Avoiding Lost Customers Due to Unknown Staff Performance Issues

Summary: This story is about Jason, a retired man who lives with his family in Santa Rosa, CA, and owns a pool used almost daily by friends and family. He realized he needed to keep his pool clean and safe, especially for the kids. He discovered that despite using a weekly pool service, his pool's chemical balance was out of whack, and his pool needed hundreds of pounds of salt. This prompted Jason to buy the WaterGuru SENSE. With the WaterGuru app, Jason gained more control over his pool's water quality and removed the fear of managing the chemicals. He now performs the pool service himself and saves about $175 a month. He can relax, knowing that his pool's water is clean and safe for everyone. As Jason says, "I look at the app at 11:45 every day, just to check where my chemistry is at. It gives me peace of mind."

Intro: Jason retired at the age of 51. He has enough gas left in the take of life to start an entirely new career if he so chooses, but Jason is too busy right now being a helpful husband and father of two children. They live in Santa Rosa, CA, on 22 acres in the North Bay region of the San Francisco Bay area called the Santa Rosa Plain. The climate is very Mediterranean, with winters dominated by cold rain and dry, hot summers. Owning a pool is almost necessary for parents like Jason and his wife, as the pool is an almost-daily place for their extensive extended family and friends to collect and cool off from the summer heat. In the Santa Rosa area, if you want to remain cool each August, you buy a home with a pool.

“We have 150 inlaws located within a 10-mile radius of us,” says Jason. “The pool is a focal point for daily visits, big parties, and more. On any given day, my wife and I might not know whether or not we are having guests because our kids might bring friends home from school or whatever. As a result, the water in the pool needs to be clean at all times. I don’t want kids going home from a visit to our home with green hair or burning eyes.”

Retirement, for Jason, was a wake-up call. He immediately inherited several jobs and chores that he had previously outsourced to a service, such as cleaning his property and the swimming pool maintenance. He was using a pool maintenance service and had no intention of stopping that service, but he was also curious about keeping the pool’s water clean and safe for swimming. As a technology lover and a rapid adopter of new innovations, Jason looked for an invention that could simplify measuring and balancing the chemicals in his pool. What he found was the WaterGuru.

“I wasn’t looking to get rid of my pool service,” says Jason. “I had a 7-year to-do list to conquer once I retired, and making sure our swimming pool was clean was on the top of that list. The water looked clean, and I employed a weekly pool service, so I never had any reason to believe it wasn't being taken care of. I just wanted to get a better understanding of what was going on in my pool. That’s when I bought WaterGuru. Once I received it, I took a sample of my pool’s water and sent it to WaterGuru for analysis. The results were astonishing.”

According to Jason, WaterGuru’s analysis of his swimming pool water showed that his 16,000-gallon saltwater pool needed 451 pounds of salt immediately, plus 163 cups of hardener, 63 cups of stabilizer, and more. The problem was that not only were the chemicals in Jason’s swimming pool out of whack, but he was under the impression that the water in his pool was clean and had started to think that burning eyes from a swim were just normal. He had been paying a pool service $175 per month for weekly, 15-20 minute visits, yet according to WaterGuru, his pool needed hundreds of pounds of salt in order to get back to normal.

“I was irate,” says Jason. “My pool chemistry was terrible. I still have PTSD from that realization for two reasons: one, because even though I retired young, I am still on a fixed income and can’t afford to throw away money, and two, it created a much bigger safety concern. Even if someone employs a pool service like I did, pool owners still need to worry about their swimming pool’s chemistry, especially those with dogs and babies. I don’t think my problem was all that unique, unfortunately. I would send my pool service notes if we were planning to have a bunch of people over for a pool party, hoping they would make sure the chemistry was perfect, but then during the party, people would be in the pool, and their eyes were burning, or they were having skin issues. And with my ignorance of the nature of pool chemistry, I just thought that was normal.”

The solution to Jason’s swimming pool maintenance problem was, of course, the very thing that identified the depth of Jason’s problems in the first place, the WaterGuru SENSE. The WaterGuru Sense is a smart pool system, sitting invisibly in the skimmer, that robotically analyzes a swimming pool’s water quality every day. It sends that timely information to a mobile app on the pool owner’s smartphone, along with expert advice on what steps the pool owner should take to maintain a near-perfect chemical balance. Once Jason started using the WaterGuru Sense and its mobile app while still employing his pool service, he started to gain more control of his pool’s water quality. And in the process, WaterGuru removed some of Jason's fear about managing the chemicals in his pool water.

“It is so much easier than I thought it would be,” he says. “I originally had blocked out from 8:00 to 10:00 a.m. each Monday to learn how to understand the readings the WaterGuru was sending to my phone and what to do about them. In reality, the readings and chemical recommendations are so easy to understand that my Monday process is just 10-15 minutes long. I look at the app at 11:45 every day, just to check where my chemistry is at. It gives me peace of mind.”

 Jason, his immediate family, and his large family can swim in his pool without burning eyes or itchy skin. His pool chemistry is where it should be every single day. His swimming pool water mirrors resort-quality water, where a pool’s chemistry is tested multiple times daily. He is saving $175 a month and has a new job. Jason is the pool service.

“I'm very excited about performing the pool service solo,” he says. “The WaterGuru Sense makes what was, for me, an intimidating and inaccurate process seem simple and safe. I am really looking forward to seeing what happens when we have 20 people in the pool for a day and how that impacts the chemistry the next day. I enjoy checking the chemicals, making sure that all the filters are clean, and all that stuff. That's my day as the pool boy. It will be interesting, after a weekend where we've been hitting it pretty hard, to see what the impact is on the water chemistry. During the hottest months, I am guessing the impact is huge, but nothing I can’t fix in 15 minutes and without bombing my pool.”