Messages

Messages is the one home for talking to customers. Every text and email conversation lives here — whether you started it with an outreach follow-up, the AI receptionist answered a cold call or text, or the customer wrote in first. Each customer gets a text conversation and an email conversation, cross-linked, so when someone is active on both channels a banner on each shows the other's latest message one click away.

What lands here

• Texts: the customer's full text history with your shop, including the AI receptionist's turns (labeled), automated messages like appointment reminders, and every staff send from any page. Cold callers with no customer record show up too, under their phone number, so no conversation can hide.
• Emails: outreach follow-ups and the customer's replies, threaded like real email with delivered and opened shown on each message, plus AI-triaged leads from your connected inbox.

Replying

Answering always sends on that conversation's channel: text threads get the compact composer, email threads get a To and an editable subject line, and email answers go out as a plain personal reply that threads onto the customer's own email, not a branded blast. The moment you send a text yourself, the thread is yours: the AI receptionist steps back and stops texting that customer, so there is never a bot talking over you.

The panel beside the conversation

Contact info, the customer's vehicle with VIN and mileage, the declined work the conversation is probably about (with its price and a link straight to the job), and recent activity — so you know who you're talking to before you type.

Hard to read?

Turn on High contrast under Settings > Display (Me tab on mobile). Message bubbles get a visible edge and timestamps, dividers, and status colors darken across the whole app.

How it fits with Outreach and the Receptionist

Outreach decides who is worth contacting and drafts the message; the AI receptionist answers when you can't. Both write into these threads — Messages is where the conversation itself lives. The Receptionist console reviews what the AI handled and jumps here when a caller needs a human; the Outreach Follow Up tab sends the first message and points here when the customer replies. Shops that use neither still get Messages as their plain texting inbox.