Reputation management setup and best practices in ServiceTitan Max

Overview

Reputation Management is part of Marketing. It powers three things that work together inside the Demand Capture & Online Booking workflow: listings management (so customers can find you in local search), automated review generation (so happy customers leave reviews that lift your rankings), and centralized review management (so you can respond to feedback from one place instead of jumping between Google, Facebook, and Yext).

Because ServiceTitan Max bundles Contact Center alongside Marketing, every review survey reply, every "I saw your reviews" inbound call, and every booked job ties back into the same customer record — so reputation isn't a standalone marketing function, it's the front end of how new demand enters your business.

This article walks through the full setup sequence and the best practices we recommend for each phase.

How Reputation Management fits the ServiceTitan Max workflow

In a ServiceTitan Max account, reputation, contact center, and scheduling are connected:

• Reviews drive search visibility. Google reviews and accurate local listings determine whether you show up when a homeowner searches for a service. More five-star reviews on the right listings means more inbound calls.

• Calls land in Contact Center. The inbound calls that reviews generate route through Contact Center, where CSRs book them as jobs. Tracking phone numbers tie each booked job back to the marketing source.

• Jobs trigger surveys. When a technician completes a job, a survey trigger fires, asking the customer to leave a review — which feeds the next cycle.

When you set up Reputation, you are not setting up a standalone marketing tool. You are closing the loop that turns service delivery into the next round of demand capture.

Activation sequence

There are five things to set up, in this order:

1. Activate Reputation in Marketing and add your locations.

2. Connect your Google and Facebook accounts via Yext.

3. Configure survey triggers and launch your first review survey.

4. Set up review response workflows.

Steps 1 through 3 happen inside ServiceTitan; step 4 is an ongoing operational practice you should set up before you start collecting reviews at scale.

Step 1: Activate Reputation and add your locations

After your account is configured, activate Reputation in Marketing.

1. Go to the navigation bar and click Marketing.

2. In the pop-up window that opens, click Activate Account

This opens the Activate Reputation page with all three in-product steps to get started:

• Step 1 Add Locations — Create Locations for your business to power listings management, review management, and review generation in Marketing Reputation.

• Step 2 Connect to Google & Facebook — Connect your Google and Facebook accounts to ServiceTitan via Yext.

• Step 3 Launch Your First Review Survey — Start generating online reviews and boost your local search presence.

Add Locations

1. Click Add Locations.

2. In the Add Locations pop-up window that opens, choose how you want to add your locations. Options include:        

   • Import from Google Business Locations — Find and import your business location information directly from Google. We recommend this option if you have management access to your business locations in Google Business Profiles.

   • Manually Add Single Location — Manually add your business location information. Use this option if you do not have access to your Google Business Profiles account. For more, see Create Locations in Reputation Management.

3. After you add your locations, click View Locations to check their statuses.

Note: Any locations that fail to activate show as Cancelled. You can click Delete to remove these locations and retry adding them.

Import from Google Business Locations

1. From the Add Locations pop-up window, select Import from Google Business Locations then click Next.

2. In the pop-up window that opens, click Authorize.

3. Select which locations you want to import then click Next to proceed to the Associate Business Units step.

4. Each location must have at least one associated Business Unit (BU). To associate BUs with a location, click Associate BUs, select all BUs that apply, and click Apply.

5. (Optional) Click Edit to review and make any necessary changes to the location data you are importing. When finished, click Save. For more, see Create Locations in Reputation Management.

6. Click Next to proceed to the Activate Local Listings step.

7. Turn the Local Listings toggle on or off for locations as needed. When this toggle is on, Reputation links this location's data across your search sites. If you use a different vendor for managing your listings but still want to use Reputation for reviews, turn this toggle off.

Note: You cannot enable this option if another vendor is managing your local listings. To transfer the listings to ServiceTitan, you must request an ownership transfer from your current vendor. See Submit ownership transfer request for listing below.

1. Click Next.

Best practices for locations

• Associate every location with at least one Business Unit. This is what links reviews and survey responses back to the right team in your reporting. Locations without BUs cannot attribute reviews correctly, which makes it harder to spot which crews or markets are driving feedback.

• Use Google import whenever possible. Manual entry introduces small inconsistencies in address formatting, NAP (Name, Address, Phone) data, and category selection that hurt local search rankings. Importing pulls verified Google data directly.

