Jobber vs ServiceTitan: Electrical Job Surveys in 2026

Most electrical contractors who ask "should we be on Jobber or ServiceTitan?" are really asking a different question underneath: which platform will finally make the customer follow-up happen. It is a reasonable thing to hope for and the wrong place to look for it, because the follow-up rarely fails for lack of a feature. It fails because the send depends on a person remembering, at the end of a day that ran two hours long, that a survey exists.

The choice between field service platforms is a genuine decision with real consequences for dispatch, invoicing and reporting. It is not, on its own, the thing that gets a satisfaction survey in front of a homeowner ninety minutes after the panel cover goes back on.

TL;DR

• Post-job surveys fail mechanically, not culturally. Sending one by hand takes someone noticing a job closed, finding the contact, writing the message and later checking for a reply — four steps that collapse under route density.

• Both Jobber and ServiceTitan are credible field service platforms for electrical work, aimed at different firm sizes. Pick on dispatch, invoicing and reporting fit; do not pick expecting either to solve follow-up discipline by itself.

• The reliable trigger is a job-state change your platform already emits, not a calendar reminder. Everything downstream — the SMS, the score routing, the public review ask — hangs off that one event.

• In the illustrative model below, a four-crew contractor goes from 8.7 monthly office hours on surveys to 1.5, while surveyed jobs rise from 87 to 310.

The contractor this is written for

This is written for an owner or office manager at a firm somewhere between three and fifteen field electricians, running a mix of residential service calls and light commercial work, already on a field service platform they broadly like. If you are a two-person shop, the honest answer is that you probably do not need this yet — you know every customer's name and you will hear about a problem directly.

Illustrative firm bands for orientation, not survey data.

The scarcity underneath all of this is labour. According to the U.S. Department of Labor's O*NET OnLine, the median wage for electricians was $63,190 a year in 2025, with roughly 818,700 electricians employed as of 2024 and about 81,000 openings projected annually over the 2024–2034 period. In a trade with that much churn and that much hiring pressure, office hours spent retyping survey messages are hours not spent on recruiting, scheduling or collections.

There is a customer-side reason the follow-up matters more than it used to, as well. According to the Federal Reserve, 63% of adults said they could cover a $400 emergency expense entirely with cash, savings, or a card paid off at the next statement — meaning a sizeable minority could not. Unplanned electrical work lands squarely in that category, and a customer who stretched to pay for a panel repair is a customer whose experience is worth actively checking rather than assuming.

What chasing feedback by hand actually costs

The manual version is not expensive in dollars. It is expensive in the jobs it silently skips.

An illustrative model for a four-crew contractor at 310 completed jobs a month. The 6-minute send time, the 24% and 31% response-rate assumptions and the low-score catch rate are assumptions, not measured results — replace them with your own once the loop has run a quarter.

Read the second row rather than the last one. Surveyed jobs rise from 87 to 310 while office hours fall from 8.7 to 1.5. The manual shop is not doing the work badly; it is doing roughly a quarter of the work, and the missing three-quarters is where the unhappy customers are, because a technician who senses a job went sideways is not the person who volunteers it into the survey queue.

Response rates are the other half of the arithmetic, and they are worse than most owners assume. According to Pew Research Center, typical telephone survey response rates fell to 7% in 2017 and 6% in 2018, having previously held steady around 9%. That is a different population and a different survey type, but the direction is the point: any design that depends on a customer picking up a phone is designed against the grain. A single-question SMS sent while the van is still in the driveway is not.

The survey loop, from final wire to public review

The whole loop is five steps, and only one of them is a judgement call.

1. Fire on a job-state change, not a timer. When the job moves to complete in your field service platform, that state change is the trigger. This is the entire difference between a process that runs and one that runs when someone remembers.

2. Wait a deliberate interval. Ninety minutes to three hours is the common range for residential service work — long enough that the customer has seen the finished work and the invoice, short enough that the visit is still the most recent thing that happened to their house.

3. Ask one question. A single 1-to-5 rating with an optional comment box. Every additional question costs response rate, and you are not running market research; you are running a sensor.

4. Route by score, not to an inbox. Low scores page a human immediately. High scores get a public review invitation. Middle scores go to a weekly review list. A survey that lands in a shared inbox nobody owns is a survey that was never sent.

5. Close the loop publicly where it is warranted. Satisfied customers who leave a review deserve a reply, and that reply is itself automatable in draft form. The unanswered-review problem is worth solving alongside this one, and it is covered in stop unanswered reviews in electrical.

Timing expectations here are not a matter of taste. According to BrightLocal, 74% of consumers seek reviews written in the last three months, and 32% look for reviews written in the last two weeks — up from 20% the year before. A steady trickle of recent reviews is worth considerably more than a large stock of old ones, which is an argument for surveying every job rather than remembering to ask after the memorable ones.

US Tech Automations wires this loop against the platform a contractor already runs — the job-completion event, the delay, the single-question send, the score branch and the review invitation — rather than asking them to migrate their dispatch and invoicing to get it.

