Product Updates

File Attachments on Notes + Files Browser

You can now attach files directly to notes! And, with our new Files Browser you can easily find files associated with each lead.

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Attaching files to leads via Notes

You can now upload images, PDFs, and other files directly to notes.

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Enhanced attachment previewing in app

We've also improved the experience when previewing file attachments on emails, SMS, and now on notes.

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Easily find files on leads via the Files Browser

We've also added a Files Browser that shows any files that have been sent, received, or uploaded to the lead. To access it, open this menu and click "View Files".

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We hope both features allow you keep more of important documents within Close, and help avoiding using other tools for storage.

Automatically Set Lead Status

We've introduced a new action to our Workflows: the option to automatically update a Lead's status. Now, you can configure Workflows to automatically change the status of a Lead at one point or multiple points in your Workflow. This means less manual work and more accurate categorization of your Leads.

As an example, at the start of a Workflow, you might set a Lead's status to "Potential" or "Actively Working." And, if a Lead reaches the end of the Workflow without engaging or responding, their status could automatically change to "Unresponsive."

This new action is all about making sure your Leads are always sorted correctly, without you having to keep tabs on manually updating their status.

Our goal with this update is to save you time and ensure that your lead management process is as seamless as possible.

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@mentions and Commenting

We've released a few new additions to Close to help you collaborate with your team.

@mention other users and groups in notes

You can now @mention users and groups within notes and activities. Any user that is mentioned will receive a notification via email that links them directly to the activity in Close.

We hope this allows to collaborate more efficiently, rather than creating tasks that reference notes or other activities on the lead.

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Comment on activities

You can also comment directly on various objects and activities in Close. This should make discussions leads, calls, opportunities, etc. much more seamless in Close, avoiding the need to have those internal conversation outside of Close.

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We hope both features allow you keep more of your conversations in Close so you always have the most context when interacting with your leads.

March Improvements

What’s New‍

• Easier Access to Edit Smart Views: You can now edit the name and permission settings of Smart Views directly from the ‘More’ menu in the page header.

• Add New Users Directly: Organization Admins can now add new users directly, replacing the old invite system and making user setup faster and more straightforward. Additionally, the Zapier action "Create Invite" has been renamed to "Add User" to align with this new process. This name change should not break existing Zaps.

• Enhanced Visibility to Email Follow-Up Options: The email interface now clearly shows the two options available ("Follow Up" and "Enroll in Workflow") if the recipient does not reply.

• More Efficient Bulk Processing: When bulk emails and actions are run simultaneously, they are now processed in separate queues. Previously, bulk emails and actions shared a queue, which could cause delays if either process was long-running.
• Relocated Email Attachment Button: When composing an email, the attachment button has been relocated from the activity footer to the formatting toolbar for easier access.
• Search Within Snippets: You can now search for Snippets by the text within their bodies, simplifying the process of finding the snippet you need without having to remember its name.
• Link to Specific Activities via Zapier: An activity_url field has been added for each activity type in Zapier—Call, SMS, Note, Email, Meeting, and Custom Activity. This feature allows direct linking to specific activities for easier access.

Bug Fixes

• Improved Accuracy of Call Assistant Summaries: We've enhanced our Call Assistant to more accurately attribute dialogue, reducing instances of incorrect speaker identification.
• Fixed Activity Date Filter: The date filter on the lead page now correctly filters activities based on the activity date.
• Addressed Broken Avatar Images: Avatars that fail to load will now display the user's initials until the image can be reloaded.
• Resolved Email Attachment Sharing Errors: Fixed an issue where attempting to share email attachments to external services, like Google Drive, would result in an "Unauthorized" error.

Conversations

We released a brand new Conversations page in Close. Easily find and review calls and meetings without digging through leads.

• Keyword and phrase filtering. Search through notes, transcripts*, and summaries* to find calls and meeting about a particular topic.

• Filter by call properties. Filter to only show calls in particular directions, over or under certain durations or talk time percentages*, or only for calls that were recorded.

• Filter by User or Smart View. Review calls made by a particular User or calls made to Leads in a particular Smart View.

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• Save views for easy access. Easily saves your filter sets to avoid having to recreate them later.

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** Transcripts, summaries, and talk time percentage are only available on calls made with Call Assistant enabled.

