SKIMMER AI Phone - Never Miss A Lead!

The fastest way to lose a new pool service customer is painfully simple: let the call go to voicemail while you’re out on route. I sit down with Niki Acosta and Hal Denbar from Skimmer to talk about a practical use of AI that actually earns its keep, an AI phone receptionist built specifically for pool businesses. We get into what AI should do for operators, save time, reduce interruptions, and stop real revenue leaks, instead of adding another shiny tool to the pile.

Niki breaks down how Skimmer’s AI Phone works day to day: answering during the hours you choose, asking the questions you design, and routing calls based on rules for existing customers versus brand-new leads. The system can collect contact info, address, service area details, and even pool type, then store the call data inside Skimmer and create a customer record automatically. We also talk about “custom knowledge” so you can embed troubleshooting steps and safety escalations, like when a caller reports smoke or a potential equipment hazard.

Hal zooms out on what this means for growth in the pool industry. Bigger companies used to win by default because they could always pick up the phone. If a small operator can answer every call with an AI voice agent, the playing field shifts. We also dig into how to choose pool service software the smart way: stability, security, business continuity, and the ability to integrate with the rest of your tech stack through APIs and webhooks. If you’re looking for pool route software, field service management tools, and a realistic approach to AI automation, this one delivers.

Subscribe, share this with a pool pro who misses too many calls, and leave a review with your biggest customer communication headache. What would you want an AI receptionist to handle first?

We talk with Niki Acosta and Hal Denbar from Skimmer about why missed calls quietly crush pool service growth and how an AI phone receptionist can fix it without adding office overhead. We also get honest about AI hype, what “real” time savings look like, and why software stability and security matter as much as flashy features.  
• AI overwhelm and a simple test for value: does it reduce real work  
• How Skimmer AI Phone answers calls and routes them by rules  
• Capturing lead details automatically and creating new customer records  
• Using custom knowledge for troubleshooting, escalations, and safety  
• Why always answering calls changes the growth advantage of big companies  
• Pricing, 30-day free trial, and what setup looks like in practice  
• What to look for in pool route software: uptime, security, long-term support  
• Building an integration ecosystem with APIs, webhooks, CRMs, and ERPs  
• Making software simple for techs in the field and back office teams  
Are you a pool service pro looking to take your business to the next level? Join the pool guy coaching program. Get expert advice, business tips, exclusive content, and get direct support from me. I'm a 35-year veteran in the industry. Whether you're starting out or scaling up, I've got the tools to help you succeed. Learn more at swimmingpoollearning.com.  
If you want to try Skimmer for free, simply go to my website, swimmingpoollearning.com, and click on the skimmer banner that's on the home page of the website.  
And if you want more podcasts, you can also go to that same site, swimmingpoollearning.com. On the banner, there's a podcast icon. Click on that, and there'll be over 1900 podcasts there for you to listen to at your leisure.  
And if you're interested in the coaching program, you can learn more at pullguycoaching.com.  

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Transcript

Welcome And What’s Coming

SPEAKER_02 0:14

Hey, welcome to the Pool Grey Podcast Show. In today's episode, I'll be joined by Nikki Acosta and Hal Denbar of Skimmer, and we're going to talk about their new AI phone system, which is going to revolutionize pool businesses across the industry. And they're going to go into a deep dive of how their new AI phone will take your pool service to the next level. Are you a pool service pro looking to take your business to the next level? Join the pool guy coaching program. Get expert advice, business tips, exclusive content, and get direct support from me. I'm a 35-year veteran in the industry. Whether you're starting out or scaling up, I've got the tools to help you succeed. Learn more at swimmingpoollearning.com. So I'll jump right in. So I'm joined today by Nikki Acosta and Hal Denbar, and they're from Skimmer, of course. And how are you guys doing today?

SPEAKER_00 1:10

I'm great. Yeah, really excited to have Hal on our board here at Skimmer. It's been pretty great to have him as part of our extended crew here.

