PoolPros: Pool Maintenance and Service

The Challenge

Kim M, the Dispatch Lead at PoolPros, was spending every morning buried in spreadsheets trying to manually assign pools to technicians and figure out the most logical driving order. Routes were built in Google Maps, copied into group texts, and sent out hoping everyone would actually follow them. Most didn’t. Technicians would glance at the address list, pick whichever stop seemed closest, and improvise from there. The result was backtracking across town, skipped pools, and overlapping service areas where two techs would show up at the same neighborhood while another part of Phoenix went completely unserviced.

Kim’s phone never stopped ringing. On a typical day, she’d field 30 to 40 calls from technicians asking which pool was next, whether an address was correct, or if they could swap a stop because they’d driven past it already. She had no way to know where any technician actually was, how many stops they’d completed, or whether the day’s work would even get finished. If a customer called asking for an ETA, she’d have to call the tech, who’d have to guess, and then she’d relay that guess back. It was a chain of uncertainty.

PoolPros tried a couple of free routing tools, but nothing stuck. They either couldn’t handle the stop volume, didn’t have a driver-facing app, or were so complicated that technicians gave up after the first day. Kim needed something dead simple that her team would actually open and follow.

The Solution

Upper changed the workflow within the first week. Kim now imports all service addresses at the start of the week, and Upper optimizes every route across all 14 technicians in minutes. What used to be a two-hour morning ritual of spreadsheets and group texts now takes about 15 minutes.

Each technician receives their daily route directly on the Upper driver app. Stops are listed in the optimized order, and one tap launches turn-by-turn navigation. There’s nothing to interpret, nothing to decide, and nothing to call Kim about. They just open the app and drive.

Real-time tracking gave Kim something she never had before — a live view of her entire operation. She can see which technicians are ahead of schedule, who’s falling behind, and where everyone is at any given moment. If a priority service call comes in, she drags and drops it into the nearest tech’s route without a single phone call.

Proof of service closed the last gap. Every completed pool visit is documented with a time stamp and photo, so when a homeowner claims their pool wasn’t serviced, Kim pulls up the evidence in seconds instead of playing phone tag with a technician trying to remember three days ago.

I used to start every morning stressed, scrolling through a group text trying to figure out which pool was mine. Now I just open the app and my whole day is laid out. I finish faster, I don’t miss stops, and I haven’t had to call dispatch in weeks.