Actions in Spectora Advanced are a powerful tool to help automate your workflow and ensure that important tasks don’t slip through the cracks. By setting up Actions, you can create automated email responses and trigger messages based on specific events, such as sending follow-up emails, generating reminders, or notifying team members when an inspection is scheduled.
Here’s how you can get started with using Actions in Spectora Advanced to streamline your operations and improve your client communication.
Actions allow much more customization than the Automation options in the standard software. In addition to standard timed reminders and follow-ups, Actions allow for conditional logic and event triggers. Some possibilities include:
Send a reminder to pay the day before the inspection if it is still unpaid
Send an upsell email if a certain service add-on isn't included
Send a third-party contractor a text if a certain service is selected
Send different emails/texts based on the service selected
Send different emails/texts for different types of clients (VIP, investor, etc.) and agents (first-time agent, repeat agent, etc.) based on Contact Tags
Send different publishing emails based on the name of the report
Send an email only if the property's square footage is above a certain amount
Trigger a webhook if a custom field has a certain value
Actions are more complex and require a bit more time to set up and organize - we'll walk you through everything you need to know in this guide.
If you are interested in learning more about Spectora Advanced, click here to book a call with our team! You can also sign up for your free 30-day trial here! 🤩
If you'd like, we also have tutorial videos that you can watch on our YouTube channel.
How to Enable Actions with Spectora Advanced
How to Enable Actions with Spectora Advanced
First, you'll want to make sure your Spectora Advanced Actions are enabled!
Once you sign up for Spectora Advanced, you'll have new tools at your disposal. To use these new tools, you'll need to enable them under your settings.
Click "Settings:
Click "Advanced Tools"
Click "Enable Actions"
Decide if you want to use Actions on all inspections or a per-inspection basis
Per Inspection: Use Actions only for inspections that you choose.
All Inspections: Use Actions for all inspections, including inspections that are booked through your Online Scheduler.
Click "Save"
You'll automatically be redirected to your Company Actions page! This is where you can create, edit, and delete your Actions.
Now you're ready to begin!
🔴 Note: If per-inspection is enabled and an inspection is scheduled using Automations, you cannot switch to Actions after the inspection has been scheduled.
Managing Your Actions
Managing Your Actions
You can access your Company Actions a few different ways - through Settings, your Profile Picture, or the Navigation Bar.
Your Company Actions can be viewed and managed by anyone with "admin" permissions.
💻 Pro-tip: To add Actions to your Navigation Bar, check out the steps in this article!
Organizing Your Actions
Organizing Your Actions
Actions are organized into arbitrary "Action Groups" to help you break things up. These can be any logical grouping you'd like. For example, maybe you'd like to organize your groups by recipient.
Other possible grouping ideas include:
Scheduling, Reminders, Publishing, and Follow-Ups
Emails, Texts, and Webhooks
Click on your profile picture in the top right corner
Click "Actions" in the dropdown menu
You'll be redirected to your Company Actions page
Actions are sorted into groups to make them easy to manage
To add a new group, click "+Add Action Group"
To edit or add to a group, click on the group's tab
You'll see all actions associated with that group
To add a new action to the group, click "+ Add Action"
To edit an existing action, click on any of the boxes (To, Event, Rules, Details)
To duplicate an existing action, click the paper icons on the right
To delete an action, click the trash can icon
To reorder your actions, click and drag the bar on the left
There is no limit to the amount of groups you can have, so create any structure that works for you!
Importing Automation into Actions
Importing Automation into Actions
We automatically import your existing Automation settings into Actions when you first start. If you have changed your Automation setup and want to re-import them to Actions it's easy to use those emails/texts as a starting point for your Actions. Just click "Import" in the title bar and choose which ones to import!:
Creating New Actions
Creating New Actions
Click on "Add Action" to start the wizard for creating a new Action:
Here are a few extra details on each step:
Choose An Event
This is the event that triggers the Action. It includes things like:
Inspection scheduled
Inspection published (i.e. inspection is published for the first time)
Inspection canceled
Inspection rescheduled (i.e. date/time changed)
Agreements being signed
Inspection being paid
Report being viewed
Report being published
Inspectors being assigned or unassigned to an inspection
Actions can be set to trigger at the time of the event or an arbitrary amount of time after the event. For known future events, like the "Inspection started" event, you can schedule Actions before they happen. This is useful for reminders leading up to the inspections.
