Latest / RoofersCoffeeShop / Building a Streamlined Insurance Process
Transcript
- Adam Cabrera: Welcome to Roofing Road Trips, the podcast that takes you on a thrilling journey across the world of roofing. From fascinating interviews with roofing experts to on-the-road adventures, we'll uncover the stories, innovations, and challenges that shape the rooftops over our heads. So fasten your seatbelts and join us as we embark on this exciting roofing road trip. Hello and welcome to another episode of Roofing Road Trips from Roofers Coffee Shop. My name is Karen Edwards, and today's episode we're going to be talking about building a streamlined insurance process. And joining me for the conversation is Jamie Piloteri from Service Titan. Jamie, welcome. Hi, thank you. Happy to be here. Yeah. So ⁓ for those who don't know ⁓ who you are and what you do, let's do some introductions. Tell us about you and what your role is at Service Titan. Yeah, let's do it. So I'm Jamie Piloteri. I lead the Exteriors product development program inside of Service Titan's RD org. ⁓ so for those that don't know, Service Titan, we're the operating system for the trades. We are that one platform end-to-end, including sales, production, financials, marketing. Top of funnel, bottom of funnel, we have tools that solve it. ⁓ if it involves running your business, you use Service Titan for that. So we are building an ⁓ we've been building the end-to-end software for the trades. And we've recently, over the past two years, have been building up for roofing specifically. So my team's job ⁓ in the exteriors program is to specifically deploy into different parts of the product to purpose build for roofing. Yeah, yeah. And you guys have made a lot of investment and time and energy really ⁓ tailoring your solutions to what roofing contractors need. And it's really great to see that. ⁓ but today we're talking about insurance. There is a lot that's happening on the insurance side of things. So what's changing the that on the insurance side that really makes this timing matter? Yeah, for sure. So yeah, we are investing Specifically into making the insurance roofing process better. And what's changing, and contractors will feel this so much, is that things are taking longer. And both sides really want things to be shorter, but there's dynamics at play in the greater market that are making this process even more painful than it used to be. The average property claim is taking 45 to 90 days for roofing. ⁓ and from some contractors I talk to, that honestly sounds a little short. ⁓ These processes can take really long. ⁓ and with carriers being, you know, motivated with storm season and everything to ⁓ have these things sometimes take longer or to be more ⁓ scrutinize the paperwork more, the gap in documentation is a really big problem. ⁓ and we're seeing that back and forth on the actual scope of work, even just to get the initial approval, is sometimes taking weeks while Homeowners are waiting for their roof to be improved. Yeah. It's a challenge. I mean, that and and we're only seeing weather get worse, right? There. The storms are are worse. Yes. And so property working with insurance companies is not going away, right? ⁓ it's it's there to stay. So if if you can make it any easier, ⁓ you know, bring it on. so you talked about a gap, right? And and a disconnect ⁓ between, you know, the field estimating and what's happening in the claims process. Why, what is the hardest part? Why is that so hard? Yeah, so a big part of the disconnect is that the people that are doing the initial inspection are really disconnected both in the materials that they're producing and in just communication from the people that are producing an estimate and working with the adjuster. So The reality on the ground is that a lot of the people that are doing door knocking or even responding to an inbound claim, the sales reps, are a lot of the times they're not very tenured. ⁓ and even if they are, every job is different. ⁓ but with these less tenured reps, they're going through and they're kind of following a formula and steps to do the inspection ⁓ without a lot of knowledge of what's going to come out on the other end, right? They're not gonna go into a program like Xactimate and make an adjuster scope of work. They might not even ⁓ interact with that adjuster scope of work that they get from the carrier very much depending on the contractor's setup. So what ends up happening is that you have these reps that go out and do the inspection. They're taking ideally a lot of photos, ⁓ but then there's this handoff. They hand off those photos, they hand off the findings from their inspection to someone in the office who's going to re-review everything and rebuild a scope of work from scratch. And as you can imagine, that handoff just is ripe for error, right? ⁓ Error in actually like not understanding the work that needs to be done, having images that weren't actually accurately captured. ⁓ but also just in time too. Then that's ripe for things taking long, images get lost, ⁓ maybe they don't have the full context, the ⁓ estimator doesn't have the full context they need, so they're needing to go back and forth with the rep. And so That's really like adding all of this time before you can get this sort of clean contractor version of the scope of work that needs to be done so that you can get to that agreement with the adjuster. And so if you think about that as like the