How Many Calls Does a Pool Company Miss?
Every owner I ask says "not that many." Every owner who checks is surprised. Here's how to check, and what the number costs you.
When I owned my company I would have told you we missed a handful of calls a week. Then I pulled the call log from our phone provider for July. It was not a handful. Peak season stacks calls on the days you're busiest, and the days you're busiest are the days you can't answer.
I'm not going to quote an industry statistic here, because the ones floating around are unsourced and your number is the only one that matters. Here's how to find it.
Find your number in five minutes
- Open your phone carrier or VoIP dashboard. Look for a call log or call history export.
- Filter to inbound calls for last July, or your busiest month.
- Count calls with a duration under 10 seconds or marked as missed or voicemail. Those are misses.
- Divide by the number of working days. That's your daily miss rate.
- Subtract obvious spam. Be honest. A number you don't recognize that called at 2pm on a Tuesday is probably a homeowner.
Most owners who do this land somewhere between one and four real misses per working day in season. Your number might be lower. Check anyway.
What each miss costs
A weekly service account in most markets runs $120 to $200 a month. Use $150. A customer who signs up in May typically stays through the season, and most stay into next year. Even at a conservative twelve-month life, one account is worth $1,800.
| Misses per working day | Real leads (say half) | Recovered with an instant text (say 1 in 3) | New accounts (say 1 in 4) | Annual value at $1,800 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 0.5 | 0.17 | 0.04 / day, about 9 / season | $16,000 |
| 2 | 1 | 0.33 | 0.08 / day, about 17 / season | $31,000 |
| 4 | 2 | 0.67 | 0.17 / day, about 35 / season | $63,000 |
Season is 200 working days. These are illustrations with conservative conversion assumptions, not guarantees. Plug your own numbers in. Even the bottom row is the price of a truck.
Why the caller doesn't leave a voicemail
- They're searching on their phone. Your listing was one of three. They call the next one.
- A green pool is urgent. Whoever answers gets it.
- Voicemail feels like a dead end. A text feels like a conversation.
- Younger homeowners don't leave voicemails. Ever.
Three fixes, ranked by cost
- Answer more calls yourself. Free. Doesn't work. You're under a deck.
- Answering service. $150 to $400 a month. They answer, take a message, and you still call back late. Better than voicemail, not by much.
- Missed call text back. The caller gets a text from your number within seconds, before they dial the next company. They reply, you text back between stops. This is what PoolCRM does. How it works.
Do this today
Pull the July log. Count the misses. Multiply by $1,800 and by whatever conversion rate you believe. If the number is bigger than $397 a month, you know what to do. If it isn't, you just learned something useful for free.