Outreach

Outreach brings customers back without a marketing hire. Autopilot watches your records and decides what to send about each customer's own car; Follow up shows you what is scheduled to go out, day by day, with time to skip or send any of it early.

Follow up: what is going out

Follow up is one table of every message CarSignal will send for you, in two views you flip at the top: Today and Upcoming (by day, under a quiet date line), each with its count. It opens on Today and remembers your choice on this device. Autopilot decides what sends; this list shows it, read from the server, so it is what will happen, not a guess.

Each row: customer, car, reason (Service due, Declined work, Lost customers, First visit, Review ask, Appointment reminder, Appointment confirmation, Campaign, Birthday), channel (Text or Email), when it is planned in your shop's clock ("Today 2:00 PM", "Tue Oct 28 9:00 AM", "At pickup"), and its state. The state word carries the colour:

• Planned. It will go at that time. Sending means its time has come and the next run sends it.
• Held, with the reason: a review ask the rules kept back (asked in the last 90 days, not sent at pickup, no phone or email, already rated, Review ask off), or an appointment reminder with texts off.
• Sent, Replied, Came back (the customer booked).
• Skipped, with the reason: opted out, booked an appointment, car came in, heard from you this month, no consent, reason turned off, quiet hours, by you.

Today holds what is planned today, what happened today, and anything held or overdue. Rows sorted by time. Sent and skipped rows from earlier days leave the table.

One quiet door per row. Review draft opens the message in the row: edit the words, Send now, or Skip (a held message cancels and that reason rests for a month; a planned one is snoozed). A held review ask has Send now; an appointment reminder has Skip (that one appointment's own "Text the customer" turns off); a campaign has Pause. The state word changes the moment you press.

A customer with a car in your shop or an appointment on the books is never messaged about coming back; the table never shows two messages to the same person.

Every message comes from a person

Nothing CarSignal sends on your behalf reads like a system. A text opens "Hey Maria, it's Mike at Summit Auto" and an email signs off with Mike's name above the shop's. The sender is the visit's service writer; when the car has no writer on file it is the person you named when you started outreach, and before that your first admin. Each reason can name its own sender instead (Outreach > Autopilot). Marketing texts (service due, declined work, lost customers, first visit, campaigns) end with "Reply STOP to opt out"; review asks and appointment reminders are transactional and carry no footer. Campaign messages can use {sender} the same way they use {first_name} and {shop}. Edit, send, or snooze. Every message carries a personalized booking link so a reply becomes an appointment in two taps: the link opens your booking page, the same one on your website, with the customer and car already filled in, the work the message was about already ticked, and the offer code applied. One-to-one emails (follow-ups and automations) go out looking like a note from you, not a designed campaign, so they're far more likely to land in the customer's main inbox.

The numbers, where the decisions are

Under the Outreach tabs sits one line: Last 30 days 48 sent · 9 came back · $4,120 back · Next 30 days 23 scheduled. Sent is every follow-up, held message and campaign that went out; came back is the customers whose car booked or checked in after a send; the dollars are the paid bills of the visits that followed, credited once to the send that earned them and never when you named another source on the visit yourself. Scheduled is what is waiting to go. Each row on the Autopilot tab carries the same figures in its own words ("12 sent · 3 back · $1,240 · 4 waiting"; the review ask reads "5 asked · 2 rated"), and each campaign row reads delivered, replied, booked and dollars from the same source, so you can see which reason and which campaign bring cars in. Before the first send the line says so: numbers appear after the first sends.

Campaigns

Campaigns go to many customers at once about the shop: specials, seasonal pushes, hours. Reminders about a customer's own car (a service coming due, work they held off on, a customer gone too long) come from Autopilot, never from a campaign.