• Decide on Local Listings before you flip the toggle. If another vendor manages your listings today, do the ownership transfer first — turning Local Listings on with an active conflict will fail. If you only want Reputation for review generation and response, leave the toggle off and skip the transfer entirely.

Step 3: Connect to Google & Facebook

Connecting your Google and Facebook accounts must be completed to use all the features available in Reputation Management — including responding to reviews directly from ServiceTitan and seeing review activity in your dashboard.

1. Click Connect via Yext.

2. Click Sign In via Yext to sign in to your Google and Facebook accounts via Yext.

Sign in via Yext for Google

1. Click Sign In via Yext for Google.

2. On the Link Your Google Business Profiles Accounts page that opens in Yext, select your location under Match Entities.

3. On the page that opens, select a Location Group for your location.

4. In the Potential Matches, select the listing that matches your location.

Note: If none of the potential matches match your location, you can search using a store code or create a new listing.

5. Click Continue.

6. Verify your Google Business profile listing then click Save.

7. In the Confirm Submission pop-up window that opens, click Confirm.

8. Repeat steps 2–7 for each location.

9. Click Continue to return to the Activate Reputation page.

Sign in via Yext for Facebook

1. Click Sign In via Yext next to Facebook.

2. Log in to your Facebook account.

3. Connect your Facebook account in Yext. Once complete, you will be returned to the Reputation Activation page.

Best practices for connecting review platforms

• Connect both Google and Facebook even if Facebook isn't a priority for you. Even low-volume Facebook review activity contributes to your overall online presence. Connecting both means every review surfaces in one place and you don't miss responses on a platform you weren't checking.

• Verify match accuracy at the entity-match step. Yext shows potential matches based on name and address proximity. Take the time to verify the match is exact — connecting Reputation to the wrong listing means you start managing the wrong reviews. If no match is correct, search by store code.

• Have the admin account holder do the sign-in. Yext authentication uses the credentials of whoever is logged in. If a non-admin signs in, the connection may succeed but lack the permissions needed to post review responses.

Step 4: Configure survey triggers and launch your first review survey

Launching a review survey is recommended to be done immediately to start generating online reviews and boost your local search presence.

Note: You need to have an outbound SMS phone number configured before you can launch the survey. If you do not, you will be prompted to add one.

1. Click Create Survey.

2. Review the survey settings and message content. The pre-built survey aligns with best practices to maximize your response rate. 

3. (Optional) Click Edit to make changes to the message content if needed. In the Edit Prompt pop-up that opens, make your changes and click Confirm.

4. When ready, click Save Survey > Launch Survey Now to launch this survey. Or, click Save Survey as Draft to launch it later.

5. Click Complete Activation at the top of the screen.

How survey triggers work

A survey trigger is the condition that causes a review request to send. The most common trigger is job completion — when a technician marks a job complete in the field, the trigger fires and sends an SMS or email asking the customer to leave a review.

In ServiceTitan Max, this trigger sits at the intersection of Field (the technician completing the job on ServiceTitan Mobile) and Marketing Reputation (the message that goes out). Because Contact Center is also in the bundle, any reply or follow-up call from the customer comes back through the same contact record — the loop closes itself.

Best practices for survey triggers and review generation

• Send surveys after the final walkthrough, not when the technician leaves. Especially on install or multi-visit jobs, the customer's perception of the experience changes between when work ends and when they have lived with the result for a day. Triggering off true job completion gives you a higher and more accurate response rate.

• Use SMS, not email, as the primary channel. SMS response rates for review surveys are several times higher than email. Keep email as a backup for customers who have opted out of marketing texts.

• Don't over-edit the pre-built template. The default survey copy is calibrated for response rate. Light personalization (technician first name, business name) is helpful; rewriting the entire message rarely is.

• Cap to one survey per customer per job. Sending repeat survey requests for the same job feels like nagging and trains customers to ignore future communications. If a customer doesn't respond, let the cycle pass and try again on their next job.

• Match reviews to jobs as soon as they come in. When a Google review comes in, Reputation tries to match it to the originating job automatically. Manually match any unmatched reviews weekly — this is what makes review activity show up in your job and BU reporting.