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AI Rewrite Assistant

Struggle with composing emails that hit the right tone or length? Our new AI Rewrite Assistant will help you write faster and more effectively. Highlight the text, click the AI button on the toolbar, and choose how you want to refine your message. No more tab-switching or external tools needed.

Here are just a few ways you can leverage the power of the AI Rewrite Assistant:

• Shorten: Reduce the reading time of lengthy emails with a single click.

• Lengthen: Add depth or details to your message by expanding on key points or bullet points.

• Simplify: Make your emails more digestible by simplifying complex language and long sentences.

• Change Tone: Tailor your message to suit the recipient's expectations or adjust the tone to match your current mood.

‍Learn more about how this feature works here.

February Improvements

What’s New‍

• The Leads and Contacts tables now have a "Hide Column" action.

• Now outbound SMS messages have an outbound icon for quick distinction between inbound and outbound messages in the activity feed.

• When reviewing a call transcript, clicking "Jump to current time" now takes you directly to that point instead of scrolling. This is faster and less disorienting.

• We changed the Activity badges (call, email, task, etc.) icons. We updated the color and contrast of each icon making it easier to pick out different activities while scrolling the activity feed.
• We added "3 Months" as a snooze option for tasks or reminders.
• When using our mobile app, the share menu on Leads now uses device native share functionality when available. Now, if you're on your phone you can quickly send a Lead through Slack, iMessage or any available app on your phone.
• We updated and added new actions to Zapier.

Bug Fixes

• When you duplicate an archived Email Template, the new template will no longer be archived at the time of creation.
• When creating or editing a Scheduling Link, you could save a new link without a valid URL. This is now fixed and we validate there is a valid URL before saving.
• Attempting to remove the last admin in an organization will now require you to set a new admin first.

Email Sending Limits

We released the email-sending limits, allowing admins to define the limits for both regular (Gmail, Outlook, etc.) and mass-sending email accounts (SendGrid, Mailgun, etc.). These limits affect all connected accounts within a single Close organization.

These sending limits impact bulk and workflow emails (one-off emails are not limited). It's possible to apply them per day or hour, and it's possible to define the minimal amount of sending time between emails to limit bursts.
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Find out more in our help article.

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Email Unsubscribe

We released an update to our email unsubscribe functionality. Earlier this month, when we released the functionality to automate managing your unsubscribes you could either turn it on or off for your entire organization.

Now, after this past release, it’s much more flexible with:

• Customizable unsubscribe links. Match your brand and email template types with specific messaging.

• Find and manage your unsubscribed contacts. Filter, search, or create a Smart View to find every unsubscribed contact.

• Undo an unsubscribe. Resubscribe contacts who may have accidentally unsubscribed in a click.

Find out more in our help article.
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Snippets and Quick Insert Menu

We released Snippets, which allows you to add a sentence or paragraph of text you type frequently and insert it into the email, SMS, notes, and template editors.

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The quick insert menu is a new way of interacting with editors. By typing `/` you can insert a snippet, scheduling link, or template tags into the editors.

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We also slightly adjusted our pricing - from now on, only shared email templates, SMS templates, and snippets count toward organization limits.
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Saved Columns per Smart View

We've added the ability to save your column set as part of your Smart View.

When creating a new Smart View or updating an existing one, we'll automatically save your column set so that it loads along with the Smart View. This will help teams that want to focus on different pieces of information on the Lead or Contact when using particular views.

If the Smart View is shared, any user that accesses the view will automatically see the saved columns.

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Basic Email Unsubscribe

We've just released the basic email unsubscribe. Now, you can enforce adding a hardcoded unsubscribe link for your Bulk and Workflow emails (for your organization).

Shortly, we'll add the ability to customize the unsubscribe link and simple reporting and management of your unsubscribed contacts.

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Note - we've since shipped more unsubscribe functionality

January Improvements

What’s New‍

• You can now report issues for calls linked to meetings. 
• The call activity section has been reorganized to display information vertically, replacing the previous tab or dropdown format.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed an issue where a disconnected Calendly account did not show as disconnected in the system.

December Improvements

What’s New‍

• You can now drag and drop columns to change quickly change the order.