SPEAKER_02 1:20

Yeah, and Hal has an extensive history in the industry, and everyone in the industry knows

AI Hype Versus Real Time Savings

SPEAKER_02 1:25

him, hopefully, and they know his influence in the industry over the years. And I'm glad to be able to uh catch up with him again. And of course, uh Nikki here. And we can just jump right in and talk about some things, some talking points here. And I think the biggest thing on people's minds is AI and how it will impact the industry and how useful it will be in the industry. And of course, since you have a software company and you're you're based on helping cool pros with the routing, AI probably is going to play a bigger and bigger part in these routing softwares. So you want to touch on how AI actually is being used today in in business, but specifically in making the job easier for people. Because I think ultimately that's what AI is designed for and what it should be used for, is to make life easier, not to take over and become like your the front-facing part of your business. And of course, my son is actually gonna start college this year, but I really feel for all those kids that are just growing up in an AI generation where I think how you're probably my age where you remember card catalogs in the library.

SPEAKER_01 2:39

Oh, yeah, totally. And I've got a kid going into college next year, so we're going to the college.

SPEAKER_02 2:44

I always think this next generation growing up, you know, five, six-year-olds, and they can just look in their device and get an answer for anything. It's kind of scary that it's going to, I don't know. My my thing is it's going to dumb down the nation, but that's just how I look at it. But I think AI does have the potential on the other end of the spectrum to help businesses. So let's address that part of it. We don't want to get into the other thing because that was controversial.

SPEAKER_00 3:10

Yeah. Look, there's no doubt that AI is changing businesses everywhere and also the way that people live on a day-to-day basis. And it's come so fast. And the I think a lot of folks right now are feeling like they don't either have the time or the know-how to properly evaluate or test different solutions that are out on the market. If they do, you know, a lot of folks are using them for pretty sort of rudimentary

AI Phone Results And Fast ROI

SPEAKER_00 3:38

reasons, whether that's like help me respond to a customer review or, you know, help help me draft an email. Or but we are seeing some people, um, especially some of our customers that are making really big moves with AI. And one of the things that we did recently was we launched AI Phone. It's an AI receptionist service. And I was talking to a gentleman named Larry Earl out of Arizona. He just adopted this three weeks ago. He's already had 200 new customers come in. Within the first 10 minutes of implementing it, he had two sales from calls that he would have otherwise missed because he's a very small operation and he's in the field all day. So I think when it comes to AI, if it is saving time and reducing real work, great. If it's not, it's probably hype. And we see this a lot with a lot of the vibe coding solutions that are being put up and out everywhere, being promoted. There are obviously really big concerns with adopting a platform that is built on a foundation that may not be stable or secure. And I think everyone everywhere should kind of be aware of that hype that's out there. You know, you can you can take a vibe coded solution and put some marketing spin on it. We're being very cautious uh in our RD efforts and making sure that anything that we put out around AI is validated and tested and trained on actual pool data and that it is going to meet the needs of our customers because we don't, we don't want any to put anything in front of anyone that's going to be hallucinating or giving people bad information or creating bad experiences for our customers or their customers.

SPEAKER_01 5:20

I think one of the interesting things situation we're in right now is we're in AI overwhelm right. I mean, there's so many products, there's so many solutions, there's so many ways to manipulate data, whether in the existing system or with you know some new shiny toy. And it's it's right now, I think we're just in this stage of like what's real and what's not real and what and what and what isn't, you know, and what's gonna be a waste of time. It's it's like it's fun to play with all these toys. I mean, I I have a lot of time on my hands right now because I'm currently not not running a business. And so I've been I've been playing with lots of them. And it's, you know, what's gonna be here tomorrow? And I think that's the biggest question where it's you know, we see AI as a solution to saving time, but I think there's

How Skimmer AI Phone Works

SPEAKER_01 6:01

a lot of people out there that I know I'm one of them. I feel like I'm also wasting a lot of time right now because I'm playing with all sorts of things and uh who knows what's gonna stick and what's not.