really big disconnect, and then you multiply that by storm season when you have people's homes that were hit really hard and you're trying to work fast. ⁓ it can really be a recipe for disaster in terms of the time it will take ⁓ and the accuracy with which they'll have the claim processed. Right. Because the person in the field who is doing that initial assessment, taking those photos, making their own notes, and then it's basically being redone ⁓ after the handoff. Right. Exactly. Yeah. And depending on how you have them capturing their notes and capturing the images, there can be ⁓ a lack of thoroughness if you don't really set it up the right way, right? That can cause you to need to go back out and do a reinspection, which only adds time and cost. Yes. And that this is, you know, we're talking about the contractor. We haven't even mentioned the adjuster, right? Who may be working with totally different information. Right. Right, exactly. And the adjuster, you know, they're there to do, they'll do their own inspection. ⁓ but getting that clarity of communication up front from a contractor ⁓ really helps speed up the process and also really helps the adjuster understand like what the conversation is even about, right? Okay, one party did an inspection. What did you truly find? ⁓ being able to be really like specific about that can speed up the process. And on the adjuster side, yeah, they're feeling that pain when they're not getting. Clarity of what the scope is or clarity of the images that help, you know, corroborate the damage that was done. ⁓ without that, it is a painful process for them as well. Yes. So, you know, because the insurance carriers want that specific, detailed information. the claims process, as you said, 45 to 90 days, you know, it it it tends to drag on. So how is the industry solving this problem? And where does service tighten fit in to help these pain points. Yeah, definitely. So the pattern that shows up is that the ⁓ delay isn't on the carrier side, right? Like they're not being slow. What it goes back to is the PDF-based ⁓ supplement and scope documents that everybody works off of. And as I just explained, those things take inherently take a long time. So ⁓ I think that's where the industry as a whole is focused ⁓ and where Service Titan is focused in particular for the ⁓ claims process. So, Service Titan, what we are doing to help this process, ⁓ particularly on that top the like top of funnel claims process. So initial inspection, getting ⁓ to an agreed scope of work with the adjuster, that's where we've focused our first solution. So Where Service Titan is unique, and this is in retail and insurance, but we've taken that like formula and retail and brought it to insurance, is that the ⁓ initial inspection that the rep does, we capture that information and can automatically translate it into line items ⁓ in an estimate and scope of work that you would ultimately need to like order to actually do the job, right? So you have an experience on the rep side where they're being walked through a form that ⁓ you know, step by step tells them what pictures to take, what damage to assess, what to note. ⁓ so they're being brought through that. And then when they save that, we automatically produce an estimate. We automatically can produce several estimates. So where we've focused our solution is taking those estimates ⁓ and making that a really easy process to get from that estimate directly from the sales reps assessment, right? So directly from their information. Going back to that like pain point that we talked about, and then producing a very detailed report for that office estimator to then send into Xactimate. So we have a two-way integration with Xactimate. ⁓ whether they're using Symbolity or Xactimate or any other program, they can use those line items. But specifically for Xactimate, they can send those in and it'll actually automatically create a project with those same line items. ⁓ so where we're allowing people, what we're allowing people to do is take the information direct from that form. And create that detailed scope of work. So when they're out in the field, are they using an app on their phone that's walking them through what to do? Yeah, that's exactly right. So when they're out in the field, just to maybe paint a picture here, I'm a sales rep, I'm out in the field. ⁓ I might be using a canvassing app or I'm just going to an inbound lead. And then I pull up my service tighten app and arrive at the job. This is where that form comes into play. It's going to walk me through exactly what I should do on the homeowner's roof. It'll walk me through the information that I need to capture on my app. I'll be able to sh capture all of the images, et cetera, right into the app. So that data capture is going directly into Service Titan, which allows the office estimator in real time, right, to have the same information that the rep does. There's no disconnect or Time lag in between what the rep has seen and what the office estimator is able to see. Then, furthermore, because that information is captured in Service Titan, it automatically produces the exact amount category and selector codes by line item based on the damage that they said. So if they're like, okay, this is a full roof replacement, this is an asphalt roof, it's going to give you all of those. ⁓ exact met category and selector code. So it's almost instantly the office estimator would be able to see