FAQs
What's the difference between Service Reviews and Marketing Suite’s reviews?
Service Reviews collects private, per-visit feedback that only your team sees, so you can catch a problem early. Marketing Suite’s reviews drive public Google reviews to build your reputation and win new business. Service Reviews is included in core Skimmer; Marketing Suite is a $150/month add-on.
Is Service Reviews the same as asking for public reviews on Google or Facebook?
No. Service Reviews is a private, internal quality signal. Ratings go only to your business, not to any public review site, and the feedback page tells the pool owner that directly. If building your public review presence is also a priority, that's handled through Marketing Suite, and the two work well together without duplicating effort.
Do I have to pay extra for Service Reviews?
No. Service Reviews is part of core Skimmer and available at every plan level. Marketing Suite, which includes Campaigns and public Google review tools, is a separate $150/month add-on.
Is Service Reviews turned on automatically? Can I turn it off?
It's on by default, so you don't need to do anything to start collecting ratings. If you'd rather not use it, you can turn it off for your whole company in Service Email Settings.
Can a service review rating end up on Google?
No. Service Reviews ratings are never published or syndicated anywhere. They appear only in your Skimmer account — on Service History, the Route Dashboard, the review details view, and the customer's activity feed.
Where do I see my service reviews?
Ratings show up in a few places in Skimmer: stars appear on Service History and the Route Dashboard, rating events land in the customer's activity feed, and you can open any rating to see the full details — score, written reason, tech, and timestamp.
Do I still need Marketing Suite if I already have Service Reviews?
They do different jobs. Service Reviews tells you how your service is landing. Marketing Suite’s reviews build the public rating that brings in new customers, and Marketing Suite also includes automated email and SMS campaigns. Most pool businesses get value from both.
Will my customers get two review requests if I have both?
Service Reviews don't add a new message — the star rating sits inside communication your customers already receive, like service completion emails, work order emails, and invoices. Marketing Suite's reviews send a separate request, with a 90-day cooldown so the same customer isn't asked repeatedly. If someone doesn't respond, a single reminder goes out five days later, and requests stop once they leave a Google review. The two also ask different things: Service Reviews rate one specific visit, while the Marketing Suite request asks about your business overall.
Does turning on Service Reviews affect Marketing Suite's reviews?
No. They're completely independent. Turning service reviews on or off in Service Email Settings has no effect on Marketing Suite, and vice versa.
What if a customer misses the rating request?
Missed ratings aren't lost. Invoice emails and the hosted invoice both surface a "Rate your recent visits" prompt covering unrated visits from the past 30 days, and customers using the customer portal can add or edit a rating there too.
Key takeaways
- Skimmer has two review features, and they do two different jobs. Service Reviews collects private, per-visit feedback for your team. Marketing Suite’s reviews build your public Google rating.
- Service Reviews is part of core Skimmer, included at every plan level, and turned on by default. Marketing Suite is a $150/month add-on that also includes email and SMS Campaigns.
- Service Reviews ratings are never published anywhere. Only your company sees them.
- Service Reviews works as an early-warning system: a low rating triggers an alert so you can follow up while the account is still saveable.
- Most pool businesses benefit from running both. One tells you how you're doing. The other tells everyone else.
Two things called reviews, doing two different jobs
If you've logged into Skimmer recently, you've probably run into two features with "reviews" in the name within a couple of weeks of each other. It's a fair question to ask whether they're the same thing, whether you're about to pay for something you already have, or whether your customers are now going to get asked for feedback twice.
Here's the short version: Service Reviews tells you how you're doing. Marketing Suite’s reviews inform everyone else.
One is a private quality check that lives inside the emails you already send after every visit. The other is a public reputation tool that helps you build up your Google rating. They're built on the same customer and job data, but they're solving different problems. The clearest way to keep them straight is to ask who the feedback is actually for. Here’s the difference, laid out in the graphic below:
What Service Reviews does
Service Reviews is a quality-control loop. It answers a question most pool pros can't currently answer: how did the pool owner actually feel about the visit you finished yesterday?
Right now, that information usually shows up late, and only in bad forms — a complaint, a missed payment, or a cancellation. By then the problem has already cost you something.
Here's how it works. When a route stop or work order is completed, the service-complete email your customer already receives now carries a simple "How did we do?" star rating. The pool owner taps a star, lands on a Skimmer-hosted page already linked to that specific visit, confirms the rating, and can optionally add a short written reason. No app to download, no account to log into, about 30 seconds start to finish.
If a rating comes in at or below a threshold you set, your team gets an alert — in the panel, by email, or as an urgent notification, whichever you choose. That's the part that matters most. You find out someone's unhappy while you can still do something about it, instead of after they've already left.
Every rating is tied to the specific visit and the technician who performed it, and the stars show up on Service History, the Route Dashboard, and the customer's activity feed. Over time that turns into a real picture of how each route and each tech is performing, rather than a handful of isolated incidents.
And crucially: none of it is public. The feedback page tells the pool owner outright that only your company will see their response. Nothing gets posted to Google, Facebook, or anywhere else.
Service Reviews is part of core Skimmer, available at every plan level, and it's on by default — so if you haven't changed anything, you're already collecting ratings. If you'd rather not, you can switch it off for your whole company in Service Email Settings.
What Marketing Suite’s reviews do
Marketing Suite is a $150/month add-on, and it includes two things: Campaigns (automated email and SMS marketing built on your Skimmer customer data) and Reviews. It's the “reviews” half that gets confused with Service Reviews, so that's what we're comparing here.
Marketing Suite’s reviews are about your public reputation — specifically, your Google rating and the way you look to someone who's never hired you before.
Completed work automatically triggers a review request, so nobody has to remember to ask. When you set up reviews within Marketing Suite, you choose how requests work — collect private feedback first and only ask satisfied customers for a Google review, ask for both at once, request Google reviews from everyone, or keep feedback private and skip Google entirely. The flow most pros are looking for is Smart Review Routing: happy customers get invited to post on Google, and critical feedback stays private for your team to handle first. When a new Google review comes in, you can have AI draft a reply as a starting point — edit it, post it as-is, or skip it and write your own. Either way, response time stays down as review volume grows. A single dashboard in Skimmer tracks your Google rating trend and review volume over time.
The goal here isn't to catch problems. It's to take the good work you're already doing and make it visible to people shopping for a pool service in your area.
The visual below shows the split in practice — what each one is actually doing:
Why the distinction matters
It's easy to look at these two and think one replaces the other. They don't — they serve different needs, and they work best together.
If you only have public reviews, you're only hearing from the customers willing to post something publicly, which is a small and self-selecting group. Most unhappy customers never say anything at all — they just quietly stop being customers. A strong Google rating tells you nothing about the accounts that are about to go quiet.
If you only have Service Reviews, you'll know exactly how you're performing, but nobody outside your business will. The five-star service you're delivering stays invisible to the next person searching for a pool pro in your neighborhood.
That's why they work better together. Service Reviews keeps the work honest. Marketing Suite’s reviews turn that work into new business.
What this means for you
If you're an existing Skimmer customer and you haven't changed anything, you already have Service Reviews running. Ratings are coming in, and you can turn on the low-rating alert.
If you want the public side too — Google review requests, routing, optional AI-drafted replies, plus the Campaigns half of the product — that's Marketing Suite, available as an add-on.
To learn more about Marketing Suite and how it works, check out this blog post. For setup instructions and full detail, see the help articles for Service Reviews and Marketing Suite.