SPEAKER_02 6:10

Yeah, and so with this, this is more or less something that I think is a good use of AI. And how does the phone system work, Nikki? How like a how does a skimmer, someone who has using the app, how do they implement this in their business?

SPEAKER_00 6:24

Yeah, sure. So it's it's all set up and offered through Skimmer. And what happens is you can set it to answer during certain times, or you can basically put in custom knowledge that will allow routing rules for a call to be transferred. So for example, if you have an existing customer that calls after five o'clock, you can have it ask a series of questions that you get to design and you get to create. And we have guides that that give people really great examples on this. 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. If it's somebody that you've not spoken to before that is a potential new client, it go ahead, it goes ahead and creates that customer record, collects phone number, email address. You can have it collect, you know, zip code, address, any kind of information you want to collect, what kind of pool or spa you're going to be servicing? Is it fiberglass? Is it, you know, is it something else? So it's really, really powerful in the sense that it can be programmed, but even out of the box, it's really good at just handling any kind of pool-related questions that come in. It's not going to say, oh, what's a pump? You know, like what are you talking about? Like we've we've taken a lot of time to make sure that it's trained using the data that we have inside of Skimmer and with some of our industry expertise and knowledge.

SPEAKER_01 7:52

This was one of the things that I was the most excited about when I joined the Skimmer board and saw saw the AI call agent on the roadmap well before it was it was recently released. Because I know that you know in in my past life, I was already looking at solutions for this kind of this kind of product. And the what Skimmer's delivering is much cheaper than a lot of the solutions that are out there. And and most importantly, it's already tied into the system of record, right? So it's already got all the data it needs, uh, it knows exactly where to put things. But what as you know, as I saw this on the skimmer roadmap, you know, the first thing that popped into my mind is how does this change the paradigm of growth for pool service companies? In that historically, you know, like I for a lot of my career, I was sort of the big guy in the industry. You know, we we had a big local company and then we had a big regional national company. And so much of our growth would come from a customer that had called two or three smaller companies that nobody picked up the phone. So we would by default get those customers because we were gonna always pick up the phone in a way that the smaller companies couldn't. Now that the smaller companies with a tool like this are gonna be picking up every one of those phone calls, it's gonna be really interesting to see where the growth in this industry lies. Those small companies that get the first call can now pick them up and get that customer, you know, robbing them before the the the bigger companies get them. It really evens the playing field and and alleviates that weak point for in it that's a huge struggle and pain point for so many smaller companies out there.

SPEAKER_00 9:20

If you're a small company, it's it's it's probably not financially feasible to handle or to hire an an office receptionist. Like you just there's not enough, enough money sometimes to do that. But for 99 bucks a month, I'll reference our customer Larry again. He's like, yeah, within the first 10 minutes, this thing already paid for itself for like the next seven months.

SPEAKER_02 9:40

If we just get one account, it pays for itself. I mean, that's that's pretty basic math. I think, you know, there's a lot of reasons why pool pros don't pick up the phone. About in the field, it's hard to pick up the phone. And it's also one of those things

Setup Steps Pricing And Safety Rules

SPEAKER_02 9:55

that a lot of a lot of us are tired after a certain time of day, you know, 4 p.m., 5 p.m. We don't want to be fielding calls in the evening when we're off. And so, you know, for those reasons, I think this is a great service, a great add-on with Skimmer. And let's just let's just wrap this up by by let's say I'm a pool pro and I use Skimmer. How do I access this service? How do I implement it? Is it pretty easy to set up if I wanted to start doing this?

