The last several issues of CrewLift’s newsletter have been pricebook focused, and we are going to release a few editions focused on adaptive capacity, which has been a hot topic given how adaptive capacity intertwines with AI agents. ServiceTitan made it an even hotter topic after announcing that Podium will no longer integrate.
At its core, adaptive capacity allows businesses to schedule jobs more efficiently without CSRs having to look at their notepad and remember that John can't go on jobs that require scaling a ladder, for example. All the information that typically lives in your CSRs' heads instead lives in ServiceTitan, and the system will auto-assign jobs based on specific logic.
It's important to leverage adaptive capacity, but it's even more important to make sure it's leveraged properly as more and more companies move to using AI voice agents for booking jobs and follow-ups. AI voice agents are the "hottest" add-on for ServiceTitan users. Most businesses are turning to third parties that integrate rather than using ServiceTitan's native agents. These companies are building unbelievable technology with top-tier engineers that can dramatically change a business for the better — but they are not ServiceTitan experts who can fix your setup, and more specifically your job scheduling flow.
The agents will not work the way you anticipate if they are not being fed logical information with a structured setup. And this almost always starts with the basics of ServiceTitan: business units and job types. Your AI agents are going to have a tough time scheduling jobs properly if you have 47 business units and 130 job types. Simplify, simplify, simplify.
These are the 6 critical areas to assess whether you're ready to bring on AI voice agents and whether the basics of adaptive capacity are in place:
Adaptive capacity is turned on — not so obvious
Business units, job types, and arrival windows are cleanly configured
Zones and dispatch boundaries match
CSRs have a standardized booking workflow
Job types and membership priorities are set
Technician shifts and skills are accurate
Everything else is secondary to these six areas. You can build on that by making sure you have KPI visibility and a pricebook that maps to real services. Start with those six, though.
Once you're in a good spot within ServiceTitan, then you evaluate other tools and pick the best one for your business and your needs. It can be difficult to understand the differences, but there are differences in these AI agent tools. See how you feel about the team, too, and what you think the experience would be like working with them.
I have to throw my two cents in on the Podium fiasco… What the hell did they expect was going to happen going toe to toe with ServiceTitan? You can't expect the biggest player in the space to just let one of their "partners" waltz in as a competitor without doing what they can to shut that down, as pretty much any company would.
That being said, ServiceTitan did not handle the situation very gracefully, to put it nicely. Giving customers one month to transition during the busiest and most profitable time of the year is not the move I would have made, but hey, we're not a $10B company… yet.
I will spare you from all of my thoughts on this situation, but the bigger takeaway is that there is risk associated with being completely reliant on one software to hold the keys to your operation. I believe this will shift in the AI era, and you're already seeing it happen.
Feel free to book time on my calendar if you want to walk through best practices with adaptive capacity, or just want to talk about where the industry is heading with AI.
Jack Walsh
Co-Founder & CEO, CrewLift