this is the scope of work in terms that they and the carrier are going to understand inside of Service Titan. Wow. That saves an incredible amount of time. Doesn't it? Yeah, definitely. Yeah. Yeah. And there's the other side of this too to there's a few different workflows contractors will know. And sometimes like ideal You're getting your scope of work out to the adjuster before you even go to that adjuster meeting. ⁓ so everybody can really be speaking in specificity by the time you get there. Contractors will know that doesn't always happen. So the other thing that we've built to support this workflow is an AI parser that takes an adjuster's PDF scope of work and parses it into those same exact category and selector code line items. So what this allows you to do is instead of taking a PDF that you got in an email and eyeballing it between you know your ⁓ scope of work and the adjuster scope of work or hand keying it into Xactimate, you can use our AI parser to just upload the PDF and then produce those line items in your ServiceTitan account. You can send that to Xactimate for pricing. ⁓ And then ultimately because it's a two-way sync, you can bring that pricing back into ServiceTitan. So Service Titan can ⁓ remain the source of truth, which again speeds up that whole ⁓ information loop. Got it, yeah. So, you know, they're Xactimate it traditionally ha you've needed kind of an expert, right? ⁓ somebody who understands that that program and the software and and a person in on your team that that's basically what they do. But it sounds like you guys have made it so that pretty much anybody can be s passing the information back and forth. Yeah, exactly. So it'll be up to the contractor who actually presses the button right and sends to Xactimate, but we've made it so that that can be anybody on your team. Anyone that's within Service Titan will be able to do that. ⁓ and I think the big thing that will resonate with contractors here is that, yeah, what you have you have people that right are experts in Xactimate. And those people on your team shouldn't be focused on just like getting things into Xactimate. They shouldn't just be focused on the translation of line items and doing this like arduous work of typing things in. What they should be focused on is what their expertise is in, which is understanding the damage, understanding the codes in the places that they work so that they can make sure that what's being covered by insurance is going to bring people up to code. ⁓ so we with taking this like act the manual work of hand keying out, it allows your supplement team and your office estimators to really focus on what matters and what their expertise is in. Yeah, yeah. This is a great example. ⁓ you know, the with AI saying it's not gonna take the job from someone, but it's going to allow that person to do more and focus on what's really important and not that the details, the little the data details, right? Right, exactly. Yeah. So really focus on that skilled work and focus their energy on You know, communicating in a way that's gonna speed up the whole process, be great for them, great for the adjuster, right? They're packaging up the images that go along with the line items. ⁓ they've built relationships with these adjusters. So keeping them focused on that rather than trying to like spelunk through data from a sales rep just to get even a picture of where where are we starting from? Yeah. Wow. ⁓ so how long have you guys had this integration with Xactimate? I'm curious. Yeah, this is super new. So we've just now ⁓ launched it into a beta. ⁓ and so we have customers using it in the field and live. ⁓ and we'll be expanding that throughout the next several months. Yeah, so you've probably gotten a little bit of feedback and are contractors happy? Yeah, so people are happy with it. The big things that we've needed to do as we this is like the purpose of beta in our RD program, is we have, you know, contractors that are at the forefront of technology working with us so that we can refine the feature before it hits mass market. ⁓ and so in this case some of the refinement has been obviously on the AI side. So we we're training a model to do that AI parsing and it's just going to get better and better. We've fed it a lot of PDFs, but there's more for it to learn. So that's been one piece. ⁓ and then the other piece has been making sure that we have the ⁓ entire Xactimate catalog, everything that people will need. ⁓ because Those that use Xactimate will know there's different action codes based on if you're doing remove or replace. ⁓ and there are different ⁓ sometimes we'll be passing back information that maybe doesn't have to do with the roof, but just happens to be on the adjuster's scope of work. ⁓ and we need our model to not break with that. So it's been working out those ⁓ types of kinks. Yeah. Wow. Okay, so so where does this go from here? Yeah. So We're really excited about where it goes from here, particularly if we open up to the entire lens of the problem space of insurance roofing and what some of the pain points are. So I just walked through that initial pain point of the sales rep to office estimator handoff and how that can add time. Another big thing that we see add time is on either end of that. So one is around canvassing, and that. ⁓ upfront actually finding the leads and having the right platform for that. ⁓ Excitingly, we're officially integrating with SPATIO, a leading