SPEAKER_00 10:22

Absolutely. So we have a step-by-step walkthrough guide right inside of our product. You have to be a skimmer customer to use AI phone. It's $99 a month, but we have a free trial for 30 days so people can try it and test it. Uh, we've been validating and adding functionality to make sure that we have the correct permissions and rules that we, if you're using like a Google Phone or some other uh VOIP solution, that you can comfortably integrate this without running into any sort of conflicts. Uh, but it's it's super easy to set up. I mean, setting it up probably takes 10 minutes. It goes, it scans your website, it pulls in all your information. From there, you can edit anything that you want to edit, whether that's your business hours or areas that you service. And then I would say take the time to get into the custom knowledge and implement the custom knowledge because you can put troubleshooting steps in there. You can, anytime someone says, you know, there's smoke coming from something, you can say, okay, automatically transfer that to me, or advise them, you know, to stay clear of the area and we'll get back with them as soon as possible. So there's some really, really good sort of safety things that you can embed in there as well that can handle escalations and handle, you know, basic troubleshooting until which time you can call them back.

SPEAKER_01 11:34

And it is really freaking good. I know all the ways I could fool somebody in the office if I was calling as a customer. As we were setting this up in test use cases, I mean, I was throwing every curveball at it I could, and it was handling it expertly. I mean, it was handling it better than you know, if you did 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. I mean, it it once it knows it, it knows it. And it was very I I could not fool it a single time as I was trying to.

SPEAKER_02 12:00

I I think people are are also accustomed to these AI phone services now and not getting a human. So it's not going to be off-putting to anyone calling. I think maybe three or four years ago, there'd be a lot of pushback getting a computer answering the phone versus now, where I don't think you can ever call anything or any company and get a human right away, anyway. So it's just common. I had a friend that worked in Amazon, maybe a queer job at one point, but he got laid off with 2,000 other coworkers, and everything is done through this AI chat that they have now that's

Picking Software That Won’t Fail

SPEAKER_02 12:34

pretty advanced for Amazon. So I think it's it's something that people are going to uh again not push back at, and it's a service that I think it's just what AI is gonna be useful for in business. Again, like I mentioned, AI is a great tool for business and maybe not so great in other aspects. But with that said, now that you have this service, and of course Gimmer has a whole bunch of other services that are available, how does somebody pick the right software now? Because you know, you're not the only software that's available, of course. You're the best software that's available for routing, but there's other softwares out there. So, you know, coming from a perspective, you're on the board now, so you kind of got an inside view of it. What makes Skimmer the obvious choice out there? I'll just say it that way.

SPEAKER_01 13:29

Yeah, so you know, I can tell you this was a big part of my decision to join Skimmer. And you know, I think for for all business owners, the biggest threat to your business is business interruption. You know, if you if you are running the entire operation on a single piece of software, it it failing or going down is catastrophic to your business. And even if it's not completely catastrophic, it can cause major damage. And seeing the resource that mainsail partners brought in behind Skimmer, I've I've known the main sale uh folks for quite a while. They're in Austin, I'm in Austin. Um so I was already familiar. I've seen their track record of when they touch something, they create winners and very sustainable winners. And it's it's very different when you have a true organization that has the level of support they have, as opposed to, you know, if you've got a single operator, you know, five code or somebody out there, I mean, that person gets hit by a bus or that person goes through a divorce and their life gets upended, or they just lose interest in whatever project they're working on, you know, you've entrusted your entire business into that. And if if something in their life derails their ability to continue it, you're the one that's going to pay the price for that. Beyond the fact that just the security layers that go into it, data protection, all those kinds of things, hugely important, right? Beyond the fact that we're, you know, our customers are trusting us to get access into their yard and get access to their you know credit cards and financial data. We're also trusting whatever the system we're using with all that same information of ours, right? And so for me, it's always been, you know, what's what is gonna be here and make sure I'm protected. You know, features and things like that can always be upgraded, can always be built. And and you know, that that that was a huge attraction to Skimmer, knowing again with the resource how aggressively they can attack that. I mean, the people they had on the team to do it. But above all else, to me, it's always about, you know, is my company gonna be here because the system my company runs on gonna be here.