Suggested. The Campaigns tab opens with up to three rows CarSignal built from facts it holds, each an audience with its count, why it is worth sending, the plain offer it carries, and a drafted text in your sender's voice: holiday hours when a closure is on your calendar inside three weeks; a seasonal nudge when next week has open drop-off slots; a free tire and battery check before winter in cold states or a free A/C check before summer in hot ones (from your state and the month); a thank-you special for your top fifth by spend; and a welcome-back special for customers whose first visit was this quarter (only while Autopilot's First visit row is off, so the two never overlap). Every audience skips a car at the shop, an appointment on the books, anyone unreachable and anyone you messaged in the last 30 days; a customer is in one row at most, and a row needs three people to show. Review and send opens the composer below with the people, the text and the channel filled in, so you still read it, change it, and press Send. Dismiss puts a row away for 30 days.

No suggestion ever tells a customer you are slow. The open slots next week are your fact, shown only to you on the row; the message the customer reads leads with their reason (what the season does to a car: tires and battery before winter, brakes and wipers for the wet months, A/C before summer) and whatever their car is due for, with $20 off as the sweetener and a concrete window ("book by Friday and it's $20 off for next week"). Customers with a service due or overdue go first in that audience, then everyone seen in the last year; the row and the composer's Who gets this both say so.

Blast a segment when you need to fill the schedule, or write to a handful of people by name. The audience is either everyone matching the filters (tags, lifecycle: active, dormant, never visited; last-visit window; vehicle make) or specific people you search for and pick. Either way the composer lists exactly who will get it and who is left out and why (no number, not opted in to texts, opted out), and any person can be removed from the list before it goes. Write the text or email with tokens like first name, then send now or schedule it. Sends respect opt-outs, the nightly quiet hours in your shop's own timezone, your extra quiet hours, the daily cap, and the weekdays-only switch. Every campaign message carries the recipient's own booking link, so you can see exactly who clicked and who booked, not just how many went out.

A scheduled campaign that sends to nobody says so: it shows as Failed with the reason (nobody eligible, texting not set up, outreach paused) instead of "Sent" with zero sends, and recurring campaigns keep their last run's result on the row. Run now on any scheduled campaign sends it immediately, which is also the quickest way to prove a campaign works before trusting the clock.

The tab opens with the month at a glance: active campaigns, customers reached, replies with the response rate, and bookings. Below it, every campaign is one row showing its audience, schedule, status, last send, and performance (open rate for email, replies for text, plus bookings), so you can tell which campaigns actually bring cars in and which just go out.

Start Autopilot

The messages about a customer's own history (service due, declined work, lost customers, first visit) are off until you say so. The top of Outreach carries one card: Start Autopilot. It says what will happen (texts and emails to customers who said yes, one message each at most every 30 days, every message held in Follow up first so you can edit or cancel it) and asks one thing: who signs the messages when a visit has no service writer. Start turns those reasons on; Not now puts the card away for 30 days. You can pause any time from the Autopilot tab. The Appointments and Visit rows below run with or without Start.

Autopilot

Autopilot is the one place every automatic message is controlled. There is no automation switch anywhere else, not in Settings. The tab lists what CarSignal sends for you, one row each:

• Service due. From 90% of the service's interval (or 75%, or when it is up, your pick). The row also holds your intervals: "Oil change every 6 months", learned from your own history when there is enough of it, the industry default when not, and yours the moment you change one.
• Declined work. 14 days after the no, then once more at 60 days, and never again for that job. Both numbers are yours to change.
• Lost customers. After 12 months away (or 6, 9, 18, 24), plus regulars who are well past their own rhythm. When lost customers are waiting and no offer is attached, the row says so: "12 customers away over a year · Add an offer".
• Review ask. After the bill is paid and the car is picked up. Transactional: no footer, no offer.
• First visit. Off to begin with; one paid visit, no second yet, inside the window your own customers come back in.

Under the five reasons sits an Appointments group with the two rows every shop already runs: Appointment confirmation (sent at booking and again after a reschedule) and Appointment reminder (the one-tap "Reply C to confirm", about a day before, the morning of at 8 AM, or both), each with On/Off, a sender and its own words ({first_name} {vehicle} {shop} {sender} {day} {time} {manage_link}); both are transactional, so no opt-out footer and no count against the message caps. These two never carry the booking link: the customer already has an appointment. The defaults ask them to reply if anything changed; {manage_link} is optional and opens the customer's own appointment page, where they can move or cancel it. A saved message that still says {link} sends without it. The reminder row also carries the nudge rule, which has no switch: if there is no reply 4 hours after the reminder, you get a nudge to check in (never later than 2 hours before the appointment, never outside your hours), and its figures read N sent · N unconfirmed. A shop that had turned reminders off under the old Settings switch sees the row Off.

