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Missing a call from a new customer doesn't feel like a crisis in the moment. You're in the field, hands full, mid-service. The phone rings, you can't answer, and whoever it was moves on to the next name in their search results.

That's the quiet growth problem that's plagued small pool service companies for years. Bigger operators pick up. Smaller ones don't. And the business gap between them keeps widening.

Skimmer's Niki Acosta and board member Hal Denbar joined David Van Brunt on the Pool Guy Podcast recently to talk through Skimmer’s new AI phone feature; what it does, how it works, and why one customer made back seven months of subscription cost in the first ten minutes.

Why the phone problem matters more than people think

Hal spent years running one of the larger pool service operations in the country. He watched smaller competitors lose customers not because of pricing or quality, but because nobody picked up the phone.

"So much of our growth would come from a customer that had called two or three smaller companies where nobody picked up the phone," he said on the podcast. "We would by default get those customers because we were going to always pick up the phone in a way the smaller companies couldn't."

That dynamic is starting to shift. AI phone is designed to make sure every inbound call gets a response — not a voicemail, not a callback request — an actual conversation that can qualify a lead, collect contact details, answer pool-related questions, and route the call based on rules you set.

What the product actually does

AI phone is built into Skimmer, which means it has access to your customer data from day one. You're not connecting a third-party bot to a separate system; it's already working with what's in your account.

When a call comes in, the system can:

• Answer during specified hours or around the clock
• Ask intake questions that you design — pool type, address, what they're calling about
• Create a new customer record automatically for new callers
• Route the call to you based on conditions you set (new customers, after-hours emergencies, specific keywords)
• Log the call and store it inside Skimmer

Niki described it this way: "If it's a new customer and maybe you want that call to come to you, you can make sure that it's forwarded to you. Either way, all of the data is collected, the call is collected and stored inside of Skimmer."

You can also build custom knowledge into the system. If a caller mentions smoke coming from equipment, the agent can flag it as urgent, advise them to stay clear, and immediately transfer the call or trigger a follow-up. That's not a generic chatbot — that's a configured, trained agent that understands pool service context.

How it performs under pressure

Before AI phone launched, Hal stress-tested it the way any skeptical caller would.

"I know all the ways I could fool somebody in the office if I was calling as a customer," he said. "I was throwing every curveball at it I could, and it was handling it expertly. I mean, it was handling it better than if you had hired somebody for your office and they're a month or two into the job, even six months to a year in the job. Once it knows it, it knows it."

That's the practical case for AI-assisted call handling. A new office hire needs weeks of onboarding. They'll still mishandle edge cases six months in. A well-trained AI agent doesn't forget, doesn't get tired, and doesn't go quiet after 5 p.m.

The math is straightforward

AI Phone is $99/month, with a 30-day free trial. If your average monthly service account generates even one new customer, the feature pays for itself. Most pool service companies bill well above that per account.

Larry Earl, a Skimmer customer in Arizona, started using AI Phone three weeks before the podcast recorded. He'd already brought in 200 new customers. Within the first ten minutes of setup, he had two sales from calls he would have missed in the field.

"Yeah, within the first 10 minutes, this thing already paid for itself for like the next seven months," Niki said.

Getting set up

Setup takes about 10 minutes. The system scans your website, pulls in your business information, and gives you an editable profile that includes hours, service areas, custom intake questions, and escalation rules.

From there, you can layer in as much custom knowledge as you want. The more context you give it, the better it performs. But even out of the box, it's trained on pool industry data and can handle most common service calls without configuration.

You need to be a Skimmer customer to use AI Phone. If you're not on Skimmer yet, you can start a free trial at www.getskimmer.com.

The bigger picture

AI phone isn't a standalone gimmick. It fits into what Skimmer is building — a tighter, simpler tech stack where your system of record handles more of what used to require separate tools, separate logins, and separate costs.

The goal, as Hal put it, is straightforward: "I'd go to trade shows for years, and the biggest complaint is, I have 15 things in my tech stack. Can't something just do all of it?"

AI phone is one less thing that needs to live outside Skimmer. And for a solo operator or small crew who can't afford a full-time receptionist, it's the difference between missing growth and capturing it.