Marketing campaigns and the AI SMS agent
Marketing is an opt-in add-on. It is separate from the transactional customer messaging that is included with your subscription.
Status updates, quote links, and pickup texts work without Marketing. Marketing adds automated campaigns on top of that, and the AI SMS agent adds automated replies on top of Marketing.
How the modules stack
- Customer messaging is core. Your site phone number and transactional SMS are included.
- Marketing is an opt-in metered add-on that needs Customer messaging to work.
- The AI SMS agent is a further opt-in add-on that needs Marketing and Customer messaging.
Each step is a deliberate choice an owner makes. None of them turn on by themselves, and customer messaging itself cannot be switched off through module toggles.
Campaigns fire from real workshop events
Because Openhood already runs your repair orders, campaigns can trigger from real events such as a completed job or a declined service, rather than from a separate contact list you have to keep in sync.
What Marketing does
The Marketing module runs automated customer outreach, such as review requests after a job and follow-up on declined services.
- Review requests go to every customer, regardless of how the visit went. Asking only happy customers is against platform and consumer-law rules, so there is no sentiment gating.
- Declined services can get a structured follow-up so safe, worthwhile work is not simply forgotten.
Customers are not over-messaged
Automated messaging is capped per customer per day and ordered by priority, and lower-priority campaigns step aside when a customer is in several at once. The goal is helpful contact, not a flood of texts.
The AI SMS agent
With the AI SMS agent enabled, an automated responder can reply to customer texts using a limited set of actions such as checking availability, booking, looking up history, and handing off to a person.
It works only within tightly drawn limits:
- It sees only conversations that have already been confidently grouped to a customer and job. Ungrouped messages never reach it.
- It can use only an approved set of actions, and a booking must pass date, availability, and duplicate checks.
- It always replies from the same site number the conversation is on.
- Anything touching money, such as a quote approval, is never decided by the agent. Those stay staged for a person to confirm.
Customer text is evidence, not instructions
A customer could type anything into a text. The AI agent treats that text as something to interpret within its allowed actions, never as a command that grants it new powers. If a reply would be unsafe, it hands off to a human instead of sending.