Golden Horizons
CAPABILITY · SALES & LEAD-GEN
SMS Concierge
Two-way SMS front desk that qualifies, answers, and books without staff.
$6,000 build · $1,500–3,000/mo
Talk to us about a SMS Concierge build →What it does
Runs a full two-way SMS conversation from first contact through booking confirmation. Handles FAQs, price questions, availability, and appointment requests in the client brand voice. Escalates edge cases to a human on demand.
SMS has the highest open rate of any channel most businesses use. The problem isn't the channel — it's how businesses use it. Most operators set up a shortcode, blast a monthly promo to their entire list, and call it an SMS strategy. There's no segmentation, no two-way handling, and when a customer texts back a question, nobody's watching the inbox. The channel gets blamed for low ROI when the real issue is that the business built a loudspeaker, not a conversation.
The SMS Concierge flips that. It's a two-way layer trained on your business — your services, your pricing structure, your booking logic, your frequently asked questions. When a prospect texts in from a missed-call notification, a web form trigger, or a review-card QR code, the system picks up the conversation in seconds. It asks the qualifying questions your front desk would ask, checks availability against your calendar, and books the appointment or schedules the callback without staff touching it. When an existing customer texts in between visits, the system has their history from your CRM or practice management system and responds with context — not a generic autoresponse.
Outbound works the same way. Instead of a single broadcast to your full list, the system segments by tier, recency, and lifecycle stage before any message goes out. A med-spa client who hasn't booked in six months gets a different message than one who came in last week. A real estate lead who toured three properties but hasn't moved gets different follow-up than a cold inquiry. The logic lives in the integration with your CRM so segmentation isn't a manual export — it runs automatically as your contact list updates.
Every build includes a TCPA-compliant consent flow from day one. That means documented opt-in language at the point of collection, double-opt-in where the use case requires it, instant opt-out processing on any STOP keyword, and a suppression list that updates in real time across all outbound jobs. TCPA exposure is real for any business sending promotional SMS, and we wire the compliance controls into the system rather than leaving them as an afterthought. Human escalation is always one keyword away — any conversation that goes outside the system's confidence threshold, or where the customer explicitly asks for a person, routes immediately to the staff member on call with full conversation context in the handoff.
Use cases
- A med-spa sends a pre-visit confirmation SMS 24 hours before each appointment. The concierge handles replies — rescheduling requests, parking questions, pre-treatment prep questions — without front desk involvement, and updates the booking system when a time change is confirmed.
- A gym texts lapsed members who haven't checked in for 45 or more days. The concierge handles replies, answers questions about current class schedules or membership freeze options, and routes upgrade interest to a sales rep with the conversation thread attached.
- A real estate agent triggers an SMS to prospects after a showing. The concierge fields follow-up questions about the property, collects buyer feedback, and books a second showing or an offer consultation directly into the agent's calendar.
- A dental practice runs a reactivation campaign targeting patients overdue for a cleaning. The concierge qualifies insurance status in the SMS thread, books the appointment into the scheduling system, and sends a confirmation with pre-visit instructions — no phone calls required.
- A boutique hotel sends a pre-arrival SMS two days before check-in. The concierge handles early check-in requests, room preference notes, restaurant reservation questions, and local recommendation requests, surfacing anything that needs staff attention before the guest arrives.
- An HVAC company captures inbound SMS leads from Google Local Services Ads. The concierge qualifies the service type, confirms the service address, and books a technician dispatch window without the office staff manually triaging each text.
What’s included
- Fixed scope with written acceptance criteria before any build starts
- Customization layer for your brand voice and business rules
- Clean handover with documented runbook and live training
- Monthly ROI report for three months post-delivery
- Source code delivered to your GitHub on handover
What’s NOT included
- Third-party API subscription costs (billed to your accounts)
- Data migration from legacy systems
- Ongoing infrastructure costs after handover
Retainer
Monthly retainer covers monitoring, prompt tuning, config refinement, and minor integration additions. Range: $1,500–3,000/mo.
