ServiceTitan gives customers a second chance to capture leads with Microsoft Azure AI

For home and commercial service contractors in the trades industry, each day brings a new set of challenges. They must identify and purchase materials, hire workers, and ensure projects get done on schedule. Small and independent contractors may also handle business duties, such as negotiating contract rates and handling taxes. Plus, there is the hands-on work itself. Add in ever-changing technology and regulations, and just keeping up with paperwork can become a full-time job.

ServiceTitan is a US-based company that creates software for contractors. The company prides itself on introducing innovative ideas to solve customer problems. That means adopting burgeoning technologies like generative AI before the competition. Titan Intelligence (TI) is their suite of tools custom-built to meet the needs of home and commercial contractors. These tools provide comprehensive automation for call management, job booking, technical dispatch, accounting, finance, and reporting for organizations of all sizes, and more than 12,000 customers across the US use TI. 

“AI had a bumpy road over the last three decades, and a lot of companies failed to develop even simple AI-powered business applications that could have been massive moneymakers,” says Mehmet Murat Ezbiderli, Principal Architect, Data and Machine Learning, ServiceTitan. “In recent years, the AI space has been shifting to generative AI, which unleashes immense opportunities for us, from automated content generation to copilots and virtual agents that can handle complex conversations and perform tasks.” 

A second chance to capture revenue

Service businesses spend heavily on marketing initiatives to attract leads, yet ServiceTitan’s internal research shows that fewer than 20 percent of all inbound calls convert to jobs on the spot. The concept for ServiceTitan’s AI tool, Second Chance Leads, is simple: use AI to identify potentially viable sales leads that were missed by customer service representatives (CSRs). “Our customers spend good money on marketing to make sure consumers and businesses know their services and how to reach them,” says Deanna Kawasaki, Senior Director, TI Products. Driving customers to the company is just the first step in securing business, however.

Incoming queries, or leads, are typically reviewed by CSRs who evaluate them and decide which ones merit a follow-up sales call. Leads that don’t have obvious value are often rejected and set aside. However, some leads may have hidden value that is easily missed by busy CSRs, leading to rejection and in turn, lost revenue for the company. 

The Second Chance Leads tool was designed to help capture these overlooked leads. The tool uses generative AI to transcribe and analyze calls in real time, create a summary, and identify those that appear to be genuine leads. The complete information is sent to the CSR manager, who can then review the data and decide whether to call the customer back, potentially saving lost revenue.

The ServiceTitan development team knew they would need a faster, more powerful AI platform to support the level of generative AI required for Second Chance Leads. The team found everything they needed and more in Microsoft Azure AI.

Microsoft Azure AI powers innovation

“Microsoft is ahead of the game in generative AI. That can be attributed to their excellence in infrastructure provisioning and management, large customer base, and decades of experience in the AI realm,” Ezbiderli says. “Azure AI also had the major advantage of serving the model from within the Azure region where our services are located.” This would both help avoid latency and address data privacy concerns, particularly around keeping personally identifiable information in-house. It also greatly simplified the development process.

“Building an AI platform can be a major, challenging process,” says Lilit Zargaryan, Staff Machine Learning Engineer at ServiceTitan, working on the machine learning (ML) platform within TI, adding that most traditional AI applications require teams to run pipelines for ingesting, transforming, and cleaning the data. Features, training, and serving models also must be generated. All this requires significant time and resources that could be better spent on innovation. Azure AI streamlines and accelerates the process, enabling developers to innovate faster and more efficiently, whether building custom solutions with traditional ML, generative AI, or pre-trained and domain-specific AI services.

“Azure AI offers the fundamental components required to rapidly develop the key applications required for dataset extraction and storage, pipeline development and execution, model training, registration and deployment, monitoring, logging, and alerting,” Ezbiderli says. “Just plug in your container, wrap your code, update your configurations, and you’re good to go.”

ServiceTitan used Azure pipelines, model registry, dataset management, and endpoints for training, deploying, and serving models in Azure Machine Learning to develop the Second Chance Leads product. The development team utilized Azure OpenAI Service application programming interface and Azure AI prompt flow to develop a range of generative AI applications, from chat/voice bots and content generation to retrieval-augmented generation services, which are used to augment AI information pools with externally sourced data.

Benefiting from AI

The Second Chance Leads capability was added to ServiceTitan’s TI tool suite in August 2023. It was an instant hit, with customers rapidly adopting the function. Although the tool has quickly become a fan favorite, many don’t know the underlying technology powering it.

“AI has benefited our customers in most cases without their knowing it’s AI. They just think it’s software. There’s no delineation, and that’s good,” Kawasaki observes. “They don’t need to know the how or why something is working for them in our software. They just need to know and trust that it is working, providing the outcomes that drive their business successfully to a higher ROI.” 

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