I personally generate and send out text blast campaigns for our dealerships and not having it built into our CRM does create unnecessary logistical challenges. Having to send out from a third party and jump back and pick up the conversation from a DriveCentric line is not efficient and is a negative for the customer experience.

The fine line that needs to be maintained to keep a customer engaged revolves around several factors. One of the most important is our response time, and having the customer feel that everything is seamless as we move the conversation forward hoping to convert into an appointment.

Today's customer is more demanding of the best possible experience and having them feel bounced around when they are looking for simple information is how not to sell more cars in the current market. They have less and less tolerance for anything short of a great interaction.

I understand there are compliance and carrier issues etc. and everyone faces them. The major issue is falling behind what many other platforms already offer putting us at a disadvantage in our highly competitive industry. With that, hopefully DriveCentric moves forward quickly so dealers can stay in front of our customer's and win more deals.

I cannot emphasize enough how much I agree with this. DriveCentric is falling behind in a HUGE way by not offering this functionality. Text campaigns generate significantly higher engagement for us than email campaigns, and not having this capability within our CRM is a major disadvantage.

We actually switched back to turning on Genius when we came away from Tecobi, which offered text blasting but wasn't a full CRM. While DriveCentric is undoubtedly the better overall CRM, there is absolutely no question that our customer engagement has dropped since making that switch. We've had to create numerous workarounds, including paying for a secondary platform just to send text campaigns and then transferring that communication back into DriveCentric. Not only is that inefficient, but it also interferes with Genius and so many of the other features that make DriveCentric such a great platform in the first place.

We need the ability to create and customize our own text campaigns, just as we can with email campaigns, without having those messages generated or controlled by Genius. Of course, all necessary opt-in requirements, compliance protections, and safeguards would remain in place.

Text campaigns are an incredibly important tool for dealers, whether for sales, service, promotions, customer retention, or reengaging previous customers. This isn't some unusual feature request anymore. It's a basic communication capability that competing platforms have already recognized the importance of.

I genuinely love so much of what DriveCentric does, which is exactly why this is so frustrating. This needs to be a priority, not something dealers continue having to work around.

Thanks for taking the time to lay this out, Rebekah Bean — totally hear you on the friction of having to rely on email or third-party tools for something that’s become pretty standard. This is really helpful context, and I’m sharing it with the team as we review SMS campaign support (including the kinds of guardrails you mentioned like opt-out protections, approval workflows, and usage thresholds). If you’re open to it, a bit more detail on your ideal use case (who you’d target, how often you’d send, and what “compliant” needs to look like for your store) would help us evaluate the right approach.