Ashley Carter kept marking the same message as unread, hoping someone else would get to it first. Most of the time, nobody did. So, she’d handle it herself.
Ashley and her husband started Integrity Pool Service, a pool cleaning company serving Harker Heights and the surrounding Bell County area in central Texas in 2022. They’re running routes and maintenance visits across a growing list of backyard pools. For a while, they tracked every complaint, follow-up, and call-back needed by hand.
She’s said that constantly marking chats as unread made her feel like M-O, the little cleaning robot from “Wall-E,” following the team around, picking up what nobody else caught.
That’s what happens when a job doesn’t have an owner: the work still gets done, just by whoever notices it first. Most small teams don’t realize this is happening, because nothing appears to be broken. Ashley noticed, and knew it had to change. Here’s exactly what she did.
Make ownership clear with Tasks
Previously, Integrity Pool Service tracked call-backs, complaints, , and follow-ups in a shared Google Sheets log. Everyone could see it. That was part of the problem.
Ashley’s husband worked in the field and had no reason to open a spreadsheet mid-job, so nothing on the list was clearly his to handle. The team also tried marking messages as unread, or dropping a note in the group chat and hoping someone got to it. The problem is that a shared list tells the team what needs to be done, but it doesn’t tell anyone who’s doing it. Even tagging the right person in an internal thread didn’t fix that. There was still no way for the whole team to see which to-dos had actually been completed.
Now they use Quo Tasks to assign one piece of defined work a specific owner and a due date, tied to the conversation it came from. That way, a handoff has somewhere to live instead of depending on memory.
“There’s no ownership without tasks,” Ashley said. “I estimate it saves me about three to four hours a week in marking unread, checking, reminding, re-checking, explaining what needs to happen next, plus coordinating follow-ups between team members.”
How to assign a task in Quo
Here’s how to create a new task from the Quo web or desktop app:
- Open a specific conversation in Quo.
- Hover over a call or message and select the checkmark icon to create a task straight from it.
- Click the checkmark icon to create new task.
- Enter a name and description for the task.
- Add an assignee within your Quo workspace and a due date. You can also set a specific time under Set a time.
- Click Save to finish. The assignee for the task gets notified, and the task stays linked to that conversation.
Keep the system in check
Ashley caps open tasks per person at around 20. She also keeps open or unread chats to about 10–15, so nothing piles up into what she calls “one big graveyard of hopes and dreams.”
Bring a new hire up to speed quickly
Ashley’s client concierge resigned with no notice, in the middle of pool season. She had to quickly hire and ramp up a replacement.
Before new hire Isabella’s first day, Ashley built out a set of tasks tied to real, active customer conversations, so she could start contributing early without needing handholding for every situation.
Ashley could even filter her task list to show just Isabella’s tasks, so she could see how she was doing at a glance.
Early on, a task might remind Isabella to tell a customer their pool skimmer basket or equipment part was on order, or to check in with Ashley before making a pricing exception.
As Isabella settled in, the tasks got a little more advanced. For example, updating a customer’s gate code in their route software after the customer mentioned it had changed.
“I was so thankful that I could make it at her level, and I didn’t have to give obnoxiously specific instructions,” Ashley said.
A well-written task can double as training material. The new hire doesn’t have to guess or ask what to do, as the context is right there in the conversation. Sometimes Ashley would link the relevant SOP from Google Drive directly in a multi-step task, so Isabella didn’t have to go searching for the right doc.
Use contact properties as a handoff safety net
“Contact properties were a game changer too,” Ashley said. They aren’t just for searching. They let a teammate pick up a conversation without starting from zero, even if they weren’t on the original call.
A contact property’s real job is making sure whoever picks up next knows what they’re walking into. Tag a contact “do-not-engage,” for instance, and anyone covering for you knows to escalate rather than reply.
How to set up custom contact properties in Quo
1. Open a specific conversation in Quo.
2. Click Add a property +.
3. Select the type of custom property you wish to use. For example:
- Tags: Categorize contacts with labels like “Loyal customer,” “Do-not-engage,” or “Veteran.”
- Checkbox: Easily see if someone’s a vendor or team member by marking with a custom checkbox property such as “Colleague.”
- Text fields: Record a referral source or city, like “Referred by Jake” or “Harker Heights.”
- Phone and email: Additional contact methods beyond the primary number.
- Address: Record service addresses, vendor office, or other locations.
- URL: Store website links, social media profiles, or portfolio URLs.
- Date fields: Track follow-up dates, contract renewals, or other important milestones.
- Number: Add a weekly contract cost or other information your team needs to reference.
4. Then fill out that specific new custom property for that contact.
Ashley takes it a step further with color. “Color-coding contacts really helps our team quickly fill out a client contact profile,” she said. “For example, cities are orange, and where they heard of us is green.”
Use Contact notes to document behavioral insights and preferences that don’t fit neatly into a tag, like a note that a customer prefers calling over text.
Start fixing your team’s follow-ups with Quo today
Integrity Pool Service didn’t need another piece of software, and they didn’t need to hire more people. They just needed every job to have someone’s name on it, right inside the app they already used every day.
Nowhere was that more obvious than with Isabella’s onboarding. She was fully ramped up in two months, compared to three to four months for Integrity Pool Service’s previous concierge.
Ready to stop being the only one who notices what’s fallen through? Start a free trial, or learn more about Quo Tasks by watching the recap below with Ashley and Jordan Simas, Senior Product Manager at Quo.