canvassing and door-to-door sales partner. We've just kicked off that partnership. So we're super excited to build out that integration and make it even easier for data to flow seamlessly between SPATO and our platform. ⁓ That will help with that upfront getting the sales rep set up for success as they door knock and find the right leads. And secondly, in terms of where we go from here on the other end, right, of that initial scope of work, the supplement process. Every contractor, you know, this will resonate with them, that supplement process. Now you're doing the work, but there's back and forth on the really detailed line item level. And there's keeping track of all of these supplements you're doing, especially in a storm season when you've got a ton of claims going on. And so we're building out a claim and supplement tracking system so you can really See your pipeline of supplements where they are, understand exactly like what the next thing is to do ⁓ in that pipeline to keep your whole team organized around the same goal. Yeah, because I don't think there's a single claim that goes through without a supplement, right? Right. Right. Exactly. Yeah. And when it gets really busy, I've seen a lot of spreadsheets from teams that are, you know, keeping track of these things. ⁓ outside of any technology system. And so Service Titan as being that end-to-end ⁓ operating platform, we see our unique ⁓ value that we can bring is in bringing all of that information in to keep your team organized and then also offer you the analytics on the other end. So then you'll be able to more seamlessly understand, you know, how many supplements are you doing per claim? How successful are those? How successful are those by which carrier ⁓ which are really important to the strategy of the supplement team. ⁓ yeah. I mean, if you're if you're seeing that you're always having supplements on a certain area, then maybe that you could make some changes to address that ahead of time to try to reduce the amount of energy that you're spending in on those supplements. Right. Yeah. And if you can offer that, you know, data to the adjuster, you know, we've noticed that we typically end up supplementing for this. Let's talk about it ahead of time. That could be a huge unlock in terms of. time and just also relationship building with the adjuster. ⁓ so I think that that ⁓ data is really critical for contractors to continue in this insurance environment. Yeah, definitely. All right. So what's one thing that you would want a roofing owner to walk away with today after listening to this conversation? Yeah, the big thing I would want them to walk away with is that, you know, Service Titans investing a lot of Time and money into the insurance roofing industry and purpose building our platform. So if you're using a CRM today, it's worth asking if it's built for the insurance industry and sales rep's capabilities of the future. That's an area where we are really focused. ⁓ and we believe there's a big opportunity to provide roofers with ⁓ the software that helps their entire business succeed and helps their team stay ⁓ in real time connection with each other. Yeah, definitely. ⁓ this is really, really cool. It's exciting. ⁓ I love talking about new things and how technology can can take away pain points. And, you know, definitely insurance work is getting a lot easier now with ⁓ these solutions that you were talking about. It's great. Yeah, definitely. And from an RD program perspective, we're really looking forward to to some of the things that we'll be able to do on the sales rep experience side. You know, those people are the people that are ⁓ on the ground on the roof, so to speak, ⁓ and really can be your best information capture. And if they have this a smooth and seamless experience and something that's intuitive and easy to use, ⁓ that will just make your entire business easier, right? and so from to your point about new things, I just I think that's like the area ⁓ to really keep our eye on as an industry. ⁓ service tighten, ⁓ we're like looking into wearables and learning about drone technology and really like what can make that sales rep experience more ⁓ seamless, but also even more ⁓ like thorough data capture. So I think those are some of the like new and exciting things that I'm excited to ⁓ yeah, watch in the industry as well. Yeah, for sure. yeah, but we've got to embrace technology and and leverage it. ⁓ to make things easier and and help contractors be more successful. Exciting stuff. So, Jamie, where can someone learn more about Service Titan? Yeah, if you want to learn more about Service Titan, you can visit serviceTitan.com/slash roofing, reach out on our website and book a demo so you can see it in action. Excellent. And of course, Service Titan has a full directory on Roofers Coffee Shop. You can visit there and find their contact information and learn more about Service Titan. Jamie, thank you so much for being here. Yeah, thank you so much for having me, Karen. It was great to chat. Yeah, and thank you everyone out there for listening. Be sure to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform because we want to see you on a future episode. We'll see you next time. Bye. If you've enjoyed the ride, don't forget to hit that subscribe button and join us on every roofing adventure. Make sure to visit rooferscoffeeshop.com to learn more. Thanks for tuning in and we'll catch you on the next roofing road trip.