One inbox for every customer conversation.
When a customer texts your shop number, it lands in Pitlane's inbox as a thread tied to their contact record. When the next customer texts in, they get their own thread. No mixing, no guessing which "yes" was for the brake-job estimate.
The thread list shows you who's waiting on a reply at a glance. Unread badges. Most-recent first. Click a row to read the conversation and answer it. On desktop the conversation opens next to the list so you can scan the queue while you reply.
Reply where you are, with the customer's history in view.
The thread pane sits to the right of the list, full-height, with a composer at the bottom. Type a reply, hit Cmd-Enter or click Send. The composer shows your character count and the SMS segment count as you type, so a 200-character explanation doesn't quietly cost you two segments without you noticing.
Replies go through your shop's per-shop Twilio subaccount, so the customer sees your local 10-digit number. Not a shared short code that says "is this spam." Per-shop A2P 10DLC registration is automatic the first time you turn on SMS in Settings.
- Two-pane on desktop (≥1024px), thread permalink on mobile
- Cmd/Ctrl+Enter sends, multi-line composer auto-grows to 6 lines
- Auto-polls every 15 seconds while a thread is open + on tab focus
- Outbound messages show the segment count so long replies don't surprise you
New texts arrive without a page refresh.
While you're looking at a thread, Pitlane re-fetches the conversation every 15 seconds. When the tab is hidden, polling pauses to keep the connection footprint small. When you come back, a single focus event triggers a refresh so you're never looking at stale state.
The thread list refreshes on focus too. A customer can reply while you're in another browser tab, and when you come back to the inbox the unread badge will already be updated.
Mobile gets the same thread, on its own page.
The two-pane layout collapses on phones into a list-only view at /inbox. Tap a thread, you land on /inbox/[customer]. A dedicated thread page with the full composer + a back link to the list. The same polling cadence runs, so an advisor walking the floor can reply between bays without missing a beat.