Step 5: Manage review responses

Once reviews start coming in, set up the workflow for responding to them. Review responses are managed directly in Reputation — you do not need to log into Google or Facebook separately.

In Reputation, you can:

• See all incoming reviews across connected publishers in one feed.

• Respond to reviews (the response posts back to the originating platform).

• Match reviews to specific jobs for reporting attribution.

• Resend review requests for jobs where no review came in yet.

• Manage removed customer reviews and review requests.

For procedural detail, see Manage reviews, Manage review responses, and Match reviews.

Best practices for review responses

• Respond to every review — positive and negative. Google's algorithm weights response rate. Businesses that respond to all reviews rank higher than businesses that only respond to negative ones, all else equal.

• Respond within 24 hours. Speed matters for two reasons: it signals attentiveness to prospects reading the review, and it shows the reviewer their feedback was seen. A response three weeks later reads like an afterthought.

• Turn on AI-Autonomous auto-responders for 4- and 5-star reviews. In Settings > Marketing Pro > Reputation Management > Google Auto Responders, set the 4-star and 5-star ratings to AI mode. Titan Intelligence reads each review and writes a response tailored to its specific content, then posts it to Google automatically — no template pool to maintain and no manual approval step. Set 1-, 2-, and 3-star reviews to manual response only.

• Personalize, don't templatize. Boilerplate responses ("Thanks for your feedback!") are obvious and degrade trust. Reference something specific from the review — the technician's name, the type of work, the customer's situation. This takes 30 extra seconds and reads dramatically differently.

• Use response language that ranks. Mention your service area, the service performed, and the trade in the response. This adds keyword relevance to your Google Business Profile over time.

• Set a daily review cadence, not a real-time one. Checking once or twice a day is enough. Real-time monitoring of reviews leads to rushed, emotional responses — especially to negative reviews — that hurt more than they help.

Step 6: Use Listings Management

Listings Management is enabled by the Local Listings toggle you set during location activation. When on, Reputation publishes your location's NAP (Name, Address, Phone), hours, categories, and other business details to a network of search and directory sites through Yext.

This matters because inconsistent listings hurt local search rankings. If your phone number is different on Google than on Yelp than on your own website, Google trusts the data less and ranks the business lower in local results.

To use Listings Management:

• Keep one source of truth (your locations in Reputation) and let Yext propagate changes everywhere else.

• Update locations in Reputation any time something changes — moving offices, new phone number, expanded hours, added service categories. Manually updating each directory is what creates inconsistencies.

• Review publisher coverage periodically. Reputation shows which publishers are receiving your data. For more, see Review publishers that receive your location data.

Best practices for listings management

• Audit your NAP for exact consistency before turning Local Listings on. Even small variations ("Street" vs "St.") confuse search algorithms. Pick one canonical format and use it everywhere.

• Use specific Google categories, not broad ones. "HVAC contractor" outperforms "Contractor" for the relevant search queries. Pick the most specific category that accurately describes the primary service at that location, then add secondary categories.

• Keep hours accurate, especially for holidays. Listing your business as "Open" when you are closed is one of the most common ways to generate a negative review. Update hours in Reputation before holidays, not during them.

• Photos count. Locations with photos on Google Business Profile get materially more clicks. Use Reputation to keep photos current — work-in-progress shots, team photos, completed jobs. Avoid stock imagery.

Submit ownership transfer request for listing

If another vendor manages your local listings, you must submit an ownership transfer to ServiceTitan to manage those listings in Reputation.

To submit an ownership transfer request:

1. If you don't know the vendor currently managing your listings, send the following email to LocationConflict@yext.com with your information. If you know your vendor, skip to the next step.

"I currently have listings service through Yext or a Yext Partner, but I would like to work with ServiceTitan. My information is below:

• • Business Name:

  • Address:

  • Phone Number:

  • Contact:

Can you please provide the Name and Contact information of my current provider so I can contact them to cancel?"

1. When you know your current vendor, send the following email to cancel their services:

"I would like to cancel my Yext Listings service with you so I can work with another Yext Partner. Please cancel the Listings service effective today."

After you have canceled services with your previous vendor, you can manage your listings in Reputation.

Want to learn more?

• See Manage reviews

• See Manage review responses

• See Match reviews

• See Use Marketing Reputation analytics