How clients use this
Fixed-scope build with clean handover, then an optional monthly retainer covering maintenance, monitoring, and minor changes. Most clients move to retainer within 60 days of delivery.
Part of
Used in: real-estate-agents , Dental Practices , restaurants
Questions SMS Concierge clients ask
How does the system handle TCPA compliance and consent management?
Every build ships with a documented consent architecture. Opt-in language is captured at the collection point — web form, QR code, verbal consent logged by staff — with a timestamp and source recorded for each contact. Where the use case involves promotional messaging, double opt-in is triggered automatically. Any inbound STOP, UNSUBSCRIBE, QUIT, or CANCEL keyword triggers immediate suppression across all outbound queues and updates the contact record in your CRM in real time. The suppression list is the source of truth — no batch job needed to sync it. We also configure quiet hours per your jurisdiction's state-level SMS laws, which in some states are stricter than the federal TCPA floor. The consent records are stored in a format that makes them retrievable if you ever need to demonstrate compliance. We're not attorneys and this isn't legal advice, but the system is built to reflect current TCPA requirements as of early 2026 — your counsel should review the consent language before go-live.
Which SMS providers does this integrate with, and can we use our existing number?
The default build runs on Twilio, which supports short codes, toll-free numbers, and 10DLC-registered long codes depending on your volume and use case. If you're already running a Twilio account, the concierge wires into your existing setup and you keep your current business number. MessageBird and Vonage are supported if you have an existing contract with either. 10DLC registration — the carrier-required business vetting process for A2P SMS in the US — is handled as part of onboarding if you don't already have it. Toll-free numbers are an option for lower-volume use cases with faster registration timelines. Short codes work for high-volume promotional programs but involve a longer provisioning window and higher monthly cost. We'll recommend the right number type based on your expected monthly message volume and use case during the scoping call.
What's the difference between this and a broadcast SMS tool like SimpleTexting or EZTexting?
Broadcast tools are one-way by design — you write a message, send it to a list, and the platform tracks opens and clicks. If someone replies, you either get an email notification and handle it manually, or the reply disappears. The SMS Concierge is built around the reply. It reads the inbound message, understands what the person is asking in the context of your business, generates a relevant response, and continues the conversation until there's a resolution — a booking, an answer, a handoff to staff. Outbound is still there, but segmented by CRM data rather than a flat list. The real difference is that broadcast tools require your staff to handle every inbound thread. The concierge handles most threads without staff at all, and routes the exceptions with full context so the human isn't starting from scratch.
How does the concierge pull context from our CRM or booking system?
The integration reads from your CRM or practice management system at the start of each conversation. When an inbound SMS arrives, the system matches the sender's phone number to a contact record, pulls their last interaction date, service history, open appointments, and any custom fields the build is configured to use. That context shapes the response — a returning customer asking about pricing gets a different reply than a cold contact asking the same question. On the booking side, the concierge checks live availability through your scheduling system rather than quoting from a static block, so what it offers is actually bookable. When an appointment is confirmed in the SMS thread, the booking writes back to the scheduling system automatically. The CRM record updates with the conversation outcome. Default integrations are HubSpot, Cal.com, and common practice management platforms — if you're running something else, we scope the integration during the build.
What does Golden Horizons recommend for measuring ROI on this build?
Three numbers worth tracking from day one. First, inbound response rate — what percentage of inbound SMS contacts get a reply within five minutes compared to your baseline before the build. Speed-to-response is the single biggest driver of lead conversion on SMS because most contacts are comparing options. Second, booking conversion from SMS thread — how many inbound conversations end in a confirmed appointment versus a drop-off. The concierge logs each conversation outcome so you can see where threads stall. Third, staff time on SMS — how many inbound messages per week your front desk was touching manually before the build versus after. Most businesses we work with have no baseline data on that number, so one of the first things we set up is a simple logging layer that makes it measurable. We don't promise specific conversion lifts because every business starts from a different baseline, but we can show you within the first thirty days exactly what the system is handling and where the gaps are.