Then a Visit group: Ready for pickup (when a job is marked ready, the customer gets a text or email saying the car is ready; transactional) and Birthday text (a short happy birthday on the day, once a year, text only, to customers who said yes; edit the words in the row, {first_name} and {shop}). Both used to be switches under Settings; they are rows here now.

Every reason row has On/Off, the timing in words, a Sender (the visit's service writer by default, or one person for that reason), an Offer, and Edit message, which opens the editor in the row: Text and Email, the words with the variables {first_name} {vehicle} {service} {shop} {sender} {link} {offer}, a live preview with sample data, Send a test and Save. {offer} is only ever the offer chosen on that row: one sentence with the amount, the code and the expiry. With Offer set to None it sends nothing and the sentence around it closes up on its own; the editor says so under the message when {offer} is still in the words, and the preview shows the message without it. A test goes where you point it at that moment: your own email, a phone number you type (on the Text tab it arrives as a real text from the shop's texting number, prefixed [Test]) or another email. Your last choice is remembered on this device; a test is never sent to a customer, and each person can send five an hour. A message that needs a link will not save without {link}. The header line holds how long messages wait (1, 4, 24 or 48 hours), who signs them by default, and the sending rules every message obeys in words ("Quiet 9:00 PM to 8:00 AM, weekdays only, up to 25 a day"); those rules live under Settings, Messaging (the daily cap behind its •••), one click from the header.

Held messages

When a reason is on, CarSignal drafts the message for each customer the moment they qualify and holds it. The held message is a Planned row in Follow up at its release time; Review draft opens it to read or edit, with Send now and Skip (which cancels it and leaves that reason alone for a month). One held message per customer, ever; a customer who books, checks in, texts STOP, hears from you another way inside 30 days, or whose reason you turn off has their held message skipped, not sent, and the row says which. When the time comes the message goes out through the same path as a hand send, so it threads, tracks and attributes the same way, and the Dashboard's Live feed shows one line for it: "Mike texted Maria about the oil change". A hold that would land after 8 pm or before 8 am waits for 10 am; one that lands on a day over the daily cap waits for the next.

Offers

An offer is a discount a message may carry: a name (the customer sees it on the bill), dollars or percent off (with an optional cap), how many days it stays good after the message, and whether each customer may use it once. New offer from any reason's Offer menu creates it and attaches it; the same offer can ride several reasons. Each message gets its own code ("$25 off your next visit with code BACK-7K2Q, good through Dec 20"). An offer never rides a review ask.

There is nothing to type at the counter. A customer who books through the message's link arrives with the offer already on the visit: the car header says Campaign offer BACK-7K2Q applied under their name, and the discount row named after the offer lands on the first estimate or bill (the same row the discount editor writes, so a signed bill re-asks for a signature like any other change). A visit without a campaign code says nothing about offers. A customer who walks in quoting a code gets the discount through the normal discount editor. Financials > Explore > Source shows offer visits as Offer: Welcome back, and plain win-back texts as Win-back text, so you can read what the offer brought in next to what it gave away.

Rules every message obeys

Settings holds no automation switch. It holds the rules: Settings, Messaging has quiet hours, weekdays only and your shop's writing voice for AI drafts, with the daily cap and the snooze default (how long a Skip holds) behind its ••• as Queue limits; who may message customers is on Settings, Team.

If a shop's outreach emails start drawing spam complaints or bouncing at a high rate, CarSignal pauses that shop's outreach automatically and shows a notice on the Follow up tab; inbox replies and transactional email (quotes, invoices) keep working. This protects every shop's email deliverability. Contact support to review and resume.

