Now that you have explored the new app experience and have had a chance to use it on a few jobs you may want to dive a little deeper into customizing and mastering some of the new features.

These new features fall into two categories: new comment types and the new customer experience.

Custom Saved Comments Types

Your Saved Comments still have the same Deficiency and Informational comment types like they always have. Now that you have upgraded your account to the new experience you can take advantage of custom comment types. A big change is that icons have been replaced with just colors.

We suggest taking a moment to learn the basics about custom saved comment types before making any big changes.

As a best practice we have found that changing the 'Deficiency' label to something like 'Repair or Replacement' works better than adding a new comment type and trying to manually edit each comment to have the new type.

Then you can then add another, more severe, comment type labeled something like 'Safety Concern' with a more alarming color such as red to your saved comments types and drag it to the top of the list.

This video should give you a better understanding of how these new comment types work and how you can customize them in your existing Saved Comments to work best for you.

As you do reports and find yourself wanting to make one of your saved comments a Safety Concern you can save those changes and edit your saved comments as you go.

Customize Your Client’s Experience

Your clients and their agents experience your work through your Messaging and their Client Portal. 

Client Portal Settings

Your client portal has inherited much of your existing Report Publishing settings and is more than likely quite usable already.

Portal Access Expiration

You can set how long a portal is accessible by the people you invited for a particular job. This was inherited from your legacy Report Publishing settings.

Portal Welcome Message

This is the message that is displayed when people load their client portal. You can also customize this message on a job by job basis when sharing, or re-sharing, inspection results.

The default message was migrated from your legacy Pickup Message in your Report Publishing settings.

Portal Theme

The Portal Theme describes the colors and styles used to format your portal, web reports, and PDF downloads.

You can change the primary and secondary colors to match your brand colors. These will display on the web as well as pdf reports.

The ability to change the more styles like the fonts, font sizes, colors, etc of each element is built into the client portal but a simple to use editor is not available quite yet. 

Sharing Messages

The new app experience has a brand new Messaging module. This gives you the ability to define different messages that can be sent to different people when certain events happen in your job.

If you are using Autopilot you are already familiar with this idea and how to modify these messages. to customize your client's experience.

If not, the idea is pretty simple. You can define one or more messages to be set to people that have been added to your job when certain events occur. Sharing the results (Results Available) is one of these events. Another (Results Updated) is when you update a report and want other to know and see the changes.

You can edit your messages from the Messaging page of your Settings in your web account.

The default Sharing messages for Results Available or Results Updated should be good enough to get you started.

The subject and body of the message can be edited to fit your voice and style. You can even use replacement tags to fill in job specific values to give you messages a custom and personal feel.

Different messages for different roles for a single event can also be defined. That way one message can be sent to your client and another sent to the buyer's agent.

You should now have a very good feel of what has changed with the new app experience and the additions settings you have at your disposal.

If you are a Team with multiple inspectors you are ready to move on to explore the Team specific improvements in the new app experience.