Worked example

Take a four-crew residential and light-commercial contractor whose satisfied customers are routed toward a public review. When a survey comes back at 4 or 5, the workflow sends a review invitation; when the review posts, the reply is drafted and published through the Google Business Profile API using accounts.locations.reviews.updateReply, with the incoming starRating value deciding which of 3 reply templates gets pre-filled for the office manager to approve. Across a 310-job month this produces roughly 74 review invitations and, at the response rates assumed in the model above, about 22 low-score alerts that reach a human within 15 minutes instead of surfacing publicly a week later. Replies are never auto-published below 4 stars — those route to a person, because a templated apology reads worse than silence to a customer who has just described a specific problem. The volumes, the 15-minute escalation and the 3-template split are configuration choices for an illustrative contractor, not measured outcomes; set your own thresholds against your job mix and your office capacity.

Before and after, on the same job volume

Holding job volume constant is the only honest way to compare, because a contractor who grows during the change will credit the automation with the growth.

Same illustrative 310-job month as the cost table above. "Before" figures describe a manual process where the send depends on the person who closed the ticket; treat every row as a modelled assumption until you have your own baseline.

The row worth arguing about is the second one. Sixty-two hours from job close to survey is not a criticism of anyone's diligence — it is what happens when the send sits behind an end-of-day admin block that competes with invoicing, parts ordering and tomorrow's schedule. Compressing it to two hours is not a discipline improvement. It is a change in what triggers the work.

The response side matters because customers now expect to be answered quickly in public too. According to BrightLocal, 89% of consumers expect business owners to respond to reviews, and 19% expect a same-day response — up sharply from 6% the year before. 89% of consumers expect owners to respond to their reviews. A contractor who only learns about a bad job when the review appears has already lost the window in which a same-day response was possible.

Jobber, ServiceTitan, and the layer above them

Both platforms are real, established choices for electrical contractors, and the sensible way to compare them is on firm size and operational fit rather than on any single feature.

Capability shapes and market positioning, not a feature-by-feature comparison. Feature sets and pricing change frequently — confirm current functionality, API availability and cost directly with each vendor before committing.

The practical answer to "Jobber or ServiceTitan" is that firms under roughly ten field staff usually find Jobber proportionate and firms well past that usually outgrow it, but the survey loop described here attaches to either. That is deliberate. Choosing an orchestration layer above the platform means a later migration costs you a reconnection, not a rebuild — the same argument applies to arrival notifications, covered in stop customers missing technician arrivals in electrical, and to rebooking, covered in no-show appointment follow-up for electrical contractors.

Questions electrical contractors ask

When should the survey actually go out?

Between ninety minutes and three hours after job completion for residential service work. Earlier and the customer may still have the van in the driveway; much later and the visit is competing with the rest of their day. For larger commercial jobs, wait until the day after final walkthrough — the person who signs off is often not the person who was on site.

Should we survey commercial customers the same way?

No. Commercial work has a different decision-maker, a longer close-out and often a formal handover document. A one-question SMS to a facilities manager reads as consumer-grade. Survey the commercial side on a monthly or per-project cadence with a named contact instead, and keep the automated SMS loop for residential service.

What counts as a low score worth paging someone about?

Anything at or below 3 on a 5-point scale, with no exceptions and no batching. The value of the sensor is entirely in its latency. A 2 that reaches a manager in fifteen minutes is a recoverable job; the same 2 discovered in a weekly report is a public review that already happened.

Does this replace asking for reviews?

It routes the ask rather than replacing it. The survey establishes who is satisfied, and only satisfied customers see a review invitation. That sequencing is what keeps the process honest — you are not filtering out criticism, you are handling it privately first and inviting the rest to speak publicly.

Will our technicians see this as surveillance?

They will if you present it as individual scoring, so do not. Report at crew and job-type level, use low scores to find process problems rather than people, and tell the field team what you are doing before the first survey goes out. Contractors who skip that conversation get technicians coaching customers on how to answer, which destroys the data.

How much of this works without changing platforms?

Nearly all of it, provided your platform exposes job-state changes to outside tooling. That is the one thing worth checking before you plan anything else, and it is a fair question to put to a vendor's sales engineer directly rather than inferring from a feature page.

Key Takeaways

• The platform choice and the follow-up problem are separate. Pick Jobber or ServiceTitan on dispatch, invoicing and reporting fit; neither one makes the survey happen by itself.

• Trigger on a job-state change. A calendar reminder competes with end-of-day admin and loses; an event does not.

• Ask one question. A single 1-to-5 rating survives the response-rate decline that longer instruments do not.

• Route by score with a hard latency target. Low scores at or below 3 should reach a human in minutes, because that is the entire value of the sensor.

• Recency beats volume in reviews. With 74% of consumers looking for reviews from the last three months, surveying every job beats remembering to ask after the good ones.

• Model your own baseline before quoting any of these numbers. The 310-job model here is illustrative; your send time, response rate and catch rate are the three you need to measure.

If you want the loop built onto the field service platform you already run, US Tech Automations connects the job-completion event, the timed send, the score routing and the review invitation without asking you to migrate dispatch. Pricing is set out at ustechautomations.com.