More than 210 home services professionals attended ServiceTitan’s Dispatch 2017, the company’s first-ever user’s conference, Oct. 20, at NeueHouse Hollywood in Hollywood, California.

The day-long event was billed as a celebration for the hard-working contractors who helped build the software system just as much as the 300 employees at ServiceTitan’s Glendale, California headquarters and its new service center in Atlanta.

“We’ve been fighting day and night to make the best software we can,” said Ara Mahdessian, ServiceTitan’s CEO and co-founder during his welcoming address. “But every single one of you built ServiceTitan. Your ideas, collaboration, patience, support, trust and faith built ServiceTitan.”

ServiceTitan specializes in software that helps home services pros streamline their operations, improve customer service and grow their businesses. The company’s solution includes seamless customer relationship management, intelligent dispatching, invoice management, marketing analytics and comprehensive reporting.

To date, Mahdessian said the company’s plumbing, HVAC and electrical contractors have used the mobile, cloud-based field management platform to schedule and dispatch more than 30,000 techs to 9 million service calls valued at $7 billion. Not bad for software that didn’t exist until 2012.

More than 2,000 contractors currently rely on the software to take the headaches out much of these administrative, sales and marketing chores.

In fact, sitting in the front row was ServiceTitan’s first customer — Harry, father to Vahe Kuzoyan, ServiceTitan’s president and co-founder.

Mahdessian also gave a shout-out to the company’s second and third customers, Michael West and John Akhoian, Rooter Hero Plumbing,

“From there, the list goes on,” Mahdessian said.

Origins

Mahdessian and Kuzoyan, both moved to the U.S. when they were very young. Ara’s father was a residential contractor, while Vahe’s father was a plumber.

After Mahdessian graduated from the University of Southern California and Kuzoyan graduated from Stanford University, Vahe’s father asked them to find plumbing software to help better manage his plumbing company.

Mahdessian looked everywhere, but couldn’t find software that would benefit his father’s company. So, he did the next best thing.

For the first five to six years, the two began working on ServiceTitan from Kuzoyan’s father’s garage. While the software is now cloud-based, the founders used to have to travel to each contractor customer’s office to install the original software.

The morning’s events included a panel discussion, which shared some of the secrets of contractor success. Comprising the panel were Jaime DiDomencio, Cool Today; Tom Howard, Lee’s Air; Aaron Gaynor, The EcoPlumbers; and Linda Couch, Parrish Services. The discussion was moderated by Matt Roell, ServiceTitan enterprise project manager.

Afterward, Darius Lyver, chief operating officer at F.H. Furr and Ershad Jamil, head of platform at ServiceTitan, discussed how offering financing could increase a contractor’s sales.

What’s new

But much of the morning’s discussions was left to Kuzoyan who discussed what’s ahead for the enterprise software.

“Every line of code we write should either deliver an amazing customer experience and make sure that the next time your customers need something, they think of you first,” Kuzoyan said. “Or it should help automate a best practice or process to maximize every opportunity and make sure you are doing it efficiently. Or it should give you a way to increase business intelligence so you can find out what the problems are and how to fix them.”

To that end, Kuzoyan outlined a number of features designed to enhance customer service whether its face-to-face with techs or back at the office to capitalize on business opportunities.

Some of the ideas shared had already been unveiled prior to the conference, such as the company’s expanded accounting capabilities with Sage Intacct for more sophisticated financial management. Or the integration with pulseM to automatically send requests for customer satisfaction opinions that are increasingly important to social media marketing.

But there were plenty of other new benefits that were announced at the conference. For example, ServiceTitan announced that it was partnering with Yelp, the popular online review site that also becoming more important to book service calls. And Kuzoyan also announced that the company was beginning a partnership with Google Local Services, a recently rebranded program that was originally launched in 2015 as Google Home Services. The search giant has expanded the service to 17 cities with plans to be in 30 cities by yearend.

“If you are going to keep growing,” Kuzoyan said, “you are going to need new customers, and if that’s the case, you need to be where they are and where they are searching.”

Furthermore, Kuzoyan also added that the company would soon be releasing an app that customers could download to further integrate the call booking process, which will allow for ServiceTitan users to have their own brand on the app.

The dashboard, one of the software’s most popular features, just got better. Customized dashboards now offer users the ability to easily drill down to the exact level of data they need. This and other enhancements allow owners to build interactive reports that are laser-focused on the metrics that matter most to their businesses to increase productivity and boost revenue.

Kuzoyan added that further enhancements were planned that would allow users to capture the most valuable data, set targets for key performance indicators and create charts and graphs.

“Numbers can’t always tell the whole story,” Kuzoyan said. “But if you can put it on a graph, you can communicate it to your whole team while helping you understand it yourself.”

Kuzoyan rounded out his presentation by discussing improvements the company will be making to its accounting features including ServiceTitan’s plans to create essentially its own version of QuickBooks Web Connector (news of which was met with big applause) and enhancements to mobile sales features, such as mobile check depositing.

He also briefed everyone on plans to tackle inventory management.

“That’s not our strong suite,” Kuzoyan said. “But that’s about to change.”

While he did not go into too many details, Kuzoyan said the plan was to work directly with vendors and distributors to integrate POs and pricing updates.