Automated sends follow every rule hand sends do: texts only go to customers who opted in, emails only to customers who haven't unsubscribed (and never to bouncing or suppressed addresses), nothing sends outside your quiet hours in your shop's own timezone, and every automatic message draws from the same daily cap as your hand sends, so a busy campaign day pauses them rather than flooding anyone. Automated messages ride the same records as manual ones (a customer who replies threads into Messages like any other), and a customer is never followed up twice about the same declined job within two months.

Replies

Customer replies land in Messages, the shop's one home for every text and email conversation, cross-linked per customer, with the AI receptionist's turns labeled inline. Outbound emails show delivered and opened right on the message; a message counts as booked when the customer uses their booking link, or when their vehicle checks in within 30 days of the send. Either way the visit itself is marked: the repair order's source reads reminder (or campaign) unless you already named one, so Financials > Explore > Source shows what the follow-ups actually brought in.

Reviews

Once the bill is paid and the car is marked picked up (whichever happens last), CarSignal asks the customer how the visit went, in the same personal voice as everything else: "Thanks for bringing the Camry in today, Mike here from Summit Auto. Mind rating us?" with the rating link. You can rewrite the words on the Review ask row under Outreach > Autopilot (text and email separately); an offer never rides a review ask. Happy customers (4 to 5 stars) are routed to your Google review link; unhappy ones are asked what went wrong privately, so problems reach you instead of your Google profile.

A low rating (1 to 3 stars) never sees the public link. The customer gets a short box, "Tell us what went wrong", and their words land inside the shop three ways at once: as a thread from that customer in Messages, labelled Review feedback, so the reply is one tap in the channel they already use; as one notice to the team pointing at the Reviews tab; and under Needs a reply on the Reviews tab until someone marks it resolved. The shop's email address gets a copy too. A customer with no phone on file still rings the bell and the email.

The Reviews tab on Outreach lists every ask. Each row shows the customer, the car, how the ask went out (text or email) and when. Rated rows show the stars and the customer's own words. The first move is Text or Email, whichever the customer prefers: it opens their conversation on the Messages page with a friendly follow-up already drafted (an apology and an offer to talk after a low rating, a thank-you with the review link after a high one), which you can edit before sending. Call and Mark resolved sit beside it. A row with no reply yet has Send again: the same message and the same rating link go out once more, at most once a day, and never after the customer has rated or opened Google.

A customer is asked once per visit and not again automatically for 90 days, and never after they have rated you or opened Google. A paid visit from the last two weeks that did not get an ask is a row on Follow up: Planned at pickup while the car is still here, else Held with the reason (asked in the last 90 days, not sent at pickup, no phone or email, already rated). When the reason is one of the automatic rules, Send now sends that visit's ask right away: the same message and link the automatic ask would send, once per visit. No Google review link yet? The tab says so with a link straight to it in Settings, Profile.

The Mark picked up confirm (web and phone) says before you press it whether the ask will go: the review box is ticked with "Sends at pickup" when it will, or unticked with the reason when a rule holds it ("Asked 45 days ago; automatic asks wait 90 days"), and the pickup message ends with "Review ask sent" or "Review ask held:" and the reason.

Automatic messages

Appointment confirmations and reminders ("Reply C to confirm"), the ready-for-pickup text, review asks and birthday texts all run on their own; each is a row on Outreach, Autopilot, and each shows up in Follow up before and after it goes.

If your technicians never talk to customers (odd-hours mobile work, say), turn on Technician actions don't message customers under Settings, Team: every customer message from a tech is blocked. Automatic ones (the ready-for-pickup ping, schedule-change texts, review asks) are silently skipped, and the explicit send buttons (quote, invoice, pay link, texting) answer "Customer messages are handled by the front desk." Admins and service writers are unaffected, and techs can still build quote previews for the desk to send.

Mobile service shops

Outreach drafts follow your direction of service. A mobile shop's follow-ups ask "want us to come take care of it?" instead of "want us to get you in sometime?", and the automated declined-work and comeback texts never ask the customer to come by.