceTitan’s Pantheon conference, and attended a workshop about Dispatch Pro. During that session, we heard a compelling story from one presenter regarding their initial struggle with implementing Dispatch Pro.

Something Doesn’t Seem Right

After using the tool for a few weeks, the team noticed the system wasn’t assigning the high-value leads to their best technician. Before Dispatch Pro, the office staff would consistently dispatch this technician the most lucrative leads, because of his technical aptitude, charming personality, and ability to convert the estimate. Why was Dispatch Pro giving these exceptional leads to other technicians… ones without such a substantial track record? 

A Turn of Events

It turns out that Dispatch Pro detected a trend that no one in the office picked up on: for months, this technician had been taking the company’s high-quality leads and selling them himself, outside of the company, in order to start his own business. 

Of course, Dispatch Pro did not know why the technician wasn’t closing the leads; the system simply determined he was not the company’s best chance to capture revenue on high-value opportunities. The software was safeguarding the company’s revenue. 

Meanwhile, the company’s dispatchers were working to “correct” Dispatch Pro’s automated selections and assign this technician the best jobs from the board. Because the staff was comfortable with an old process and unfamiliar with a new tool, they inadvertently got in their own way and worked against the better interest of the company. 

It Will Feel Like a Trust Fall

If the managers and dispatchers had trusted the system and the Titan Intelligence calculations, they would have saved countless jobs from being diverted away from the company by a trusted technician. 

When I heard this story one thing stuck out in my mind: blind confidence is necessary to ensure you don’t impede your own progress. 

Dispatch Pro will catch onto trends long before a skilled dispatcher or watchful manager can. If it’s not behaving how you believe it should, that might be a sign that something is going on. It might be time to take a deeper look at your metrics. 

Trust the system, folks. Trust your tools. Trust the process. 

Ready to Implement Dispatch Pro?

Want to set up Service Titan Dispatch Pro 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 can assist with the overall project management, establishing workflows, and training the team on best practices. Our team is certified to coach throughout ServiceTitan, which means you can trust that our guidance is sound. Schedule your free discovery call today!