• When submitting a support ticket from Close, you can now record a session to submit along with your ticket. This session recording would better track any errors that you be may be seeing. Please note it does not record any audio, so if you'd like to submit a video explanation to help our team assist you better, a tool like Loom would be better for that use case.

• Call recordings now automatically pause when you are no longer viewing the recording. Additionally, if a call is already playing and you start to play another call, only that call will play.
• Our ChatGPT plugin now has access to transcription summaries from calls and voicemails for teams using Call Assistant.
• You can now swipe between lead page tabs in the Close mobile app.
• We've added the ability to copy field text from any custom fields on your Custom Objects, similar to the options that currently exist on Lead, Contact, and Opportunity fields.

Bug Fixes

• SMS attachments will now send with the correct file name. This mostly impacted PDFs as they were sent with a generic application_1.pdf name before.

Call and Meeting Linking

Calls will now automatically attach to Meetings in certain scenarios to help declutter your activity feed.

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Notes:

• Calls placed from Close less than 15 minutes before the start of the meeting or during the meetings scheduled time will be automatically attached.
• The call must be placed to number associated with a contact attending the meeting or a phone number listed within the meeting itself.
• Multiple calls can be linked to the meeting in case or disconnects or unanswered attempts.
• Calls attached to Meetings are still tracked in reporting as they were previously.
• Notes taken within the Meetings field are also reflected on the attached calls when accessed through the API.
• At this time calls can not be manually attached or detached from meetings.
• Calls will only be attached when the Meeting exists prior to the call being placed. There is no historical linking associated with this feature.

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Mobile - Android app, push notifications, and inbound calling

We've released the V1 of the Close app for Android. You can download it by clicking on this Google Play link.

On top of that, we added push notifications and inbound calling support (both iOS and Android).

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November Improvements

What’s New‍

• Call Assistant improvements:

• We've made more improvements to our calling service, making our connectivity more robust. Additionally, we will now indicate the calling service status via the phone icon in the top right of the app. The icon will pulse when a connection is being established and will show red if the connection fails.

• Now, you can click on a column header in a Lead or Contact list to quickly sort by that column.

• New Email Editor Options:

• If a regulatory bundle you submitted is rejected, we'll now include the specific document that was rejected and the reason why.

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Bug Fixes

• Fixed native mobile app issue where attempting to edit an old draft email would show a blank pop-up

October Improvements

What’s New‍

• Customers that have an approved A2P 10DLC campaign will automatically get SHAKEN/STIR Level A attestation.
• We updated the Call Assistant transcript UI. There is now a different colored icon for each user and an updated transcript layout, making it easier to read and scan

• If a new contact is included in an email thread within a Lead, you can add that person as a contact in one click. 

• We've added the ability to easily copy and share a lead page.

• We updated our mobile app:

• We launched a new version on Zapier that improves all actions related to Notes.
• We updated how thumbnails show for attachments and improved the spacing for Activities in the Lead Activities list.
• We changed how replies to text messages work. Now, when you reply, Close will automatically use the same phone number that sent the original SMS, as long as that number is still available.
• When you receive a voicemail and get an email notification from Close, the link in that email will now take you to the Lead with the voicemail filtered in the activity feed.
• If an email fails to send for any reason, you can now edit the email and attempt to re-send it.

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Next Lead/Contact Button

We've just released the Next Lead/Contact button!

When you open a Lead from a lead search, contact search, or Smart View, you’ll now see a button at the bottom-right corner.

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You can use that (or `j` and `k` keyboard shortcuts) to navigate the list.

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Call Assistant

We just launched a brand new AI-powered Call Assistant. When enabled, you'll gain new functionality on any calls recorded in Close.

Transcriptions

Call Assistant will automatically transcribe all of your recorded calls made through Close.

• Know exactly what was said in calls without painstaking review
• Skim the transcript, and jump to points in the conversation just by clicking on text
• Speaker labels help you understand who said what on the call

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• You can also search through any transcriptions. At the transcription level, find instances of any words being spoken, or use Lead search to find all leads that have transcriptions containing specific words or phrases.

Summaries

• Call Assistant will generate a short summary after each call based on the transcript.
• Get the gist of each conversation without having to rely on notes. Easily review you or your team’s previous interactions with a customer much faster than previously possible.

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We're celebrating with a free access period! 🎉

Close customers can enjoy free access to Call Assistant through November 8th.

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