SPEAKER_02 15:22

That's a great point as far as that. And what about the the features? If you're comparing features, obviously there's some redundancy in the softwares. It's gonna be like that with anything you're using out there in any platform. So with these redundancies and features, and of course, skimmer has the AI phone now. There's other things that you're I think it's more of an integrated system now for a lot of these things. Like the pool guy doesn't want to go from one app to another.

Integrations And A Simpler Tech Stack

SPEAKER_02 15:51

You don't want to go from Skimmer to Arenda and then back in. You want everything like in one spot. So you want to talk a little bit about the integration that Skimmer has, and maybe that's a deciding factor for some pros out there.

SPEAKER_00 16:05

Yeah, sure. What what I will say is we we recently, I guess it's been a little bit longer than recently, but we had a gentleman named Brian Yum join our company who leads our integration strategy. And what I can share is that we recognize that connected ecosystems are where it's at. You know, Skimmer is never going to be able to do 100% of what other people want, nor do we want to be in the business of trying to make specific decisions about how things should be done because people like to do things different ways. And so what we've decided is that you know, we want to build out this ecosystem so that if you have a favorite CRM that you want to use, great. Like we have great CRM capabilities inside of Skimmer, but if you need something extra, awesome. Like we want to be able to make sure that data can move between those two platforms in a secure and stable way via an API. The same is true for different ERP systems. We have a number of large customers that have ERP systems that we need to integrate with. And we've built all the web hooks to be able to do that, to be able to get them the data they need so that they can get the reporting, the custom reporting that they need. This is especially true for large franchise operations or large private private equity-backed companies that have multiple locations and multiple places. Like they want to see a roll-up of ever of how everything is doing across the board. Hal probably knows a little bit about that. But it is, it is core to our mission to be able to integrate and create sort of this ecosystem of tools. We want skimmer. We think skimmer should be your system of record. This is where your customer data lives, this is where you do your billing, this is where you perform all your work and do all your work orders. And we think that anything that is coming in from the outside should enhance your experience and be able to connect seamlessly, whether that's like an integration to applause, which is a review collecting tool, or even to some of the manufacturer's equipment that that is coming out that has really good alerting capabilities. There's kind of a new generation of equipment that's being built that's a lot smarter than previous versions of equipment. And we want to make sure that if you want to see a Pentar alert in your in your app when you are headed to that pool, that that's surfaced for you, or if, or if there's something that you know goes awry and you need an alert, you know, at any other time of day to know if it's an emergency or something, that you can see that uh within Skimmer and that can be surfaced there where you're most likely to manage that work anyway.

SPEAKER_01 18:32

And and really big picture, you know, I think one thing that skimmers really, it's an evolution is, you know, while we want to allow for all this communication back and forth with solutions you may choose, you know, we're also focusing on creating more solutions outside of just like the pure field service management, you know, AI voice agent's an example of that. And so, you know, in future, I think there's definitely going to be the ability to, you know, I'd go to trade shows for years, and the biggest complaint is like, I have 15 things in my tech stack. Like, can't something just do all of it? And that's top of mind for us, right? Like we want to try to achieve as much of that as possible and give the customer an option to use, you know, skimmer or a another part of the skimmer ecosystem to solve those while also allowing flexibility if if they have an outsourced solution they really like. How does that tie in and communicate really well with Skimmer?

SPEAKER_00 19:22

And simplicity, right? You know, Skimmer was built with simplicity in mind. It should be really, really easy for people to

Switching To Skimmer And Getting Support

SPEAKER_00 19:28

use. And we we want our operators to have an experience that is not overwhelming, that's not technically complex, that is simple and easy to use, not only for the back office, but also for folks in the field and for customers as well.