Note that you can "Send during certain hours only" if you wish to avoid middle-of-the-night texts. These Actions will be delayed until the next time when you're sending window starts (i.e. if you set it to only send between 9am - 5pm, a 2am text will delay until 9am to send.) Similarly, you can check "Do not send on weekends" to avoid Saturday/Sunday sending.
Additionally, you may wish to "Send even when notifications are disabled" for Actions that you want going out regardless of whether an inspection is unconfirmed or silenced. For example, you may wish to send internal notifications to office staff or quotes to customers for unconfirmed inspections.
You can also choose to "Only send once" for an Action that shouldn't go out repeatedly. For example, you might publish multiple reports (residential, mold, etc) and link a follow-up request for a review to happen 3 days after publishing. If you don't want 3 separate follow-ups going out, mark this to only fire once, and subsequent report publishing won't send out more.
Add Rules
Rules allow you to apply conditions to the Action, such as "Only do this for Commercial Inspections" or "Don't do this for repeat agents". You can have Actions fire only when the published report is named "Residential" while another is only when the report is named "Commercial".
You can combine rules to create very complex logic - we recommend using different Groups to organize your actions to keep everything understandable from your perspective!
Choose An Action
Simply choose whether this action results in an email, a text, or a webhook (an automated notification to another service's server.)
Add Details
This is where you input the details of the email, text, or webhook. For emails, this would be the To, From, CC, BCC, Subject, and Text. For text messages, this is the text content. For webhooks, this is the payload. You can use any {{PLACEHOLDER}} to populate dynamic data.
Note: Any new actions added or changes made to existing actions on the Company Actions page will not reflect on inspections scheduled before these changes are made.
To pull in your newly created actions to existing inspections, you can use the Import New Actions button on the inspection page, this will add the new action to this inspection's action queue as long as the triggering event hasn't already occurred.
This also includes deleting actions. To make sure a deleted action is removed from an inspection's queue you will want to manually disable those on the inspection page.
Viewing an Inspection's Actions
Viewing an Inspection's Actions
Once you've scheduled your inspection, you can see all associated Actions that were brought into that inspection. You can view, edit, enable/disable any of the actions, as well as see why an action might not have been sent out.
Click on the inspection from your dashboard calendar
You'll see Inspection Actions at the bottom of the page
All email actions will show in the "Emails" box
All text actions will show in the "Text Messages" box
Click "View All Inspection Actions" to view all possible actions for the inspection
Click into an actions group to see what actions are available
To enable or disable an action, toggle the switch on the left
To edit an existing action, click on any of the boxes (To, Event, Rules, Details)
To manually trigger an action, click "Send"
Successfully sent actions will show in green
Actions that were not sent due to not meeting the rules/requirements will show in gray
Actions that triggered but failed to send will show in red
To see why an action did not send, click "View Triggers"
If you recently created a new action, click "Import New Actions" to add it to the existing inspection
Summary
As you can see, Actions are a powerful feature that will allow you to set up complex automation rules. It is most useful for companies with multiple inspectors that offer multiple services and have time to put into setting up all the rules.
You can still use Spectora Advanced with our original Automation system if you prefer the simple approach - just disable "Actions" in Settings.
Frequently Asked Questions
I confirmed an inspection with notifications enabled, but the Automations sent out standard notifications instead of Advanced Actions that were intended. How to avoid that in the future, or is there a way to still use Actions on the current inspection?
To avoid this happening in the future, you should set your Actions to send on all inspections. You can do so by going to Settings > Advanced Tools > Select "All Inspections" under Actions.
Unfortunately, there is not a way to use Actions on the current inspection - once an inspection is created, you cannot switch between Automations and Actions.
How can I switch from using the same messages for all inspections to having messages specific to each type of inspection without disrupting my current inspection messaging?
You can copy your existing Actions messages by clicking the paper icon to the right of the Action:
Once you've duplicated the message, you can configure the newly created Action to have more specific rules. Click here to see how to add rules to an Action.
If you have any questions or feedback, write into our chat bubble or email support@spectora.com!
