Product Updates

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March 8, 2024
New Feature

Conversations

We released a brand new Conversations page 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.

Filter to only show calls that meet desired criteria
  • Save views for easy access. Easily saves your filter sets to avoid having to recreate them later.
You can save your set of filters as a view for easy access later.

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


February 29, 2024
Improvements

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.
    • Added three new search actions: Find Group, Find Meeting(s), and Find Contact(s)
    • Added Email unsubscribe as a new trigger
    • When running a bulk action through Zapier, you're now required to specify a Lead Smart View. This will protect against accidentally running the bulk action for all your Leads in Close.
    • When using the Bulk Workflow Subscription Action, you can now select a Contact Smart View as well as a Lead Smart View.

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.

Find out more in our help article.


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.



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.

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.

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


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.


January 31, 2024
New Feature

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.

Note - we've since shipped more unsubscribe functionality

January 31, 2024
Improvements

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 31, 2023
Improvements

December Improvements

What’s New

  • You can now drag and drop columns to change quickly change the order.
Easily drag-and-drop your columns to reorder
  • 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.

Calls will now attach to Meetings if we detect the call is part of the Meeting.

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.


December 4, 2023
New Feature

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).



November 30, 2023
Improvements

November Improvements

What’s New

  • Call Assistant improvements:
    • As audio plays, the transcript will automatically scroll keeping both in sync.
    • We added speaker charts. These charts display in all calls with transcriptions, and they give you a quick way to see the breakdown of talk time between each person. You can also click anywhere in the chart to navigate to that spot in the call recording.
  • 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:
    • "Clear formatting" this option removes styling from your text.
    • Added a new option that allows you to choose custom colors for your text or text highlights.
  • If a regulatory bundle you submitted is rejected, we'll now include the specific document that was rejected and the reason why.

Bug Fixes

  • Fixed native mobile app issue where attempting to edit an old draft email would show a blank pop-up
October 31, 2023
Improvements

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:
    • Added push notifications for incoming SMS, missed calls, and new voicemails
    • Added an option in call settings to disable inbound calls to your device
    • Added quick action buttons (Email, SMS, Call)
    • Updated the search bar so that it always shows directly instead of appearing in a popover
  • 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.

October 10, 2023
New Feature

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.

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


October 9, 2023
New Feature

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
Timestamped and speaker labeled transcriptions

  • 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.
Search keywords and phrases across all transcripts

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.
Let Call Assistant handle note taking for you with AI generated summaries

We're celebrating with a free access period! 🎉

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


September 30, 2023
Improvements

September Improvements and Bug Fix Roundup

What’s New

  • We updated the Lead Page SMS editor
    • We improved the look and feel
    • The “Send Later” menu now has the same options as the Email one
    • Unusable phone numbers are now visible (but disabled) in the From/To selects
    • Scheduling Links can now be inserted into SMS messages.
  • We display the Contact name on the Opportunity card in the Pipeline report.
  • We updated the look and feel of a few Lead Activities (Opportunity Status Change, Task Completed, Custom Activities, and Lead changes).
  • We added a thread count badge to the Inbox items.
  • We added animations to upcoming activities, and modals across the app.
  • We updated SMS, Lead, Note, and History icons.

Workflow Schedule and Pausing Customization

We're launched two new customization capabilities for Workflows.

Schedules

You can now set your own Workflow communication schedule on each Workflow in Close. Simply select the days of the week you're hoping to send, along with your hourly sending window.

Note: This schedule only applies to communication steps (e.g. calls, emails, SMS). Any tasks or instant actions will process outside of this window.

Pausing

You now have more control over what pauses your Workflows. Optionally disable automated pausing when receiving incoming calls, emails, or SMS if you would rather your Workflow continue to run.

You can now customize what pauses your Workflows


Close ChatGPT Plugin

We developed the Close ChatGPT plugin. You can now connect ChatGPT and your Close data - which means using the power of Generative AI to write emails, provide valuable prospect insights, segment leads and contacts, and analyze reporting data.

Find out more about the best use cases in our blog article.

Meetings in Inbox

We've added a new Meetings section to your Inbox experience in Close.

This section allows you to:

  • Easily see a daily view of your upcoming or past meetings.
  • Navigate to future or previous days to see what's coming up or review past meetings.
  • Go to the Lead directly by clicking on the meeting.
Meetings in Inbox

Automated Triggers + Workflows

  • We've renamed Sequences to Workflows, and added the ability for you to automatically trigger your Workflows.
  • Any Workflow can now have automated triggering criteria. Triggering criteria can include most fields related to the Lead and associated Contacts.
  • The trigger will fire any time a lead is created or updated to match your specified filters. Leads that were already matching your specified criteria will not trigger the workflow.
  • Only the primary contact on the lead will be enrolled when the trigger fires.
  • By default, the Workflow creator will be set as the assigned User for any Workflow steps. Use Send As settings for more advanced sending options.
  • For more details, check out our Help Center guide.
An example of triggering criteria