Before
The pilot ran four years of bookings on a generic booking widget the customer did not know was theirs, contacts in a horizontal CRM that could not tell a sedan from a Suburban, billing in Stripe Invoices, and SMS reminders sent by hand. The system worked until volume crossed a few hundred customers a year. By 2025 the owner was answering the phone instead of detailing cars. Reschedules slipped through the cracks. Retention was whoever happened to call back.
What we replaced
- A generic booking widget → Detail Near AI booking wizard with vehicle size pricing native.
- A horizontal CRM that did not understand vehicles or ZIP routes → vertical customers table with rebook, retention, and NPS built in.
- SMS reminders sent by hand → transactional pipeline with calendar event, customer email, customer SMS, and team notification fired on every booking.
- Spreadsheet routing → ZIP cluster engine with miles dashboard.
- Reactive retention → nightly sweep that drafts SMS for owner approval each morning.
Numbers we can talk about
- Over 1,000 bookings run through the platform, worth $215K in completed jobs.
- 63 percent of those bookings were placed by returning customers, the repeat demand the retention engine is built to protect.
- Storefront live in 60 minutes. Customer SMS confirmation, calendar invite, and team email firing on first wizard booking the same day.
- Service area math working: ZIP centroids across thirteen MetroWest towns, miles trimmed roughly 18 percent in the first sixty days by accepting suggested slots.
- Specific revenue and booking counts shared in a 15 minute demo. The numbers are private to the operator.
What changed for the team
The owner stopped answering the phone for new bookings. The wizard handles 80 percent of intake. The SDR over SMS handles inbound text inquiries. The retention sweep flags exactly which customers are about to lapse, with the SMS ready to approve.