Ready to improve your on-the-fly communications with agents, clients, and inspectors?
The new Spectora Conversations feature will allow you to leverage your custom number to have direct conversations with them right along with the actions-based messages they may currently receive.
🔴 Note: This feature does require Spectora Advanced and a Custom Number.
Check out the video below for a full overview of Conversations!
Accessing Conversations
You can access the Conversations page in a few different ways:
Clicking the Conversations Icon at the top right of your screen (beside the user menu icon). This icon will also serve to notify you of unread messages as there will be a red dot on the icon if there are unread messages.
Clicking on Conversations in the user menu
Adding it to your Navigation Bar customization in settings and clicking on the Nav Bar
Starting and Continuing Conversations
Once you are on the Conversations page, you will see the page broken up into sections for Inspectors, Agents, and Clients to help with the organization of your communications.
Within each, you will see a list of recent conversations (if there are any). Recent, in this case, is defined as having had a message sent/received within the last 2 weeks.
Above that, you will see a search box where you can search for the contact that you want to start or resume a conversation with.
Note: For inspectors mobile number field in their profile is required for this feature to work for messaging them.
Select a name to see or start the conversation.
Outbound messages are seen along the right side with a date or timestamp
Under each outbound message, the name of the user that was logged into Spectora sending that message will show.
Any automated messaging (via Automations or Actions) that has been sent to that contact will also show in the thread with the user being "Auto" and a link back to the inspection that the message is associated with.
Any responses from the contact are seen along the left side of the thread
Click into the message box at the bottom of the screen to type the message you want to send then hit enter or click on the Send button when you are ready to send it
Messages sent will show up as a text message on the contact's mobile phone coming from the custom number you have set up. They simply respond via their text messaging app and the responses show up in the thread in Conversations.
🔴 At this time, you cannot attach photos to Conversations.
Conversations Directly From The Inspection Page
You can also access Conversations from the Inspection Details page. You will see a Conversations icon beside the Inspector name(s). Clicking on the icon will open the Conversations page in a new tab with the specific thread open for that inspector.
Important Tips for Utilizing the Conversations Feature
For the Conversations feature to work correctly for Inspectors to receive the messages, their cell number must be listed in the mobile phone field in the inspector profile (this number is not viewable outside of internal company users)
For the Conversations feature to work correctly for Agents and Clients, the number must be listed in the "Phone" field. Currently, we don't reference the "Mobile" field that is technically available for Clients.
🌟 Quick tip: If you are already using a custom number and have forwarding turned on, you may want to disable that after getting this started. You don't have to do so, but it could become confusing to get the messages forwarded to a separate phone number when the conversation thread is unified in the Spectora web application.
If you have any questions or feedback, write into our chat bubble or email support@spectora.com!
