Part of Spectora Advanced, 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:

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.

Once you've activated Spectora Advanced, pop into Settings > Advanced Tools and enable Actions:

Get to the Actions Manager page from the nav bar or Settings->Advanced->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:

There is no limit to the amount of groups you can have, so create any structure that works for you!

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!:

Click on "Add Action" to start the wizard for creating a new Action:

Here are a few extra details on each step:

This is the event that triggers the Action. It includes things like:

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 it happens. 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 during 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, radon) 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.

Click here for more information on the Choosing an Event options!

Rules allow you to apply conditions to the Action, such as "Only do this for Radon 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 "Radon".

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!

View this article for a further breakdown of rules!

Simply choose whether this action results in an email, a text, or a webhook (an automated notification to another service's server.)

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.

View further details of choosing your action and adding details by clicking here!

Note: Any new actions added or changes made to existing actions on the Company Actions page will not reflect on inspections scheduled prior to these changes being 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 inspections 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 inspections queue you will want to manually disable those on the inspection page.

You'll still see scheduled emails/texts at the bottom of Inspection Details:

You can also jump into the scheduled Actions for an inspection from the "Actions" link in the "More" dropdown:

This page allows you to disable Actions before they happen, edit upcoming Actions, and add new Actions:

The small text also shows status updates for an Action, such as the email being received or a text message bouncing.

As you can see, Actions is a powerful new 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.