Customer Name Formatting in Marketing Pro

[bradsd]

Hello ServiceTitan Community! We are running into an issue with how we store names in ServiceTitan and would love your help. At our company, we store customer names in a Last Name, First Name format and this is causing problems with our Marketing Pro tags because Marketing Pro is expecting a {First Name}, but getting a last name from our records instead. I have spoken with our customer success manager and there is a work around for Marketing Pro Email (namely, using the opposite tag to pull the correct info), but apparently not for Direct Mail and SMS. Short of revising 33k+ customer records, does anyone have ideas about how we can solve this issue? Thank you in advance for your help!

[scottf_GBO]

We're not using Marketing Pro, but we do use the Last, First format.  I know that there is a setting in ST that takes everything after the comma and moves it before when going to estimates and invoices so that it reads "First Last".  Not sure if that same setting would help with MarketingPro. 

PS: if you use this feature you cannot input a customer name as "Company, Inc" or it will read as "Inc Company" on the estimates and invoices.

[PamDuffy-PCG · Accepted solution]

Unfortunately, I don't have a solution for you re: Direct Mail and SMS. I hope that ServiceTitan eventually switches to a First Name and Last Name fields (here is an idea I created that you can upvote!  Separate First Name Field and Last Name Field in Customer and Location Profiles )

For your MarketingPro emails though, I'd double check that your merge tags are working as expected. I understand that MarketingPro email has its own logic for detecting the LastName, FirstName format and automatically reverses them. Look at a recent email sent to a customer and see if their first or last name was in the email - that way you know for sure if it's working or not! 

[bradsd]

Hi Pam, I just checked a recent email and the customer's last name was used where the first name was supposed to be. I believe I used the {customer first name} tag in the email, which pulled the last name because of our Last, First naming convention. So perhaps I should change this to {customer last name} instead?

[PamDuffy-PCG]

What I would do is test it. Create a dummy customer with TestCustomerLastName, TestCustomerFirstName as the customer name. Create a EMAIL TEST tag. Apply tag to test customer. Then create a marketing pro email with an audience of just that tag. In the body of the email put in all the merge tags in all the ways you want to test it. Just a blank email like: 

FULL NAME = Hello {{customerfullname}}

FIRST THEN LAST = Hello {{customerfirstname}} {{customerlastname}}

LAST THEN FIRST = Hello {{customerlastname}} {{customerfirstname}}

I'd love to hear how it goes! 

[bradsd]

Excellent idea, I will try this!

[bradsd]

Thank you for this info! I upvoted your idea and hope ServiceTitan decides to implement it!

Great idea to check a recent email for merge tags. I will do just that. Appreciate the help.