SPEAKER_02 19:43

And I was gonna say there are probably two types of customers that are looking for the software. One is someone who's never used it before, which is probably a lot of pool pros out there. There's, I know this is an industry that has been around for a while, but it's still, I think, in that really large growth stage where a lot of people aren't using software. And the second one is someone who is using another software currently and they're thinking about switching because maybe all their bills are going into junk email and the customers aren't getting the bills, or there's other glitches that they're experiencing, systems go down and things like that, like Hal mentioned earlier. So, how easy it is it for number one, someone who's never used software before. Let's say you you just pen and paper, or you're just, you know, using Microsoft Word or whatever, you're not using any software at all. And the other person who has a software they're using, but they're just not entirely happy with it, is it difficult to switch over platforms?

SPEAKER_00 20:40

I'd say no. And part of the reason I say no is because we have an amazing team of customer success managers and support staff that will literally hold your hand the entire way to help you make the best use of our software. We have a ton of features that a lot of people don't even know about still. And we recognize, like, you know, especially in the summer months, as we're continuing to launch features, that bandwidth is limited. And so a big push for the fall will be, especially at our pro summit, our road shows that we plan to do, is to make sure that people can kind of catch up on everything that we've launched and implement what makes sense to them. You know, we're not gonna AI phone is an example. There's some people who are just opposed to having AI answer the phone. If you don't want to use it, great, you don't have to. There are other things in our platform that solve real business pain points and challenges. And we have a fantastic staff, tons of resources, guides, tools to help our customers adopt Skimmer and make the best use of it.

SPEAKER_01 21:38

That's that's a it's actually a funny, good problem to have that's been a point of discussion at the board level at Skimmer is that Skimmer's so effectively using AI to increase the velocity on the product and engineering side that we've actually started to create so many things that we're like, our customers don't even know what we've created. And I know that you know, we're we're getting those calls in real time from customer at the customer success. Level where they're calling in and saying, like, man, I wish it would do this. And we're like, it already does that. We we just are trying, we got to figure out how to better communicate it because we're moving so fast, like, you know, it's almost impossible to make people aware of all the things that are that are being built and done inside Skimmer already.

SPEAKER_02 22:16

Yeah, I think that that's the great thing about it. Like, let's say someone wants to do the AI phone and they're using a different software, they can easily jump to Skimmer and implement that. Because I I really believe that can move a lot of companies having this ability to have this answer the phone versus maybe an answering service or a relative that doesn't have that same knowledge. And I think this is a good feature that people are going to maybe jump over the skimmer for. And you already have a lot of integrated integration that's already built into skimmer. If they go to the website and look at it, and they can also get a free trial through me, through my through my resources here, you know, through my website, if they go there or in the podcast, they can get the link for that. So I really think that with all the advances, it's something that people can try out at least and see if they like it. And I think they're probably gonna I think Skimmer to me, the platform, looks a lot like an Apple uh iOS kind of platform versus the other ones. It's always been the most attractive looking software, in my opinion.

SPEAKER_00 23:19

Thank you for that, David. It's I mean, having a great UI UX experience has been top of mind since the very, very beginning at Skimmer. You know, we know that there's a lot of turnover that happens in the field. We know

Free Trials Coaching And Closing

SPEAKER_00 23:31

that, you know, there are people who don't want to be slowed down by their tech. And so we really designed it in a way to make it super fast, easy, and simple to be able to use with little to no training for a lot of people, especially technicians in the field.

SPEAKER_02 23:45

If you want to try Skimmer for free, simply go to my website, swimmingpoollearning.com, and click on the skimmer banner that's on the home page of the website. And if you want more podcasts, you can also go to that same site, swimmingpoollearning.com. On the banner, there's a podcast icon. Click on that, and there'll be over 1900 podcasts there for you to listen to at your leisure. And if you're interested in the coaching program, you can learn more at pullguycoaching.com. Thanks for listening to this podcast. Have a rest of your week and God bless.